135. Ibid., 49.
136. Summerson, Architecture in Britain, 428.
137. Ibid., 426.
138. For a discussion of Beckford's Gothic works in a colonial context, see Srinivas Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans, 214–29. Lewis is discussed by Sandiford in Cultural Politics of Sugar, 150–76.
139. For a detailed study of the causes of the fall of the Caribbean plantocracy, see Ragatz, Fall of the Planter Class.
140. Alexander, England's Wealthiest Son, 40.
141. Hazlitt, “Fonthill Abbey,” 287–91.
142. The terms are borrowed from Starobinski's examination of strikingly similar monuments to art in the French Revolution; see 1789: The Emblems of Reason, 91.
143. Hazlitt, “Fonthill Abbey,” 287; emphasis in the original.
144. Quoted by Aldrich, “William Beckford's Abbey,” 132.
145. Ibid.
146. Ibid., 117.
CHAPTER FOUR. CLOSE ENCOUNTERS: TASTE AND THE TAINT OF SLAVERY
1. Quoted in L. Wright et al., Arts in America, 11–12. For the culture and attitudes of the antebellum elite, see L. Wright, First Gentlemen of Virginia; Sobel, World They Made Together, 54–63; Sugrue, “South Carolina College”; McInnis, Politics of Taste; and Kilbride, American Aristocracy.
2. L. Wright et al., Arts in America, 11.
3. For Morris's life see, Adams, Gouverneur Morris; and Brookhiser, Gentleman Revolutionary.
4. Quoted in Phillips, The Constitution a Pro-Slavery Compact, 48.
5. Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 162. For Jefferson's paradoxical relation to slavery see Onuf, “‘To Declare Them,” and Mind of Thomas Jefferson.
6. Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 162.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid., 163.
9. This last question is taken up in Wyatt-Brown, Honor and Violence, especially chapter 7.
10. The terminology here is borrowed from Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, especially chapter 4; and Douglas, Purity and Danger.
11. Given the close commercial ties between the mid-Atlantic colonies of Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas, and the Caribbean, I use the term America to refer to both territories.
12. Kaplan and Kaplan, Black Presence, 36.
13. See also Bontemps, “Seeing Slavery.”
14. Juster, “Virginian Luxuries”; K. Brown, Good Wives, 107–36.
15. Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 138, 139.
16. Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination, 3.
17. Ibid., 38.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.
20. A discussion of the relationship between virtue, commerce, and history can be found in Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History; see especially chapter 2, where he discusses the “patriot's virtue” in a culture of slavery. For American debates on the relation between citizenship, slavery, and virtue, see Tucker, Treatise Concerning Civil Government.
21. Prince, History of Mary Prince, 11–12. For explorations of Prince, slave narratives, and the economies of gender, see Ferguson, Subject to Others; Feischner, Mastering Slavery; Sandiford, Measuring the Moment; and Salih, introduction to History of Mary Prince, vii-xxxiv.
22. Prince, History of Mary Prince, 11–12.
23. Crowe, With Thackeray in America, 183.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid.
26. Library of Congress, “Largest Slave Auction.
27. Ibid.
28. Stanton, Free Some Day, 19.
29. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, one of the earliest uses of the word “carouse” to denote excess is to be found in the work of François Rabelais, the master of the carnivalesque. For Rabelais and the carnival, see Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World.
30. This information comes from the caption to Greenwood's painting in Thomas, Slave Trade.
31. L. Wright, First Gentlemen of Virginia, 2. See also Scarborough, Masters of the Big House; and Oakes, Ruling Race.
32. Quoted in L. Wright, First Gentlemen of Virginia, 4.
33. Ibid., 45.
34. Ibid.
35. Jordan, White over Black, 73.
36. Ibid., 78.
37. Writing on the policing of status in Maryland and Virginia in the 1660s, Jordan notes that “when slavery was gaining statutory recognition, the assemblies acted with full-throated indignation against miscegenation”; see White over Black, 79. For slave laws in the Caribbean during the eighteenth century, see Goveia, West Indian Slave Laws.
38. Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 337. There is perhaps no better illustration of how the degradation of the slave enhanced the status and honor of the master than the example of Sutpen in Faulkner, Absalom Absalom.
