Conjunction, Preposition, Supplement, and Trace in Slavery and the Culture of Taste

The absence of the name of Simon Gikandi as the author of Slavery and the Culture of Taste in my title is no failure of recognition. Rather, it is to signal my suspicion that this is a book that will make its way in the world without the need for a proper name. Several of such books in literary studies spring readily to mind. Thus, in no order of priority, Orientalism, Mimesis, Anatomy of Criticism, Signifying Monkey, Metahistory, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, The Political Unconscious, and The Ideology of the Aesthetic. While it may be too early to place Slavery and the Culture of Taste among this far-reaching cycle of texts, one thing Gikandi shares with the authors of the texts just listed is the capacity for grand and far-reaching synthesis. All these writers invite us to think in epic terms well beyond the subject matter on which they happen to be focusing. This makes their texts multi-generative in the sense that their insights are often called on to illuminate other areas and fields, sometimes completely different from the original subject matter of the work in question. And thus it is with Slavery and the Culture of Taste. And yet, like all works of grand synthesis, it also suffers from a number of pitfalls and contradictions, including the difficulty of encompassing the unpredictable swerves of history on three continents linked by the slave trade and the overall problem of producing a viable historiography that properly incorporates the history of the aesthetic domain alongside that of economy with which it is thoroughly entangled. It is mainly the last wrinkle that I shall be exploring in these remarks.

There is at least one preliminary error that one might make on first reading Slavery and the Culture of Taste and that is to misapprehend the significance of the title. Much turns on the conjunction “and” in it, for what Gikandi tries to demonstrate is not the place of slavery in the culture of taste of the British 18th century but rather its material and conceptual relationship to that culture. The slippage between conjunction and preposition in the overall argument of the book derives in part from the dependence on art history to illustrate many of its key arguments. In somewhat simplified grammatical terms, conjunctions may be seen as being two essential types, either coordinating (such as and, but, or, yet, for, etc.) or subordinating (such as after, although, before, since, etc.). Both types are meant to join or bring together two or more subjects of a sentence. A preposition, on the other hand, is designed to indicate the temporal, spatial, or logical relationship of the object of the sentence to other dimensions of the same sentence. However, once a preposition is seen as part of the structure of relations within a universe of significations that discursively lie beyond the specific sentence it is servicing, it shows itself to have a conceptual proximity to conjunction in the establishment of both coordinating and subordinating functions. While the discursive elision between preposition and conjuncture in Slavery and the Culture of Taste is central to its resonance, it is this also that indicates some of its methodological pitfalls. As a general rule, because painting frames its objects both literally and metaphorically, it allows itself to be seen as a container of forms or as an index of such forms in reality. This is well established in the long discourse on mimesis in art history. The many references to paintings in the Overture to the book shows that Gikandi is keen to move from the container dimension of art to larger statements about the place of slavery in relation to the aesthetic domain and the overall culture of taste in the period on which he is focusing.

While the book opens with a discussion of various depictions of black figures in the paintings of John Baptiste de Medina, Rijn Rembrandt, Frans van der Mijn, and other Dutch artists of the 18th century, it is clear that Gikandi’s argument is more than one of ordinary restitution, that is to...