Chapter 2: Intersections: Taste, Slavery, and the Modern Self, by Dwight Codr

[image from http://canadianfly-by-night.blogspot.com/2011/07/mungo-park-part-vi.html%5D

In “Chapter 2: Intersections: Taste, Slavery, and the Modern Self,” Simon Gikandi bears witness to the role played by the “culture of taste” in the repression of the brute and brutal facts of slavery and the slave trade.  The paradoxical simultaneity of Enlightenment political philosophy – championing rationality, taste, and liberty – and the institution of slavery – characterized by violence, disgust, and bondage – is rendered in and through a “contrapuntal” narration and analysis of the lives of middle-class lady-of-taste Anna Margaretta Larpent and an African slave, Nealee, left to die in the wilderness when she chose not to continue with her march into modernity, into bondage and terror (described in Mungo Park’s Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa).  Gikandi asks: how do we account for the simultaneous existence of these two lives, one leisured, one tragic, lives which, for all of their obvious differences, “operat[ed] in the same orbit” (70) insofar as global networks of trade and power gave us both slavery and “culture”?

What is the nature of the “intersection” named in the chapter’s title?  (It is a word that does not – as far as I can tell – appear in the body of the chapter itself.)  It seems to me Gikandi conceives of his own critical practice as instrumental in the process of actively intersecting these ostensibly discrete lines of life and force.  His analysis, that is, performs the work of merging life-lines that are treated as, at best, parallel (and more often altogether skew). A striking moment of this occurs when Gikandi raises Nealee from the dead: “the colonial library does not contain much information about her existence” (63). So, “[l]et us assume for a moment that Nealee did not die in the heat of Sahel. Let us suppose that she survived the West African wilderness on that fateful night of April 25, 1797” (74).

The effect of this critical necromancy is to enable readers to conceptualize the abstract collisions and overlaps of large-scale systems – of Slavery and Culture – as grounded, finally, in the affective and somatic realities of living, breathing bodies.  The haunting picture, taken by Gikandi himself, from Cape Coast Castle’s “Door of No Return” (85), suggests that this book is more than an analytic and historiographic exercise; it is an embodied writing about embodiment in an age when so many millions of bodies had little to no access to writing (even less that made it into the “colonial library”).

For me, the chapter raises many questions and ideas, but I’ll limit myself to two here.  Notwithstanding the analysis of intersections that deconstruct the opposition between slavery and culture, Gikandi’s dialectical readings maintain – however provisionally – the distinction between what might be called sordid commerce on the one hand and, on the other, culture, entailing everything from fashionable domestic interiors to novels by Samuel Richardson.  For instance: “slave traders and plantation masters studiously held on to, and jealously guarded, their identity as modern European subjects; […] they used architecture and art to assert their location in the mainstream of European fashion; and […] the cultivation of taste was an important counterpoint to the barbarism of slavery, which always had the potential to engulf their claims to be modern, rational subjects” (79).  Or, “[a]n aggressive commercial culture rooted in imperial control and expansion had enabled the culture of taste, but it had become its unspoken, almost unspeakable, event.  Also unspoken and unspeakable were the other bodies in this equation – the millions of African slaves, whose bodies were a key ingredient in the production of the wealth that made the culture of consumption possible” (63).

My question: did the sordid commerce of slavery produce its own culture?  Was slavery itself susceptible to “culturation,” in the sense Gikandi imparts to Culture?  When Gikandi gets to discussing William Snelgrave’s description of a slave execution on board a ship (89), he writes that the “scene of punishment reads like a spectacle from Foucault’s Discipline and Punish” (referring, presumably, to the description of the execution of Damiens, the regicide).  This suggests that there may be literary/textual genres of the brutality of slavery that double back to give shape to European culture.  One thinks forward, perhaps, to Django: Unchained, where Tarantino’s film’s success reveals, if nothing else, modernity’s taste for blood. Or one thinks back, to the gruesome spectacles of punishment in Behn’s Oroonoko. What is to be made of the long and on-going history of spectacles of slave punishment in the authorized spaces of “culture”?

