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.
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