Teaching Notes on Simon Gikandi's <em>Slavery and the Culture of Taste</em>

Abstract

I am delighted that the Graduate Student Caucus requested to sponsor this review forum and highlight it in its program of activities.1 I was inspired by the interest of that constituency to prepare my remarks on Simon Gikandi’s book as teaching notes. The informality and roomier format of teaching notes should allow me to range more widely in my explorations, but also compel me to be more systematic and less allusive in my arguments, all for the sake of explanatory clarity. Gikandi’s Slavery and the Culture of Taste is a succulent book, tastefully packaged, and, available for now only for $29.98 for hardcover and $16.17 for e-book, it is tastefully priced also. It is all the more appropriate then that it has received two mouthwatering awards—the James Russell Lowell award of the Modern Language Association in January 2013 and shared the Herskovits Award of the African Studies Association in November 2012. This is a significant achievement indeed. First, I will comment on two broad aspects of the book—the archive and the method. Their specifics in the book apart, these are also the two central decisions you will face in a major way as a scholar from the dissertation stage onwards. Your profit from these remarks should, thus, be both specific and general-conceptual. Second, I will raise two queries toward the end. The archive of Gikandi’s book is that of Euro-American imperialism during what is called “the long eighteenth century,” roughly from the mid-1660s to the mid-1830s, but mostly the eighteenth century proper, 1701–1799. The curriculum of our field, African literary and cultural studies, whether in Africa or North America, rarely reaches that far back other than the occasional slave narrative in a broad survey course by an expansive-minded teacher. Our shallow attention is hardly reflective of the significance of that century and that archive in any deep history of the cultural formations and values that are constitutive of modern Africa. The archive, as we know well, has featured more prominently in the fields of African history and political economy. Part one of the reason is no doubt that the kind and volume of available records of the Africa-Europe encounter of the era, produced mostly by Europeans, appear to be more amenable to the “impact assessment” tools of those disciplines. The records at the African end by Africans at the time—and not just records of cultural, but also of social and political production and transformation—are scarce and many are subject to all sorts of debates that