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Slavery and the culture of taste [[electronic resource] /] / Simon Gikandi



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Autore: Gikandi Simon Visualizza persona
Titolo: Slavery and the culture of taste [[electronic resource] /] / Simon Gikandi Visualizza cluster
Pubblicazione: Princeton, NJ : , : Princeton University Press, , [2011]
Edizione: Core Textbook
Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource
Disciplina: 306.3/6209033
Soggetto topico: Slavery in literature
Slavery - Moral and ethical aspects
Soggetto non controllato: Africa
American plantocracy
Barack Obama
Britain
Christopher Codrington
James Tallmadge Jr
Missouri
W. E. B. Du Bois
West Indies
William Beckford
antebellum South
art
beauty
black difference
black self
black slaves
blacks
bondage
bourgeois culture
consumption
culture
enslavement
festival
freedom
identity
involuntary servitude
modern identity
race
selfhood
sensibility
slave money
slavery
slaves
sorrow songs
statehood
sugar colonies
taste
violence
Note generali: Description based upon print version of record.
Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Nota di contenuto: Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- 1. Overture: Sensibility in the Age of Slavery -- 2. Intersections: Taste, Slavery, and the Modern Self -- 3. Unspeakable Events: Slavery and White Self-Fashioning -- 4. Close Encounters: Taste and the Taint of Slavery -- 5. "Popping Sorrow": Loss and the Transformation of Servitude -- 6. The Ontology of Play: Mimicry and the Counterculture of Taste -- Coda: Three Fragments -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index
Sommario/riassunto: 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 Taste demonstrates 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 rarified 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.
Titolo autorizzato: Slavery and the culture of taste  Visualizza cluster
ISBN: 1-283-16902-9
9786613169020
1-4008-4011-2
Formato: Materiale a stampa
Livello bibliografico Monografia
Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
Record Nr.: 9910781476503321
Lo trovi qui: Univ. Federico II
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