Slavery and the Culture of Taste

Simon Gikandi is the Robert Schirmer Professor of English at Princeton University. His many books include Writing in Limbo and Maps of Englishness.

Co-Winner of the 2011 James Russell Lowell Prize, Modern Language Association Co-winner of the 2012 Melville J. Herskovits Award, African Studies Association Winner of the 14th Annual (2012) Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship, Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research at Texas A&M University One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2012 "In this at times disturbing and often provocative book, Gikandi seeks to bring together two seemingly disparate areas of experience, African slavery and European high culture... This impressive, and in places startling, book is sure to redirect the tide of contemporary 18th-century studies; it exemplifies critical inquiry into the 'global 18th century' at its best."--Choice "[T]his is an absorbing and otherwise well-executed study. It is nuanced, erudite and wide-ranging, shedding much valuable new light on the vexed relationships between eighteenth-century aesthetic culture and the outrageous history that shadows it."--Carl Plasa, Review of English Studies "Among the many strengths of this study is that it will engage scholars and students from a variety of disciplines, including the Atlantic world, British history and/or literature, colonial history both North American and Caribbean--and the slave trade. Gikandi is an engaging author, but he assumes some prior knowledge of the materials that he so intricately weaves into his remarkably detailed narrative."--Dorothy Potter, Sixteenth Century Journal "Interdisciplinary in approach, Slavery and the Culture of Taste is a virtuoso performance that mobilizes a vast amount of secondary literature and deploys a dazzling array of theory."--Ryan Whyte, Journal of Curatorial Studies "Slavery and the Culture of Taste is an important book that should be widely read by students of slavery and the modern world."--Ed Rugemer, Literature & History

• Preface ix Acknowledgments xvii Chapter 1: Overture: Sensibility in the Age of Slavery 1 Chapter 2: Intersections: Taste, Slavery, and the Modern Self 50 Chapter 3: Unspeakable Events: Slavery and White Self-Fashioning 97 Chapter 4: Close Encounters: Taste and the Taint of Slavery 145 Chapter 5: "Popping Sorrow": Loss and the Transformation of Servitude 188 Chapter 6: The Ontology of Play: Mimicry and the Counterculture of Taste 233 Coda: Three Fragments 282 Notes 287 Bibliography 321 Index 353