Secondly, Gikandi rightly asserts and establishes as sacrosanct the discourses of liberty and rationality in the context of Enlightenment, but he approaches expressions of religious belief with a degree of skepticism that is itself the hallmark of an Enlightenment historiography that might not fully appreciate the dangerous potency of religious belief in political and aesthetic judgment.  Invocations of Liberty, for Gikandi, make perfect sense, whilst invocations of Providence, by contrast, are read as mystifications of or strategies for the repression of the real problem (“[t]he vocabulary of providence would thus come to mediate the double demands made on these men of taste” 83, my emphasis).  Perhaps Gikandi is less suspicious of true believers than I, but I’m uneasy reading expressions of faith as strategic vocabulary.

I am put in mind of 1990s debate between Gananath Obeyesekere and Marshall Sahlins on the question of Captain James Cook’s divinity.  For Sahlins, Cook was seen as a divinity; for Obeyesekere, Cook’s divinity was strategically asserted and not ultimately “believed.”  Sahlins and Obeyesekere staked out their respective positions in the context of “native” Hawaiian thought.  I think it’s worth considering the fact that many eighteenth-century Europeans, for all of their “enlightenment,” just like many twenty-first century Americans, for all of their “modernity,” are still very much guided by religious belief. So, what if slaver-turned-preacher John Newton – who presided, it might be noted as an aside, at St. Mary Woolnoth, which had been recently re-designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor, another figure discussed by Gikandi (61) – entirely resolved this tension within himself through the figure of God?  In a volume already confronting such a wealth of material, one can hardly ask for more treatment of religion than what Gikandi already offers, but when Newton describes his involvement in the slave trade as “the appointment Providence had worked out for me,” is this a strategic attempt to reconcile his role in the slave trade with a more fundamental faith in the Enlightenment project, or is it evidence that the Enlightenment project was less firmly established for someone such as Newton?  In any case, I’m happy to see some treatment of religious questions in the chapter, since questions raised by both slavery and culture were so often answered with chapter and verse.

Dwight Codr

Gikandi, Preface: armored men and quarantines

[image of James Drummond, 2rd Duke of Perth, from National Gallery of Scotland and Wikipedia; cf. also, Gikandi, x-xii]

I believe this image is as good a place to start as any in this densely argued book.  In his Preface, Gikandi describes an early moment of fascination in the National Gallery of Scotland, where he saw this portrait of the Jacobite James Drummond by Sir John Baptiste de Medina.  As he looked on this painting, with its conscious, almost theatrical projection of power, Gikandi began to wonder:

Why would Drummond, a symbol of the Catholic insurrection against the Protestant establishment, seek to inscribe an enslaved boy in his family portrait? What aura did this figure, undoubtedly the quintessential sign of blackness in bondage, add to the symbolism of white power?  What libidinal desires did the black slave represent? What was the relation of this blackness, confined to the margin of the modern world picture and placed in a state of subjection, to the man of power with his hand on his hip? And how were we to read this diminished, yet not unattractive, blackness in relation to the center embodied by the wig and armor?   And where was one to draw the line between the gesture of incorporation and dissociation? (xi-xii)

In some sense, I think it’s not too difficult to understand the relations here in the Drummond portrait as part of the theatrics of power, the way in which the “diminished, yet not unattractive, blackness” of the gazing, enslaved boy (signified by the collar around his neck) provides a readily comprehensible image of his, and by extension, our subjection to the armored, bewigged man at the painting’s center.  In this respect, the pairing seems at least comparable to our now familiar cultural repertoire of  assymetrical cross-cultural pairings like Crusoe/Friday, Huck/Jim, Lone Ranger/Tonto, Kirk/Spock, etc. etc.

In other words, de Medina’s pairing seems designed to demonstrate that the conquest has already occurred, and now a more subtle form of subjection has begun.  This is part of what I see at stake in these scenes of “incorporation and dissociation,” emblematized by Drummond’s helmet or Crusoe’s musket:

In some sense, as I’ve said in the comments, this story of subjection and hegemony has been hiding in plain view for some time, and I don’t think it has gone unnoticed in cultural criticism.  What Gikandi adds to this scenario of a visible “incorporation and dissociation” of the enslaved Other is a notion of the black as a source of libidinal energy for civilization and Modernity, one that requires regular maintenance, or “quarantining,” to be contained and yet productively nurtured:

What surprised me in the end, however, was the discovery that the world of the enslaved was not simply the submerged and concealed counterpoint of modern civilization; rather, what made the body of the slave repellant–its ugliness and dirt–was also what provided the sensations and the guilty pleasures of modern life (xii).

