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Slavery and the Culture of Taste

2015; Duke University Press; Volume: 76; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00267929-2920105

1527-1943

Srinivas Aravamudan,

Colonialism, slavery, and trade

Simon Gikandi’s prizewinning study begins with a reflection on the finality of Derek Walcott’s poem “The Sea Is History” as the answer that silences the cultural interrogators who ask slave martyrs, “Where are your monuments, your battles … / Where is your tribal memory?” (ix). If the sea is the “grey vault” that has locked these events up, who indeed possesses the cultural keys to decrypt the transatlantic secrets of the Middle Passage? Refusing to accept the social death of the slaves as a given, as Orlando Patterson (1982) asserted many years ago, Gikandi shows the productivity of slavery as a condition structurally present to the texts and artifacts of high culture. Paradoxically, both slavery and taste are visible and invisible counterpoints to each other; neither would be complete without the other as (a partly secret) sharer.While perhaps studied (to death!) more than any other important topic in world history, transatlantic slavery still has many undecrypted secrets, not the least of which is its productivity in terms of cultural history. Gikandi’s book systematically explores socioeconomic and racial coercion, on the one hand, and aesthetic voluntarism and freedom, on the other, as mutually constitutive and structural opposites. In three of six comprehensive chapters, Gikandi demonstrates how aesthetic freedom was defined relative to black slavery; how ideologies of consumption were fabricated by histories of race and taste; and how Caribbean servitude created prestigious art collections owned by plantocratic philanthropists from William Beckford to Christopher Codrington. The second half of the book builds on insights about the structural relevance of aesthetics to New World slave experience, exploring Thomas Jefferson’s Virginian ideas of luxury; the self-fashioning of enslaved subjects, including Olaudah Equiano and Phillis Wheatley; and the celebratory counter-aesthetics of the provision ground, the fair, and the carnival, all imagined by reference to the iron discipline of the plantation.Gikandi’s book rests on a powerful base of previous scholarship on the origins of modernity, the peculiar institution of slavery, and the broader movements of commerce, colonialism, and imperialism. Especially concerning us as literary critics is the cultural half of the equation, which comprises everything from the moral development of the subject, to cross-racial formations and perceptions, to the circulation of ideas about beauty, taste, and pleasure. Gikandi documents more comprehensively than earlier scholars how the rise of aesthetics was conditioned by the racial-economic trajectory of capitalism. His ideology critique proceeds from the elision of African bodies in aristocratic and colonial portraiture to the significance of slavery for white and black self-fashioning. Slavery and the culture of taste are “nonidentical twins,” in Gikandi’s words, monstrous doubles introjected into the maw of modernity, bearing witness to the dialectic between commerce and culture that culminated in the Enlightenment and various emancipations (xii). Would that modernity had so upbeat a conclusion as the plot of his book implies. According to Kevin Bales (1999) and the website slaveryfootprint.org, twenty-seven million people remain enslaved in countries from China to Congo and Pakistan to Peru. Where does such an ongoing reality fit into narratives of modernity and postmodernity, empire and decolonization? This inconvenient truth is the specter that haunts accounts of slavery in the past. Ideology critique takes us only so far.▪ ▪ ▪Gikandi finds that eighteenth-century aesthetics brings violence, beauty, and emancipation together under one roof. The relations between aesthetics and economics (and more specifically between taste and slavery) were repressive as well as regulatory, interruptive as well as contrapuntal, strictly causal as well as loosely analogical. This seemingly impossible set of contradictions is resolved at a higher level, namely, by a psychoanalytic reading of slavery in the cultural text that Gikandi bases on Nicolas Abraham and Mária Török’s account of introjection. Unlike Jürgen Habermas or Simon Schama, who give slavery a laissez-passer as an aberrant but forgettable form of economic exploitation that muddied the high ideals of bourgeois liberation and the autonomy of the self, Gikandi, to his credit, rejects Eurocentric narratives of modernity that ignore slavery and insists that, to be effective and truthful, cultural analysis has to be plurivalent across interpretive dimensions that have been kept apart. The