39. Dunn, “English Sugar Islands,” 55.
40. John C. Miller, Wolf by the Ears, 2.
41. Ibid.
42. See Vlach, Planter's Prospect.
43. Roberts, Plantation Homes, 53.
44. Dunn, “English Sugar Islands,” 55.
45. Ibid.
46. See Lamont and Fournier, introduction to Cultivating Differences, 9.
47. L. Wright, First Gentlemen of Virginia, 335.
48. I borrow the concept of colonial mimicry from Homi Bhabha. See “Of Mimicry and Man.”
49. L. Wright, First Gentlemen of Virginia, 332.
50. Quoted in ibid., 330–31.
51. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 99.
52. Bhabha, Location of Culture, 92.
53. Lamont and Fournier, Cultivating Differences, 3.
54. A comprehensive discussion of the doctrine of art and order is provided by Humphreys in “Arts in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” 3–5. See also J. Burke, English Art.
55. This intimacy is documented in many studies of plantation life. Sobel, for example, notes that in eighteenth-century Virginia, blacks and whites lived together “in great intimacy, affecting each other in both small and large ways”; see World They Made Together, 3. The process of cultural exchange between Africans and Europeans is underscored in the essays collected in Ownby, Black and White Cultural Interaction. For a detailed discussion of Byrd and the culture of slavery, see Bontemps, Punished Self. For Byrd's life as a gentleman, see Bolton, “Architecture of Slavery,” chapter 2; Berland, Gilliam, and Lockridge, Commonplace Book of William Byrd II; Lockridge, Diary and Life of William Byrd II and On the Sources of Patriarchal Rage, 1–28; and Marambaud, William Byrd of Westover. Questions of gender and sexual relations in the colonies are taken up by K. Brown in Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, especially chapter 10.
56. Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 138.
57. Ibid.
58. Quoted in Sobel, World They Made Together, 3.
59. B. Edwards, Historical Survey, preface, v.
60. Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods, 149. For Haiti, race, and the crisis of modernity, the following texts have been invaluable: James, Black Jacobins; Trouillot, Silencing the Past; L. Dubois, Avengers of the New World; D. Scott, Conscripts of Modernity; Fischer, Modernity Disavowed; Geggus, Impact of the Haitian Revolution; and Burck-Morss, “Hegel and Haiti.”
61. B. Edwards, Historical Survey, 143.
62. The relationship between the planters' isolation and their craving for “civilized culture” is discussed by L. Wright in “From Wilderness to Republic,” 12.
63. In addition to Sobel's World They Made Together, already cited, see L. Wright Teach Me Dreams.
64. For this argument, see McCoubrey, “Painting.”
65. Ibid., 50.
66. Waterhouse, Painting in Britain, 74.
67. Ibid.
68. Roarke, Artists of Colonial America, 43–44. See also Craven, American Art.
69. Mannings, “Visual Arts,” 133.
70. Benjamin, “Work of Art,” 221.
71. Waterhouse, Painting in Britain, 60.
72. Blackburn has aptly noted that one term “for evoking the ethos and aspirations of early European colonialism is ‘the baroque'”; se
e Making of New World Slavery, 20. According to Rubert de Ventós, the baroque was an attempt “to retain the classical ideals in a world in which everything seems to overwhelm them: a portentous effort to contain elements from overflowing any figurative perimeter.” See Hispanic Labyrinth, 116.
73. McElroy, Facing History, 3.
74. Ibid.
75. Ibid.
76. P. DuBois, Slaves and Other Objects, 79.
77. Craven, American Art, 74–75.
78. Derrida, Truth in Painting, 9.
79. This is the approach represented in Honour, Image of the Black.
80. Derrida, Truth in Painting, 9
81. Ibid.
82. I paraphrase and simplify Benjamin's claims on aura. Here is the relevant quote from “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 223–24:
Originally the contextual integration of art in tradition found its expression in the cult. We know that the earliest art works originated in the service of a ritual—first the magical, then the religious kind. It is significant that the existence of the work of art with reference to its aura is never entirely separated from its ritual function. In other words, the unique value of the “authentic” work of art has its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value. This ritualistic basis, however remote, is still recognizable as secularized ritual even in the most profane forms of the cult of beauty. The secular cult of beauty, developed during the Renaissance and prevailing for three centuries, clearly showed that ritualistic basis in its decline and the first deep crisis which befell it. With the advent of the first truly revolutionary means of reproduction, photography, simultaneously with the rise of socialism, art sensed the approaching crisis which has become evident a century later.
