End Date :
Second Floor Common Room,
The Heyman Center for the Humanities
A book discussion with Simon Gikandi.
Slavery and the Culture of Taste (Princeton UP, 2011)
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 Tastedemonstrates 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 rarefied 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.
PROGRAM
Panelists include: Simon Gikandi (Princeton University) Carroll Smith-Rosenberg (University of Michigan) Saidiya Hartman (Columbia University) Madeleine Dobie (Columbia University)
Moderated by Mamadou Diouf (Columbia University)
Simon Gikandi is Robert Schirmer Professor of English at Princeton University. He is the author of many books and articles including Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature, Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o, which was a Choice Outstanding Academic Publication for 2004, and co-author of The Columbia Guide to East African Literature in English Since 1945. His most recent book, Slavery and the Culture of Taste, is the topic of this event.
Carroll Smith-Rosenberg is Professor Emerita of History, American Culture, and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan. The author of several books and more than 40 essays on American history and culture and women’s history, she has twice received the Binkley-Stephenson Award for best article in the Journal of American History. Her most recent book is This Violent Empire: The Birth of an American National Identity (2010).
Saidiya Hartman is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She has been a Fulbright, Rockefeller, Whitney Oates, and University of California President’s Fellow. Professor Hartman is the author of Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth Century America (Oxford University Press, 1997) and Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (Farrar,Straus and Giroux, 2007).
Madeleine Dobie is Associate Professor of French at Columbia, and has also served as Director of Undergraduate Studies for Columbia’s French programs. Her most recent book is titled Trading Places: Colonialism and Culture in Old Regime France, an interdisciplinary study of the impact of colonialism on pre-Revolutionary French culture and literature.
Mamadou Diouf is Leitner Family Professor of African Studies and History at Columbia University, where he also leads the Institute of African Studies. Prior to teaching at Columbia, he taught at the University of Michigan and before that at Cheikh Anta Diop University in his native Senegal. His most recent books are Histoire du Sénégal: Le Modèle Islamo-Wolof Et Ses Périphéries (2001) and La Construction de l’Etat au Sénégal, with M. C. Diop & D. Cruise O’Brien (2002).