With this move into the “sensations and the guilty pleasures of modern life,” Gikandi has taken us into the peculiarly modern aesthetics of disavowal, what we thoughtlessly enjoy but cannot admit to having any contact with.  The libidinal pull of slavery and its  products is what takes us out of the purity and transcendence of Enlightenment aesthetics, and brings us into contact with something far more unsettling, the infrastructures of commercial modernity.  Drummond’s hand rests lightly upon his helmet, and Crusoe balances his musket on his shoulder, while these two figures set the terms for the “incorporation” of their black counterparts.

DM

collaborative reading of simon gikandi’s slavery and the culture of taste, may 13th-19th at the long 18th

OK, I’m calling the Gikandi collaborative reading for next May 13th-19th.  Who’s in?

When I initially floated this proposal, a number of people responded on and off the blog.

Could I now get volunteers to commit to responding to a single chapter? You’ll see the Table of Contents below. I would like each chapter to be covered, but otherwise multiple respondents to a single chapter are fine.  I am also including a link to the Amazon listing.

If you are still interested in participating, either as a post-writer or respondent, please let me know as soon as you can.  Feel free to forward this to any colleagues or students you feel might be interested in participating. Just hit Reply, and let me know which of the chapters you’d like to tackle:

Ch. 1: Overture, 5/13: DELUCIA; MAZELLA
Ch. 2: Intersections, 5/14: CODR; BURNARD
Ch. 3: Unspeakable Events, 5/15: DYKE; WOOD
Ch. 4: Close Encounters, 5/16: MOWRY; COUCHMAN
Ch. 5: Popping Sorrow, 5/17: KUGLER
Ch. 6: The ontology of Play, 5/18: GOTTLIEB; HARDY
Coda, 5/19: MAZELLA

If you are too busy to do a formal post, but want to listen and respond to others, that would be fine, too.

Thanks, DM

Proposal for a Race and Empire Caucus at ASECS

[I just saw this announcement on the Eighteenth-Century Questions group at Facebook, and thought it would be a good idea to cross-post at the Long 18th.  Take a look, and if you're interested or have further questions, please reply to Suvir Kaul or Ashley Cohen at kaul@english.upenn.edu or AshleyCo@sas.upenn.edu.  Thanks, DM]

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In an attempt to make ASECS a more conducive and productive environment for scholarly exchange on the issues of race and empire, we are proposing to establish a Race and Empire caucus. ASECS procedures require us to collect a requisite number of signatures. Please consider our proposal (below) and reply to kaul@english.upenn.edu or AshleyCo@sas.upenn.edu with your name and departmental affiliation if you would like to sign. We would be much obliged if you would forward this e-mail to like-minded friends, colleagues, and students.

We have also organized a Race and Empire roundtable in Cleveland in support of our efforts and would be delighted to see you all there.

Best,

Ashley Cohen and Suvir Kaul

The rise of European sea-borne trade and colonialism is the central geopolitical fact of eighteenth-century history. It is thus impossible to understand the domestic social formations and cultures of eighteenth-century Europe in isolation from a global framework that acknowledges and takes into account the histories of European exploration, commerce, conquest, colonialism, and slavery in Africa, Asia, the South Pacific, and the Americas. These simple propositions form the basis for our present proposal to found an ASECS caucus dedicated to the constitutively linked issues of Race and Empire. We feel that the systematic study of these issues has been significantly underrepresented at ASECS’s annual conference in years past, even as occasional panels on such issues gather large audiences. A Race and Empire Caucus will ensure that ASECS consistently provides a forum for discussing and developing innovative critical approaches to eighteenth century histories and legacies of imperialism and slavery, as well as to the strategies of racialization that were central to both of these institutions. It is our hope that a Race and Empire Caucus will promote intellectual solidarity, create community, and foster collaboration, transforming ASECS’s annual meeting into a venue that consistently offers vibrant and vigorous discussions of these issues.

one definition of a “public good”: not just unprofitable, but impossible to profit from . . .

