Although it is far from clear that Steele, the absentee owner of a plantation, saw slavery itself as an immoral institution in itself, The Spectator does not presuppose a wall of separation between high culture and forced labour. Certainly The Spectator seems closer to Gikandi’s way of thinking about how the arts relate to the economic speculation and exploitation than, say, Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy essays.

I keep wondering if the (to me) odd inflections of the theoretical pastiche, and of evidence selection and handling, have to do with Gikandi’s standpoint of critique. As you say Dave, there’s really nothing more than gestures here toward the Marxian tradition; I too missed Bourdieu, and although the link between slavery and Europe’s wealth and power so well analyzed by Blackburn is part of the critical equipment of the book, exploitation is not really the problem here.

So what is? I have to admit I’ve had some trouble staying focused on the book long enough to feel confident I understand it; this is because every couple of pages my momentum and trust is disrupted by an optional reading or arbitrary presentation of evidence, such as the one from ch. 3 I discussed at length in my second post, or Douglass’ Aunt Hester story. More on that in a second. But to anticipate the point, I think I disagree with you that the repression metanarrative is an optional overlay; I think that’s where Gikandi’s standpoint of critique is, I think it shapes how he sees and handles evidence, I think it therefore shapes the evidence that’s available for other uses in the book, and so I don’t think the book can be (or even should be, depending on what you want to accomplish) saved from it.

OK, back to the Aunt Hester story since we’ve been having so much fun with it. What Gikandi (and some readers here) do with that is really interesting. I kindled up a copy of Douglass’ Narrative and confirmed the undeniable sexual dimension of the master’s relation to Hester, and libidinal quality of his violence. Douglass describes him as a cruel and hardened man who sometimes took “great pleasure in whipping a slave,” and Hester as “a woman of noble form, and of graceful proportions,” whose offense on the occasion was to be caught in the company of a man other than the master.

“Clearly, the act of punishing the slave was not purely instrumental – it was bound up with perverse pleasures,” Gikandi rightly says. But where is the clarity? In Douglass, but not in Gikandi, who quotes the whole description of the beating, but NOT the setup passages in which the libidinal context is clearly established. The beating itself is so lacking in any evidence of libidity that readers here had to read it in, imagining and making much of a garment-ripping that is not in either the quoted material or anywhere else in the text, and taking a stand on facts not in evidence that easily could have been. Why did Gikandi do that to us?

Strikingly, the plainly-stated sexual motive of the mulatto woman’s flogging in Stedman is also left off-stage, in the midst of an interpretation confidently asserting the self-evidence of this motive. Instead, we are asked to accept a speculative assertion of a more universal eroticization based on the fact that the woman (actually not a mulatto but a samboe, a distinction that mattered in context) resembled Stedman’s mulatto mistress Joanna. Why? Apparently because all attractive mixed-race women look alike and stimulate the same perverse lusts.

Douglass, it turns out, was very interested in assessing the slaveholders’ libidinal relationship to slavery, which was not uniform. Some, starting with his likely father and by his estimate thousands of others, saw enslaved women as a sexual resource, objects of “lust” and “wicked desires.” He is not coy about this; he explicitly refers to and leverages sexual outrage. In contrast Mr. Severe, the overseer, “seemed to take pleasure in manifesting his fiendish barbarity,” while his replacement, Mr. Hopkins, “whipped, but seemed to take no pleasure in it,” and Mr. Gore “seemed to do so from a sense of duty.” These are variations on the theme of slavery’s brutality, but they complicate the story of its sexualization, and find no place in Gikandi’s discussion. Why?

I also found Stedman at the Internet Archive and spent a sleepless night reading through both volumes. They are a fascinating example of the ‘rhizomatic’ style of presentation JRW and DM have been talking about in relation to The Spectator. Gikandi tells us that Stedman “knew, for example, that his expedition was in Suriname to protect the sources of the coffee that had become a major source of pleasure in European high culture. Stedman easily recognized the connection between coffee, a valued stimulant, and the violence of slavery.” But actually what connections Stedman ‘knew’ and ‘recognized’ is by no means so clear in a text that jumps without transition or apparent reflection between descriptions of military campaigns, accounts of ‘shocking’ slave tortures and admirable slave lives, reports of brutal disciplining of soldiers and seamen, romantic transports about the lovely and virtuous Joanna, and naturalistic catalogs of the flora and fauna of the region.

A striking feature of the text to current sensibilities is the extraordinary scale and scope of routine violence, mayhem, disease, and death in the colony. Stedman fights duels with severe woundings for small insults; suffers a series of gruesome tropical diseases and afflictions, of which many of his company die after lengthy agonies; whole units are wiped out, the survivors taken and tortured; rebels mangle and kill plantation families; cockroaches eat his spare shoes and undies. By the time the rebel Gikandi cites and Blake depicts is broken on the rack, enough mutineers, murderers and thieves have suffered the same punishment that the only relief from the banality of barbarism is Stedman’s notably more sympathetic depiction of the victim. Gikandi is therefore quite right about the spectacular re-representation of the slaves’ torture for a European audience; Europeans whose bones were publically and spectacularly being splintered for offenses with which Stedman felt no sympathy are only briefly remarked. It might seem to make practical sense in this context that punitive violence would need something ‘extra’, as it did in much of Europe until well into the 19th century and as Gikandi acknowledges. So why does Gikandi still insist that the ubiquity of human and environmental violence “doesn’t explain the necessity of the spectacle and the exhibitionary order, the scopic regime of slavery…?”

