Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Slavery and the Culture of Taste. Simon Gikandi. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011. pp. xviii + 366. (Cloth US$ 45.00)

2013; Brill; Volume: 87; Issue: 3-4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1163/22134360-12340061

2213-4360

Catherine Hall,

Colonialism, slavery, and trade

Slavery and the Culture of Taste is provided by Derek Walcott's evocative lines: "Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs?/Where is your tribal memory?Sirs,/ In that gray vault.The sea.The sea/ Has locked them up.The sea is History."Gikandi's project in this book is to connect eighteenth-century modernity with its dark side, to find that history lost in the sea, to link the metropolis with the colonies, the enslavers with the enslaved, and offer "an allegorical reading of spaces of repression . . .recover transatlantic slavery, often confined to the margins of the modern world picture, as one of the informing conditions of civilized culture" (p.x).Both the institution of slavery and the culture of taste, he argues, were constitutive of modern subjects.Yet there is no simple causal relationship, for the connections were often sublimated: this is a subject that requires a contrapuntal reading, Said's chosen method.Gikandi's exploration is of two distinct regions of social life and the discursive work that aimed to separate them.On the one hand there was the world of the court, the city, the coffee house, and the country house; on the other, that which was quarantined off from their esteemed politeness and civilitythe slave trade, the Middle Passage, and plantation slavery.Gikandi draws on a dazzling range of social and cultural theorists, among whom are Mary Douglas, Fredric Jameson, Jacques Derrida, Jean Laplanche, Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, Walter Benjamin, and Charles Taylor, to explore "what survives in the 'secret tomb' of modern subjectivity" (p.x): the political unconscious of the slave owners and the countercultures of taste that were created by the enslaved.His scholarly range is impressive and interdisciplinary, the cultural forms he analyzes many and variedfrom diaries, travel writings, and literary, philosophical and political works to buildings, paintings, and pottery.His spatial universe traverses the antebellum South, the Caribbean, and Britain; his temporal frame, though centered on the eighteenth century, moves well into the nineteenth at times.This scale and reach can sometimes raise wonders about specificity for the historian.But Gikandi is a cultural critic, his strength the capacity to conduct what he calls "allegories of reading, explorations of the tropes and figures that often point, or lead, to sublimated connections" (p.xiii), work that requires, imagination, conjecture, and unverified reconstruction.