83. For the relation between enslavement, subjection and violence, see Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, especially chapter 2.
84. See Park, Travels in the Interior Districts, chapters 24 and 25; De Villeneuve, L'Afrique, ou histoire, vol. 4.
85. Wood, Blind Memory, especially chapter 5.
86. Newton, Journal of a Slave Trader, 37–38. For Newton and the slave ship, see Rediker, Slave Ship, 157–86.
87. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 252.
88. Equiano, Interesting Narrative, 85. Equiano's encounter with the slave ship and his subsequent life as a sailor are discussed in detail in Rediker, Slave Ship, 108–31; and in Carretta, Equiano, chapters 2 and 3.
89. Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 4–7.
90. Long, History of Jamaica, 2:262.
91. Ibid.
92. For the treadmill as a form of punishment, see Holt, Problem of Freedom, 106–10; and Paton, No Bond but the Law, 83–120.
93. Nash, “John Pinney.” For Pinney and Bristol merchants in the West Indies, see Pares, Merchants and Planters; K. Morgan, “Bristol West India Merchants,” 185–208; and Dresser and Giles, Bristol & Transatlantic Slavery.
94. C. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 286.
95. Newton, Journal of a Slave Trader, xii.
96. Ibid.
97. A curious aspect of the experience of slavery is that it is now represented most vividly in iconographic terms, meaning it is now available to us primarily through its images. Wood's Blind Memory provides a useful genealogy of this iconographical tradition. For the exhibiting of slavery, see Tibbles, Transatlantic Slavery; Burnside, Spirits of the Passage; and McMillan, Captive Passage.
98. Scarry, Body in Pain, 4.
99. Ibid.
100. Ibid., 5.
101. My discussion here is indebted to Hartman's Scenes of Subjection, especially chapters 2 and 3, and Salih, “Putting Down Rebellion.”
102. B. Edwards, History Civil and Commercial, 78–79.
103. B. Edwards, Poems, Written Chiefly in the West–Indies, 40.
104. Douglass, Narrative of the Life, 19. In Scenes of Subjection, Hartman refuses to quote this scene “in order to call attention to the ease with which such scenes are usually reiterated, the casualness with which they are circulated, and the consequences of this routine display of the slave's ravaged body” (3). But Douglass uses this “terrible exhibition” (18) to call attention to the uses of the ravaged body beyond instrumental control. I cite this passage and the images discussed below to make the same point.
105. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 8.
106. Ibid, 11.
107. Wood, Blind Memory, 228–30.
108. Ibid., 230.
109. Stedman, Narrative of a Five Years' Expedition (1963). For discussions of Stedman's work, see Wood, Blind Memory, 234–39; Sharpe, Ghosts of Slavery; Gwilliam, “'Scenes of Horror.'” For background to Stedman's life in Surinam, see Price and Price, Stedman's Surinam; and Stedman, Narrative of a Five Years' Expedition (1988).
110. Stedman, Narrative of a Five Years' Expedition (1963), 18.
111. Ibid., 38.
112. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 26.
113. Ibid., 38.
114. Honour, Image of the Black, 19. See also Dykes, Negro in English Romantic Thought; and Baum, Mind–Forg'd Manacles.
115. The figure of Joanna is discussed by Sharpe in Ghosts of Slavery, 54–86.
116. Stedman, Narrative of a Five Years' Expedition (1963), 43.
117. Ibid., 44.
118. Ibid.
119. This discourse dominated, indeed motivated, the revisionist histories of African slavery among slave agents and their supporters. The most notorious examples are the works of Long, History of Jamaica; Dalzell, History of Dahomy; and Norris, Memoirs of the Reign. For pro-slavery thought in the United States, see Tise, Proslavery; and Faust, Ideology of Slavery.
CHAPTER FIVE. “POPPING SORROW”: Loss AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF SERVITUDE
1. Detailed readings of these images can be found in Tobin, Picturing Imperial Power, 139–73; Kriz, “Marketing Mulatresses,” 195–96, and Slavery, Sugar.
