Eroticizing Slavery

Like most of the essays and articles for this class, this week’s selection about slavery was new information to me, but nonetheless interesting and providing new insights. In particular, it shed light on how much we take for granted in terms of what information is used to frame our culture and what is omitted from history. The sense of bias and subjectivity of the people engagaged in the slave trade or witnessing it as spectacle is hard to fathom--far too often we accept what is told to us, written down, or depicted in photography and painting without contextualizing the information or peeling away the layers of specificities, agendas, and motivations that allow such information to become irrefutable fact in our minds.

In particular, I was intrigued by the article by Joseph R. Roach, “Slave Spectacles and Tragic Octoroons.” First, I had not thought about the myriad actions that we call everyday life as performative, but indeed they are—we perform at the workplace, at our gyms and on our days off; for our friends, our colleagues and co-workers, and in a self-reflexive way, for ourselves. In short, everything that implies action of some sort is performative and furthermore, as Roach suggests, “The performative. . . is a cultural act, a critical perspective, a political intervention.” (p. 49)

With that framework in mind, it was interesting to see how the author addressed the performative traditions of the trafficking in human flesh in antebellum America to link it to present-day practices of eroticized spectacle. Of course, one of the most obvious of the “collective representations” to which the author refers is art. The many paintings, sculptures, and films, etc. that I have seen which address the theme of slavery now come back to me to be considered in a new light. That those during the antebellum period rationalized their practice of “exhibiting” slaves to be sold because they found precedents in ancient Greek and Roman times seems incredible. Given that we have long held up those cultures as paradigms of civility and order, the delusion that slavery was acceptable behavior has to link to something perceived to be rational in order to be desensitized enough to take part in it.

More appalling, however, is the circus-like atmosphere that was created. It was one thing to insist that for the progress of America we must stoop to unprecedented lows to find the workforce needed to keep up the demand of product, but to be entertained by the spectacle complete with musical accompaniment and costumes reveals just how little the people of the time were normalized into thinking this was acceptable behavior. Of course, as the author explains, while such behavior appears beyond callous, “The restored behavior of the marketplace created by its synergy a behavioral vortex in which human relationships could be drained of sympathetic imagination and shaped to the purposes of consumption and exchange.”(p 53)

Furthermore, the elegant, theater-like rotunda connected to the St. Louis Hotel further legitimized the practice, for if an opulent building is erected for such purposes, does it not reinforce the notion that such an enterprise is an extension of sophisticated society? It is no wonder that a leap can be made from the slaves who were stripped down for the examination of their bodies to the display of prostitutes in the brothels—so often we are expected to believe that sex workers prefer their profession over other types of employment, just as we are led to believe that slaves accepted their plight. And while it might be a plausible notion, as the author suggests, that the practice of forcing slaves to dance in semi-nudity for prospective buyers anticipated the development of American musical comedy, it only reinforces the notion that it was spawned by callous indifference to what was really taking place, especially since the minstrels were performed by whites in blackface.

Of course, the idea that paintings were sold in one part of the rotunda, slaves in the middle, and land in another, while beyond despicable, clearly illustrates the institutionalizing of desire and possession. Of the many paintings and etchings that were mentioned in the essay, I wonder how many of the artists were complacent in their selection of subject matter or if they stepped outside of their exotic reverie to realize what stereotypes they were establishing and myths they were promulgating, all for money. In many ways, such artists, while lacking the cultural hindsight to access the practice in more humanistic terms, are much like prostitutes—they play on the prospective buyers need to possess and to fetishize everything, giving them what they want all in the name of formal artistic concerns and exoticism. To call the slave spectacle as American as baseball, however, seems to me to be a big stretch by the author. While the average man might have been allowed to “inspect the merchandise,” it implies that large audiences chose to partake in witnessing the slave auction over other forms of entertainment. I surely hope this is not true, but while I thought at first the analogy to the New Orleans Superdome to the slave market rotunda a bit far fetched, on second thought, it is not without merit that we are engaging in a similar practice of spectacle, albeit with the players in command of their present and future, agreeing to the fetishization of their bodies to the highest bidder. Giving people what they desire through surrogate performative practices and representations therefore places athletes and artists in the same category perhaps. They are each performing for an elite consumer which then trickles down to the middleclass citizen who, in parody of what they think is the embodiment of desire, takes the game, or the reproduction of the painting in the case of the artist, as an acceptable surrogate to the real thing. Not to diminish the deplorable practice of slavery where there is no choice in the matter of the servitude or the spectacle of the auction, however, it is interesting to note the strategic dance between desire, possession, and need that still plays out in contemporary society.

-Julie Sasse