Slavery and the Culture of Taste

Abstract

It would be easy to assume that, in the eighteenth century, slavery and the culture of taste—the world of politeness, manners, and aesthetics—existed as separate and unequal domains, unrelated in the spheres of social life. But to the contrary, this book demonstrates that these two areas of modernity were surprisingly entwined. Ranging across Britain, the antebellum South, and the West Indies, the book illustrates how the violence and ugliness of enslavement actually shaped theories of taste, notions of beauty, and practices of high culture, and how slavery's impurity informed and haunted the rarified customs of the time. The book focuses on the ways that the enslavement of Africans and the profits derived from this exploitation enabled the moment of taste in European—mainly British—life, leading to a transformation of bourgeois ideas regarding freedom and selfhood. It explores how these connections played out in the immense fortunes made in the West Indies sugar colonies, supporting the lavish lives of English barons and altering the ideals that defined middle-class subjects. Discussing how the ownership of slaves turned the American planter class into a new aristocracy, the book engages with the slaves' own response to the strange interplay of modern notions of freedom and the realities of bondage, and it emphasizes the aesthetic and cultural processes developed by slaves to create spaces of freedom outside the regimen of enforced labor and truncated leisure. Through a close look at the eighteenth century's many remarkable documents and artworks, the book sets forth the tensions and contradictions entangling a brutal practice and the distinctions of civility.

Terrestrial Humanism and the Weight of World Literature: Reading Esi Edugyan’sWashington Black

“…54 Crucially, it is the ability to engage freely in such processes of world-making that constituted, in Enlightenment terms, "the production of a unique and self-reflective human subject": "humanity" and "freedom" here become tautological concepts, the one implying and necessitating the other. 55 This is the epistemological crucible in which an enduring model of European humanism was forged, and which, from the outset, did not simply ignore its contradictory dependence on transatlantic slavery, but wove that contradiction into its DNA: Black exclusion marked the limit of the Kantian human, and therefore made humanism possible. As Gikandi argues, "alterity … assumed a structural function: the designator of what enabled Europe, or whatever geographical area took that name, to assume a position of cultural superiority and supremacy."…”

“…As Gikandi argues, "alterity … assumed a structural function: the designator of what enabled Europe, or whatever geographical area took that name, to assume a position of cultural superiority and supremacy." 56 To make his point, Gikandi cites an especially unpleasant excerpt from Kant's Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime:…”

‘I didn't mean that: It was just a slip of the tongue’: Racial slips and gaffes in the public arena

“…The trouble begins on line 9 when Newton uses the word ‘boy’ to refer to Ali. It is clear from the extract that Ali regards this term as highly offensive: During segregation in the United States, and apartheid in South Africa, ‘boy’ was used as a condescending and disparaging term for black men, implying their subservient status (Gikandi, ).…”

Building plantation America: Creolized design and captive labor in Wright, Faulkner, and Chesnutt

“…Gikandi () builds on Vlach's work to stress small opportunities in the lives of enslaved workers, such as provision grounds and handicrafts, for creative self‐expression.…”