Prompted by something Dave’s been saying I pulled up Foucault’s History of Sexuality and refreshed my memory on the ‘repressive hypothesis’. Gikandi makes much of the unspeakability of slavery; like its associated sexualization, it was hidden, denied, repressed, and sublimated into an aestheticized culture of taste that denied its brutal unconscious. In other words despite the parade of theoretical citation, also unreliable as it turns out, the analysis is a throwback to Freud, old school. In his Overture Gikandi tells us he’s going to be an unreliable analyst, and justifies this by the silences of his sources. But in his sources slavery and its uneven sexualization is widely discussed, and not at all hidden; in fact, it’s hidden only in how he treats his sources, approached by assertion and imaginative leap when it’s right there elsewhere in the archive or in those sources themselves, as JRW also notes. “Why has [slavery] been so widely discussed, and what has been said about it? What were the effects of power generated by what was said?,” Foucault might ask.

I’m not sure I understand your vocabulary of a “field” analytic, though. It sounds more like anthropology. The Markell sounds like contemporary political philosophy. But I’d be curious about how to describe and analyze these kinds of porously organized groups within groups, and the benefits of such an approach.

I’m not saying this isn’t a truthy story. But down in the data there’s usually nothing like the consistency of agenda or implementation it would take to totalize any particular public, so instead there are lots of publics, at various scales; fields of action with their own spaces, resources, concepts, and practices, more or less permeable to each other, in dynamic interaction. For a pithy conceptual decentering (and demonstration of the principle) see Jeff Weintraub’s short article here (which became part of a very useful edited volume on the public / private distinction). I think Patchen Markell is also pretty useful.

It can be really hard to see fields in the kinds of sources Gikandi is using, given their rhetorical purification. Sources that express or imagine an image of the world usually don’t textualize messiness.

My own feeling is that G’s use of theory as pastiche or running commentary does end up distracting readers, even some presumed ideal reader familiar with every name and work cited, since it adds a layer of interpretive work that seems to add relatively little to the most intriguing insights and juxtapositions of his material.

In our discussion, we’ve seen instances where commentators wondered whether a term like “public sphere” was being used in some deliberately inflected way or not, or whether Derrida’s “Structure, Sign, and Play” or “Archive Fever” were being invoked (the answer seems to be no, but see p. 26, n. 95 for “trace”). This may be a matter of stylistic or methodological preference, but I confess to being baffled by the relative absence? unimportance? underemphasis? of Bourdieu’s Distinction, likewise much of the Marxist side of either Caribbean social history or post-structural thought, or the historians of slavery like Blackburn. In other words, considering the subject matter and the argument, the post-structuralism embraced here seems rather apolitical, and strangely, much more closely aligned with the European “culture of taste” than the post-colonial criticism or cultural studies descended from, say, E.P. Thompson or Gayatri Spivak.

On the question of evidence, I’ve reread the Overture, and G does state that “the questions that I find compelling will not have answers, evidence, or proof, nor will they satisfy any standard of explanation, because my objects of analysis–slavery and enslavement–are surrounded by silence and are submerged under what Patrick Chamoiseau, the Martinican novelist, has called a “web of memories which scorch us with things forgotten and screaming presences” (37). The problem that I have is that this book, even with these caveats, still remains a scholarly “analysis,” even if it represents a more broadly and eclectically conceived scholarly analysis than perhaps other scholars have done. Without some acknowledgment or further explanation of its genre, this book itself constitutes another “aesthetic gesture” rather than a “counter-aesthetic” one.

The problem of dealing with problematic sources to delve into social history is something that Thompson discusses in Customs in Common, and I think Thompson is very useful in his reminders of how the academic historian or literary critic can identify with the landowners or their functionaries in the past. I believe that the answer to this conundrum must lie in the use of as wide an array of sources as one can assemble, very much along the lines of G’s uses of visual and verbal materials here. Sharon Howard, who works at the Old Bailey, also discussed many of these issues a few years ago at this blog, here.

It also seems to me, from my perspective, that the core of the book’s confrontation between the culture of taste and the emergent communities and identities of enslaved people seems to be staged by writers like Douglass and Prince, who can begin to address white readerships to inform them, to use Carl’s earlier terms, that there is a “problem” in their enjoyment of the spectacle of racialized suffering and subjection. In other words, this seems to be a moment when writers like Equiano, Cugoano, Prince, Douglass and others try to make their white public aware of the moral dissonance surrounding slavery’s practices. In some ways, the absence of anything like a linear chronology makes it harder for G to highlight the importance of this moment, which I think is an important one, at least from the perspective of the culture of taste.

I also concur that the book’s treatment of performance seems to serve as a conceptual nexus to talk about a variety of issues raised when these two cultures confronted one another: the staged power differential that produced flattery for planters like Beckford, but also opportunities for public expression of melancholia among some performers; coerced affects for slaves in some contexts, but then also possibilities for agency and community-formation. I also think that the performing and the visual arts are especially important here, because they make it possible to talk about collective and oral experiences ways that feel somewhat less mediated by the slave-owners and their allies.

Finally, it seems to me that the routine commodification of gender in the culture of taste seems to put special pressure on the female slave, especially, as G points out, the “mulatress.” (190) Do you have other works in mind besides Prince that might benefit from taking this approach to the performance of sorrow?