Accounting for African Presence in Aesthetic Modernity in Simon Gikandi’s Slavery and the Culture of Taste

The image of Simon Gikandi that crept into my head as I read and took notes for this presentation was that of an expert forensic accountant. Maybe I have seen too many television shows on which professionals so titled clinch cases with the results of their meticulous research in off-the-book transactions and deals. Perhaps I am enchanted by the televisual efforts to make forensics stand for clinical truth and knowledge. Whatever obscure reason might have caused me to image Gikandi as a forensic, I know I am not alone in my very high opinion of the book’s accomplishment; Ato Quayson, using the language of art music, described it as “virtuoso erudition” during an earlier informal chat a group of us had about Slavery and the Culture of Taste. Gikandi’s relentlessly astute readings account for the multiformations that subtended the rise and spread of taste as a cultural ideal in the British-led circum-Atlantic 18th century. He exacts from painting, monumental buildings, and musical texts evidence of the centrality of slavery to the production and enjoyment of the beauty and happiness believed to be simultaneously inherent and manifest in the particular existence of the artifacts. Gikandi, like a truth-seeking forensic accountant, also rehistoricizes the intellectual and material elements that grounded the emergence of institutions that were responsible for the production of taste, or what many in the colonized world that emerged later accepted as civilized conduct. Unlike courtroom forensics, Gikandi refused to advocate for any side. It seems as if the case for the subject of taste is indisputable as presented.

How does this book work? Gikandi expertly accounts for the presence of the tenets of taste in accomplished paintings of the Dutch masters. He locates the machinations of taste in other cultural forms like plantation slave dances, music, travel narratives of liberated African captives, as well as the shipping logs of those who transported them. The book finds a common course, and perhaps cause, for the being of monumental architecture on the West African slave coast, British show castles, and designed landscapes and he finds in each item evidence of the centrality of slavery to both the production of beauty and the cultivation of the proper sensibility for appreciating and enjoying the same. During the Age of Reason, which is also the age of high trade in African enslaved bodies, philosophy and cultural praxes quarantined aesthetics and taste from “lived experience” (12) and isolated them for exhibition and contemplative study. The rise of highly lucrative commissioned works across the arts, particularly in architecture and landscape designs, was a concomitant development. In their tasteful starkness, aesthetics occupied prime physical space and gaining the proper outlook for its most rewarding consumption became an organizing factor in virtually all facets of life, including, surprisingly, the management of the normally gruesome execution of a rebellious slave.

Under the rule of taste, transcendence is not sought in the arts and neither is aesthetics an instrument of overcoming existence; arts and aesthetics belong to the kingdom of this world and serve, as well, as resources for ordering the multiple contradictions of living in the age of slavery and reason. Within taste, education culminates in “aesthetic sensibility, cultural uplift, and the careful mastery of the economy of manners” (50). The person of taste and sensibility learns to fashion himself or herself “with the best cultural objects available” (57), displays a “self-conscious engagement with cultural matters,” and conducts himself thoughtfully with “clear intellect and organized design.” People of taste pursue “political and religious balance instead of frenzy, efficient style and idea instead of complexity, discipline of vision instead of spasmodic tentativeness” (58). They are polite, seek happiness, and exercise self-restraint. They are also obliged to collect and promote the public display of objects of taste. Although these pursuits in refinement are to be achieved within a world purchased with proceeds from the bloody trade in Africans, poised connoisseurs of taste cannot allow the feverishness of activities in those other domains of life to unsettle them...