Robert W. McChesney’s Salon piece nails the higher education/journalism analogy, and reveals something that all our talk about “business models” fails to acknowledge:

There is probably no better evidence that journalism is a public good than the fact that none of America’s financial geniuses can figure out how to make money off it. The comparison to education is striking. When manag­ers apply market logic to schools, it fails, because education is a cooperative public service, not a business. Corporatized schools throw underachieving, hard-to-teach kids overboard, discontinue expensive programs, bombard stu­dents with endless tests, and then attack teacher salaries and unions as the main impediment to “success.” No one has ever made profits doing qual­ity education—for-profit education companies seize public funds and make their money by not teaching. In digital news, the same dynamic is producing the same results, and leads to the same conclusion. (h/t Brad DeLong):

This is the extraction economy argument all over again, in which private companies make money by seizing public funds and not performing the now-privatized public serve (e.g., education, public parks, museums, etc.) . It’s a quieter, more plausible-sounding way of denying people the public services they once expected and received, while funneling money towards one’s friends and donors.

In the case of journalism, it has resulted, as McChesney observes, in a relentless attrition of the paid labor force of journalism that once provided the content, even while the quality of the now outsourced product declines to the point where no one would want to spend money on it. The internet’s effect has been to whittle away at the business model that once sustained newspapers (car dealerships and department stores once paid for local news), without leaving anything that could plausibly take their place. We might make a similar observation about all the “disruptive” models of education we’ve been hearing about lately.  How, exactly, does giving away content on the internet lead to the financial health of the institution giving its content away?  Who does end up paying for something that’s supposedly “free”?

It’s also worth noting how much the new online journalism, like the new higher education “business models” rely on massive amounts of “volunteer” labor from underemployed or aspiring laborers, who offer them free content in the hope of “exposure” rather than pay.  (And even if this kind of writing is conceived, like graduate education, as a form of apprenticeship rather than de facto pauperization of the profession, it still suggests the long-term unsustainability of the model).  I’ll leave the last word to writer/editor Teresa Nelson Hayden, who commented in this way on the value of the writing done “for free” in the public sphere:

“The role of journalism in a democracy is a public trust. It is much abused. It is a scandal. Writers aren’t expensive, but they aren’t free. If Atlantic isn’t paying them, someone else is. By not paying its writers, the Atlantic has thrown itself open to manipulation, astroturfing, and other disinformation. The principle you learn in Cinema 101 is that movies don’t film themselves. There’s always someone behind the camera. The same goes for journalism. We thought we knew what it was: this publication hires these writers. Now we know other agendas and relationships were in play, and we don’t know what they were. So yes, we feel betrayed.”

DM

18th century blog round-up resumes: march edition

I haven’t done one of these round-up posts for a while, but it seems as if some interesting new blogs have been coming online (along with others I’ve followed for awhile), and I wanted to call your attention to them.   Here are some links:

• The 18th-century Common has had some good posts lately.  Jonathan Lamb has posted an essay about Hogarth’s blush and Maori tattoos; and Margaret Koehler discusses her new book, The Poetry of Attention in the Eighteenth Century, in the Common’s ongoing collection about Cognitive Science and 18th century studies.
• The Early American History blog The Junto has a very useful omnibus posting called “This week in American History.”  This week’s post contains a link to the soon-to-be-indispensable UCL Legacies of British Slave-ownership database, along with a great post (at the worthy journal of narrative and experimental history, The Appendix) about colonial-era drunkenness.
• At Persistent Enlightenment, James Schmidt asks “What, if anything, does Dialectic of Enlightenment have to do with the Enlightenment?“
• Ted Underwood makes a case for the use of DH methods to help us revisit and refine our categories and macro-narratives of literary history, using the (admittedly incomplete but still voluminous) digital archives now available to us. Takeaway line: “The blurriness of literary categories is exactly why it’s helpful to use computers for distant reading.”

These are just a few of the posts I’ve been reading and thinking about this week. If you’ve got your own thoughts about them, or more suggestions for this week’s round-up, please hit “comment.”