2. Beckford, Descriptive Account, 8–9. For landscape and conquest, see Seed, Ceremonies of Possession, 16–40; and Casid, Sowing Empire, 43–93.
3. Kriz, “Marketing Mulatresses,” 195–96.
4. Young, Observations, 20.
5. Kriz, “Marketing Mulatresses,” 208.
6. Kriz recognizes the absence of the white Creole woman from the West Indian public sphere and the difficulties of presenting them as signifiers of white civilization (“Marketing Mulatresses,” 203). My point is that the space left open by the absent white woman rather than the black slave is the one the mulatress is asked to occupy, as a supplement. For the idea of a supplement as a stand-in for the original and a “mark of an emptiness,” see Derrida, Of Grammatology, 144.
7. Norris, Memoirs of the Reign, 179.
8. Ibid., 179–80.
9. G. Hall, Slavery and African Ethnicities, 162.
10. Roach, Cities of the Dead, xiii.
11. See Nettleford, Dance Jamaica; and Warner-Lewis, Central Africa in the Caribbean.
12. Equiano, Interesting Narrative, 48.
13. Ibid., 51. A useful discussion of the structure of apostrophe can be found in Culler, Pursuit of Signs, 135–54.
14. Useful works on slavery and subjectivity, race and affect include Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 17–48; Sharpe, Ghosts of Slavery, especially the introduction; and Cheng, Melancholy of Race, 3 –30.
15. Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama. Benjamin's book was written between 1924 and 1925 and published in Berlin in 1928. The circumstances in which it was written and published are discussed by George Steiner in the introduction to the Verso edition, 7–24.
16. Ibid., 166.
17. Equiano, Interesting Narrative, 62. See Gomez, “Quality of Anguish.”
18. Prince, History of Mary Prince, 37.
19. For the idea of being in negation, see Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 3385; and Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 210–22.
20. W.E.B. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, 180–81. The definitive historical and ethnomusicological accounts are by Southern, Music
of Black Americans, 150–76; Floyd, Power of Black Music, 35–57; and Cone, Spirituals and the Blues, 9–19.
21. W.E.B. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, 183.
22. Ibid., 182.
23. Kristeva, Black Sun, 19.
24. Ibid.
25. Prince, History of Mary Prince, 37.
26. Menke, “Modernity, Subjectivity,” 40. Potkay discusses happiness as a moral good in Passion for Happiness, 1 –26, 61–75.
27. Prince, History of Mary Prince, 38.
28. Ibid., 34.
29. Douglass, Life and Times, 596. This point is discussed by Hartmann, Scenes of Subjection, 47.
30. Douglass, Life and Times, 596.
31. Ibid., 148.
32. See Menke, “Modernity, Subjectivity,” 40.
33. I owe this point to Stauffer, “Creating an Image in Black.”See also his Black Hearts of Men.
34. Lewis, Journal of a West Indian Proprietor, 40.
35. Schaw, Journal of a Lady of Quality, 107–8. Similar scenes are described by almost all European travelers to Jamaica in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, including Nugent, Lady Nugent's Journal, 48 –49; M. Scott, Tom Cringle's Log, 63–65; and Carmichael, Domestic Manners and Social Conditions, 161–201.
36. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 187. For the history, form, and structure of carnival in the Caribbean, see Hill, Trinidad Carnival; and Crowley, “Traditional Masques of Carnival.” For the United States, see Kinser, Carnival, American Style; and Roach, Cities of the Dead, especially chapter 5.
37. My terms here, as elsewhere in this study, are indebted to Stallybrass and White, Politics and Poetics, 27–31.
38. Douglass, Life and Times, 147.
39. Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, xviii-xxii. According to Certeau, a tactic “insinuates itself into the other's place, fragmentarily, without taking it over in its entirety, without being able to keep it at a distance” (xix).
40. My understanding of performatives is informed by Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 4–11.
41. Anonymous, Marly, 88. See Burton, Afro-Creole, 57.
42. Lewis, Journal of a West Indian Proprietor, 133.
43. Moreton, West India Customs and Manners, 152–53.
44. Lewis, Journal of a West Indian Proprietor, 41–42.
45. Sandiford, “'Monk' Lewis and the Slavery Sublime.”
46. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 10.
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