Between Slavery and Taste: A Response

My interlocutors have done a good job of pointing out the cluster of concerns that drove me to make what was initially supposed to be a short excursus into the library of slavery and enslavement. They are right to note, explicitly or implicitly, that my concern was not the institution of slavery (of which much has been written about), nor the experience of enslavement (who has the authority to bear witness to unspeakable events?). Mine was an allegory of reading, one that sought to understand the inscription and imagination of bondage in the extensive library left behind by both masters and by slaves (to the extent that they could). I considered this library to be the depository of a certain narrative of modernity that could only be accessed through its symptoms, left behind as traces, fragments, images, and fictions of the self.

The four reviewers provide us with a good map of my readings or misreading of this library. They note that my book is structured by a desire to understand two archives—that of enslavement and taste—as both connected and disconnected in the making of modern culture in the long eighteenth century. They note that my book is informed by a long standing problematic in African criticism, first evident in Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic—how to account for the place of Africa and African discourses in the making of the Atlantic world. My interlocutors further note that what is at stake in this reading or rereading of the past is nothing less than the terms into which a modern subject emerges at the interstices of bondage and freedom. Sometimes the reviewers are puzzled by my intellectual preferences: why focus on the culture of slavery on the West African coast instead of the interior (Adéåkö)? Why do I work with a frame that seems to obscure the complex, dialectical relationship between masters and slaves (Harrow)? Why does a discourse that set out to expose the mutual imbrication of slavery and taste seem to leave them separate on the conceptual level (Quayson)? Why do I seem to insist on a rhetoric of newness when it comes to the study of margins in the making of centers when others have been there before me (Tejumola)?

When I started reflecting on the relationship between slavery and enslavement and their separation in the conceptual sphere, even when they were constantly brought together in everyday life, I was thinking about the larger problem of explanation and of the disciplinary formation in which making sense of things takes place. My initial target was the philosophers of freedom (Immanuel Kant and David Hume, for example), who seemed so keen to get to the desired ideal (universal emancipation) that they were ready to step on the many black bodies that littered their intellectual landscape. Was the conceptual value of freedom only possible through violent negation? But I was also thinking about the limits of explanations in the current order of knowledge, namely that what seems obvious in some displinary quarters is alien or marginal in others. In regard to the philosophical and literary study of the eighteenth century, for example, my book would turn out to be revelatory in its concern with the interstices of the art object and political economy. In historical studies, where monumental histories of empire and slavery are common, what seemed original was my attempt to step out of epistemological frameworks and to engage with the phenomenology of blackness.

In regard to periods, the eighteenth century occupies an important place in Slavery and the Culture of Taste for obvious reasons: it was a transformative moment in the making of modern culture; it was the age of freedom; it was the age of slavery. What this means, among other things, is that it is a period that secures identities for some (the subjects of the so-called modern West), while it condemns others to transcendental homelessness. My main quarrel with the teachers who taught me this period was that they were so keen to insulate the culture of freedom from the detritus of slavery that they considered enslavement to be a...