DM

asecs president julie candler hayes on “disrupting disruption”

[When I saw Julie Candler Hayes's President's Column (in the winter ASECS news circular (January 2013)), I thought it might spur some response from the readers of the Long 18th.  So, with her permission, I'm posting it here, in the hopes that we can begin a discussion about the future of 18th century studies and the historical literary specialties in the contemporary university.  Julie and I are particularly interested in hearing how ASECS could further this conversation at future meetings. So what are our options in this environment for higher ed?  Thanks, DM]

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Disrupting Disruption

In my fall column, I promised that I’d use this space as a chance to discuss some of the recent writing on some of the issues facing higher education. I (finally) read one of the most-discussed higher ed books of recent years—at least among administrators—Clayton Christensen and Henry Eyring’s The Innovative University (2011). Of all the current books, this one has probably filtered the furthest into the national conversation, whether or not people read it, through the proliferation of Christensen’s term “disruptive innovation,” coined in his earlier work on corporate culture. (For a more extended overview, see Christensen’s 2011 white paper, “Disrupting College: How Disruptive Innovation can Deliver Quality and Affordability to Postsecondary Education.”

In a nutshell, Christensen’s model distinguishes between “sustaining innovation” that industries implement to improve high-cost products and maintain their market dominance, and “disruptive innovation” that allows a savvy competitor to introduce a low-cost alternative. The low-cost alternative may not have all the desirable qualities of the original, but if effective, it will come to dominate the market, add sustaining innovations of its own, and replace the older product. Translated to higher education, the key disruptor in Christensen’s view has been the advent of for-profit online degree programs. It’s worth noting that The Innovative University underscores the need for other changes, such as curricular reforms that support timely degree completion and career preparedness, improved advising and student support systems, greater interdisciplinary, more undergraduate research, an end to competitive athletics, and an expansion of capacity (through both online learning and year-round operation) to decrease the need for selectivity.

I need hardly point out that there is much to criticize in The Innovative University. Christensen’s claim that the for-profits “fund their own operations” rather than rely on state support or philanthropy ignores the fact that the for-profits receive 25% of federal financial aid moneys while enrolling only 10-13% of fulltime students—and have dramatically higher non-completion and loan default rates; his insistence on the low operating cost of the for-profit sector refers blithely to the “low cost” of online adjunct instructors, something we can hardly take lightly amidst current debates over reimagining graduate education, creating new career pathways for PhDs, and reforming the working conditions of contingent faculty, as advocated by the New Faculty Majority and the Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success.  Indeed, the recent financial and accreditation troubles of one of the leading for-profits, University of Phoenix, may signal that their peak has passed.

That said, Christensen’s account of the challenges facing higher ed is all too accurate, and as the list above suggests, many of his recommendations are important. The “high fee high aid” model that has propelled many institutions both public and private is moving the cost of higher education increasingly beyond the reach of many and is not sustainable in any case. Distance learning has its usefulness, in terms of both revenue and institutional outreach, but if we value the full range of experiences and relationships provided by an immersive residential education, then it’s incumbent on us to be creative in our use of technology, smart in our use of resources, and attentive to the needs of students who trust us to give them the knowledge and skills that they need to go into the world.

At the Vancouver ASECS, a roundtable discussed the question, “Will tomorrow’s university be able to afford the 18^th century?” I was optimistic then and I am optimistic now that not only the 18^th century, but the full range of humanistic inquiry can thrive in tomorrow’s university, but we need to make that university our project today.

Julie Candler Hayes

@J_C_Hayes

[PS: DM here.  If my link to the Markides article in my comment below is not working (my UH library proxy seems to be interfering), here's a link to the article, which is freely available online. Thanks.]

asecs 2013: initiative for digital humanities, media, and culture workshop, wed. april 3rd

Laura Mandell, of 18thConnect, has asked me to post this announcement for all interested ASECS attendees:

The Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture (IDHMC) will be hosting a special workshop at the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Conference (ASECS) to be held in Cleveland this Spring 2013.

Creating a Publishable, Digital Textual Edition

Wednesday, April 3rd, 2013
8:30 am – 7:00 pm

For workshop agenda, click here.

To register, click here.

This workshop will be taught and sponsored by 18thConnect. For additional information, please contact Laura Mandell, mandell-at-tamu-dot-edu.

