Slavery and the Culture of Taste

by Simon Gikandi

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, Slavery and the Culture of Taste demonstrates that these two areas of modernity were surprisingly entwined. Ranging across Britain, the antebellum South, and the West Indies, and examining vast archives, including portraits, period paintings, personal narratives, and diaries, Simon Gikandi 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. Gikandi 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. He 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, Gikandi engages with the slaves' own response to the strange interplay of modern notions of freedom and the realities of bondage, and he 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, Slavery and the Culture of Taste sets forth the tensions and contradictions entangling a brutal practice and the distinctions of civility.

Genres: History, American, Art, American History, 19th Century, 18th Century

387 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2011

About the author

Simon E. Gikandi is a Kenyan Literature Professor and Postcolonial scholar. He is the Robert Schirmer Professor of English at Princeton University. He is perhaps best known for his co-editorship (with Abiola Irele) of The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature. He has also done important work on the modern African novel, and two distinguished African novelists: Chinua Achebe and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. In 2019 he became the president of the Modern Language Association.

Gikandi was born to a Presbyterian family. He graduated with a B.A [First Class Honors] in Literature from the University of Nairobi. He was a British Council Scholar at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland from which he graduated with a M.Litt. in English Studies. He has a Ph.D in English from Northwestern University. His major Fields of Research and Teaching are the Anglophone Literatures and Cultures of Africa, India, the Caribbean, and Postcolonial Britain, the "Black" Atlantic and the African Diaspora. He is also interested in the encounter between European and African languages in the modern period, literature and human rights, and writing and cultural politics.

Reviews

[Melina]

Gikandi’s texts aims to situate slavery as constitutive of the idea of modernity in the 18th century. The rise of aesthetics and liberalism in europe, in this reading, emerge as a set of regulative norms through which to figure an ideal society. When culture and art become standards to measure what the value of a person is, it precludes a practice of differentiation that not only normalizes and reproduces enslavement, but also sets the commercialization of culture as inextricable from the commercialization (and dehumanization) of the enslaved. “Taste” as the core of modern identity then emerges as a paradoxical concept which is founded on the enlightment’s ideal of freedom while being economically mobilized and made possible through the presence of slavery, which became inextricable from the culture of taste.

[Benji · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you enjoyed reading this, make sure to watch Tarantino's movie adaptation, especially the library scene.

[Cait · Rating 2 out of 5]

read

[Deborah · Rating 5 out of 5]

My full review is here.