globalizing culture of slavery within modernity arose transversally and was resisted by enslaved individuals through religious cults such as Myal and festivals such as John Canoe (Junkanoo). This important insight is at odds with any reflexive indictment of canonical philosophical texts and cultural artifacts for their parochial racisms and subordinated elisions, an indictment that Gikandi largely eschews. But the wreckage of history assures us no easy choices. Phantasmatic association is just as important as causal logic. The aesthetics of slavery can point to ephemeral phenomena, to organized forms of enchantment, or, above all, to a logic of potential liberation that arises from reappropriative tactics by enslaved subjects who refashion themselves into survivors. In this regard Slavery and the Culture of Taste is a powerful rejoinder to Patterson’s argument concerning “natal alienation” in Slavery and Social Death, whose title Gikandi’s book ironically rewrites. Cultural politics not only survived the Middle Passage but thrived into syncretic efflorescence. The formerly enslaved became bravura instances of the modern subject, not as vicariously propertied white males but as differently scored agents, whether as the recalcitrant slave woman Nealee profiled in Mungo Park’s Travels; in the guise of Equiano, the consummate professional who was everything from barber to Arctic explorer; or as the beribboned dancers in Agostino Brunias’s ethnographic paintings of Caribbean life.▪ ▪ ▪Starting with the high culture of art, literature, and philosophy, the logic of Gikandi’s book leads toward the popular rituals and embodied performances of religion, song, and theatricality, experienced within the architecture of plantations in the Caribbean or the transportation castles in Africa. Their doubleness leads slaves to “the undoing, warping, unraveling, and even inverting of the imposed idiom” (235). Even the lowly provision ground, granted by the cunning plantocrat as a way to make the enslaved toil to grow their own food on Sundays, becomes the place to fabricate a liberating commercial and communitarian identity, whereby the enslaved share a form of happiness that paradoxically arose out of their exploitation. “Art,” “literature,” and “philosophy” are insufficient in their etiologies of modernity. Gikandi’s insight drags us inexorably beyond and outside high culture to the fertile ground of performance.Given the widespread reshaping of the Americas by the institution of slavery, how can Gikandi’s powerful study make common cause with students of slavery and the culture of taste in francophone, hispanophone, lusophone, and other diasporic contexts to avoid reinforcing yet another hegemonic Anglo-American account of modernity, mitigated by a postcolonial inflection? Where indeed is every other country, continent, and language, outside crypto-Hegelian teleologies of Atlantic modernity that lead from slavery to freedom? At the end of the book Gikandi invokes the first inauguration of President Barack Obama as “an act that guaranteed that the son of an African was now the custodian of late modernity and its problems … proof that the catastrophe of history was also the condition of possibility of the idea of human freedom” (284–85). While I do not object to the earned poetic license for final reflections, I am prompted to reinterrogate Anglo-Atlantic genealogies of modernity such as Gikandi’s. This last little temptation should be refused by the reader, especially in the slide from legacies of the British Empire to the United States as global hegemon. Do such narratives also distort our world picture with their Occidentalist silence about Asia? Maybe we could remember Obama’s Indonesian childhood to render the narrative more complete, but even then I cannot help wondering whether in 2009 the United States, through its sitting president, merits the sovereign epithet of “custodian of late modernity and its problems” (284). Walcott is also invoked at the end of the study to sanctify the post–Civil War emancipation proclamation concerning forty acres and a mule (285). Not wanting to end my appreciation of this book with a quibble about Gikandi’s overreach to shift from the legacies of the British Empire to the global sovereignty of the United States, I will reconnect to the Walcott quotation with which Gikandi begins, a better place to start and indeed to return. To say that “the sea is history” is to shift us, and the tenor of the cultural history of slavery, from territorial sovereignty to oceanic conceptions that are resolutely transcultural and perforce multilingual. The ocean remains the world’s biggest crypt, with many shipwrecks, disappeared bodies, and sea changes, rich and strange. These cultural transformations, still in store for us, feature “the interlaced experiences of the enslaved” (ix).