DM

welcome to the university of pret a manger

I think any academic who reads this TNR piece about “emotional labor” at the upscale English coffee/food chain, or the essay that inspired it in the London Review of Books, will recognize the similarity between the weird emotional demands of Pret’s workplace and those placed on faculty, staff, and especially TAs in US institutions of higher education.

Here is a sample of “Pret behaviours” listed on a now-yanked corporate webpage:

Among the 17 things they ‘Don’t Want to See’ is that someone is ‘moody or bad-tempered’, ‘annoys people’, ‘overcomplicates ideas’ or ‘is just here for the money’. The sorts of thing they ‘Do Want to See’ are that you can ‘work at pace’, ‘create a sense of fun’ and are ‘genuinely friendly’. The ‘Pret Perfect’ worker, a fully evolved species, ‘never gives up’, ‘goes out of their way to be helpful’ and ‘has presence’. After a day’s trial, your fellow workers vote on how well you fit the profile; if your performance lacks sparkle, you’re sent home with a few quid.

This could be on an MLA advice column for potential job-seekers, and of course we really do like the idea of genuinely friendly people acting as our doctors, teachers, nurses, policemen, and so forth. And who wouldn’t want to have as a colleague someone who “goes out of their way to be helpful”?

What seems strange to me is the idea that people must be coerced into such “behaviours.” And, of course, I naively thought that one of the ways to create a pleasant environment for one’s customers is not to treat people like complete assholes. So yes, apart from the small group of people who actually get off on the flattering insincerity of upscale bootlicking, I think this approach to management is actually counterproductive for staff and quite unpleasant for customers.  But what do I know?  I may have been served by a succession of cowering baristas for most of my life without even knowing it.

As someone who spends a lot of time reminding faculty and various others not to treat their students like non-humans, I feel a little ambivalent about the way in which the “service mentality” creeps into higher education, whether as the “loving our work” phenomenon so aptly diagnosed by Marc Bousquet, or the strangely schizophrenic attitude of hyper-rich institutions like Harvard towards their highly privileged faculty and students.  The problem is that the “caring for students” in those places is either caught up in superexploitation, as in many if not most public institutions, or in the careful maintenance of a reputation for caring, as at many of richest private institutions.

The tip-off, as we saw in the Harvard cheating debacle that either was or wasn’t a cheating debacle, is that instead of trying to educate all parties (faculty, students, parents, etc.) about the appropriate forms of collaboration either for teaching or learning (remember, a significant contributing factor was the lack of appropriate coordination of TAs), the university simply lowered the boom and silenced everyone about the incident.

From my perspective, one of the missing dimensions to Bousquet’s argument about superexploitation, and one I’d love to see him take up at some point, is why he himself continues to do what he does, or why any of us in higher ed still continue to care about our work, our students, or the consequences of what we do for others.  I think there is some tacit notion of a non-exploitative professionalism buried deep in there, but it’s difficult to disentangle those feelings from what we already know about institutional life and its risks of exploitation.

So what allows us to continue to interact with people, even if we feel that we work within institutions that may not always have ours or our students’ best interests at heart?  To what extent can we maintain a decent relation with others under such circumstances?

DM

 

new blog alert: James W Schmidt’s Persistent Enlightenment

I recently discovered a new blog by James W Schmidt, whose anthology What is Enlightenment?: Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions I’ve always admired. It’s called Persistent Enlightenment, and it proposes to examine “the Enlightenment, considered both as an historical period and as an ongoing project.”

It’s only just started, but one of the first posts, about Diderot in contemporary American culture, and specifically in the NY Times, is an interesting exploration of why Diderot “ought” to have mattered to Americans from their founding forwards, but perhaps did not.  Significantly, the term “ought” is not Schmidt’s phrase, but Andrew Curran’s in his own NYTimes tribute to Diderot, and Schmidt explores the gap between is and ought in American intellectual history.

Having read Schmidt’s treatment of the intellectual history represented by the Times and its editorial choices, I wondered how large an influence Jacques Barzun might have had in the construction of a middle-brow Diderot and indeed Enlightenment in 20th century America, since it was probably his translations and introductions to Diderot that introduced me to the term Enlightenment many years ago. Thoughts?

DM