None of the black women in the seventeenth-century text that I read in this article are referred to by name. In this way, the figures that I discuss recall the oft-cited sentence by Hortense Spillers that “I am a marked woman, but not everybody knows my name. Spillers’s foundational “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” underscores that “the black woman” is a figure perhaps always deserving of scare quotes—that shuddered marking of unrepresentability across historical transportations. Given gratuitous antiblackness, slavery’s reproductive political economies, the production of sexual difference and ungendered flesh, these black women burst the sign under which they fall as gendered subjects, as various academic investigations into vexed modes of subjectification have made clear In this article, the question of how these anonymous black women and/or girls serve their author-narrators on a textual level becomes entangled with how they serve the contemporary scholar allured by the idea that a study of the past might impact, however obliquely, how we can disrupt our political present. In other words, while reading, the particularities of libidinal encounters with certain black African women stage a space for the reader that indexes a mass of black enslaved women.
Tracing a symbolic order that designated an “American grammar,” Spillers outlines state policy in the mid-1960s United States alongside the history of slavery and its legacies. She writes:
The massive demographic shifts, the violent formation of a modern African consciousness, take place on the sub-Saharan Continent during the initiative strikes which open the Atlantic Slave Trade in the fifteenth century of our Christ, interrupted hundreds of years of black African culture. We write and think, then, on an outcome of aspects of African-American life in the United States under the pressure of those events. I might as well add that the familiarity of this narrative does nothing to appease the hunger of recorded memory, nor does the persistence of the repeated rob these well-known, oft-told events of their power, even now, to startle. In a very real sense, every writing as revision makes the “discovery” all over again
Spillers is describing a critical situation in which, despite the repetition of the violence of slavery, either as a historical account or as quotidian fact, the immense crush of the past is still troubling to bear as it crushes the present. I suggest here that this “hunger of recorded memory” does not go away but lingers, as the yearning of hunger suggests, in the body and mind. Reading and writing opens the wound again, insofar as it revises the past through every reencounter. In a very real sense, to call on Spillers, every writing is anticipated by a hunger, an attachment that cannot be consummated. The hunger is itself never appeased. With English author Ligon as a case study, I situate the notion that we ingest and digest narratives of slavery real and imagined, and that they leave multiple aftertastes with which we must reckon.
This paper follows from the “we” that Spillers expresses as the position of African American writing and thinking. It is these discussions, debates and ideas in black studies—about temporality, corporeality, historiography, archives of slavery, power and desire—that bring me to Ligon’s A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados (1657), the main subject of this article, a text that is tied up with black female sexualizations I am not a scholar of the seventeenth-century literature. However, my serious interest in the text, which comprises what Rebekah Mitsein calls “part travel narrative, part botanical index, part plantation manual,” was piqued by Jennifer L. Morgan’s reading of Ligon in Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery, which I revisited while preparing my own manuscript about desire and the figure of the laboring black woman in twentieth-century America I initially took up Morgan to better understand black women’s laboring as a multi-pronged process bound up with both capitalist production and reproduction but I became simultaneously gripped by how Ligon’s representation of his own taste for African women exposes a politics of reading the past from a black feminist position in the present. In this article, then, I consider what the focus on the gustatory teaches us about a black feminist relationship to the racial past.
Many scholars have written about depictions of blackness in early American and early modern texts like Ligon’s History In Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive, Marisa Fuentes practices a methodology that deploys archival traces to understand black women’s presence in Bridgetown. In Encyclopédie Noire: The Making of Moreau de Saint Méry’s Intellectual World, Sara E. Johnson turns to the enslaver Moreau to tell a “communal biography” of the enslaver that uncovers the “stolen labor” and “embedded story of hidden violence” necessary to produce and maintain his polymathic intellectual projects Nicole Adjoe’s Creole Testimonies: Slave Narratives from the British West Indies, 1709-1838 uncovers rich slave narratives in seemingly dry colonial documents such as treatises, natural histories, and diaries Part of a wide-ranging archival and speculative turn in black studies, both Adjoe and Johnson engage with black feminist encounters with history and archives to shape their experimental methodologies, such as Saidiya Hartman’s influential “critical fabulation” writing practice, which uses speculation to engage with archival fragments and silences.
More specifically, scholars including Kim Hall, Morgan, Keith Sandiford, and Cassander Smith have focused on Ligon in various ways that outline the problematics of his History in terms of race, gender, colonialism, and sexuality. In literary studies, Smith focuses on how Ligon’s encounter with black African women transforms the travel narrative into a romance genre while Hall, who also analyzes Ligon’s depictions of black women, explores the intersection of gastronomic and aesthetic pleasures as sugar profits and consumption rose in England in the seventeenth century Situating Ligon as one among other colonial and creolized authors, Sandiford has argued that sugar is a metaphor that helps us to understand cultural politics in the Caribbean.
My intervention is a reading of Ligon that further illuminates the position, desires, and demands from the vantage point of the black feminist reader today. In this article, I install Ligon’s reflective section set in Santiago, Cape Verde as integral to understanding desire in the text, not only Ligon’s desire as other critics have astutely noted, but also our own in the present, whoever “we” are. An often-implicit undercurrent for research, desire is a dynamic socially and academically productive psychic process that provides a framework important to approaching ungraspable figurations of blackness in colonial texts. Drawing on contemporary scholarship, narrative strategies, and reading practices, I illuminate the historical and literary instrumentality of black women as muddied symbols of culture, by establishing an awkward and ambivalent analogy between Ligon’s oral obsession and our own. In other words, I locate this writing’s enactment of a stance toward the past from the present as affectively produced and desirous.
Here, then, I am intervening in longstanding debates in black studies where numerous scholars have asked us to navigate silence, fissures, and gaps in our orientation to history, narrative and archive What does the presence of who Ligon calls “free Negroes” do not only for Ligon and his text but also the black feminist reader More explicitly, following Toni Morrison, what does a focus on the silent and silenced Africanist women’s presence in a text do Does the decision to privilege these seemingly accessible figures—that is, those “seen” in the texts we have access to—over a more superfluous mass? Or might the gesture begin to dramatize the relationship between individualized figures and the invalidated mass that orients the “Sixty Million and more,” a number so famously speculated in an epigraph to Morrison’s Beloved What do we demand from the textual “objects” that we seem to desire to transform into subjects when we write about them? Why do we ask our readings to do what they do?
Black feminist objects of study and our ethical relationships to anonymous figures are often framed through mourning and reparation. Following Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s well-known 1995 work, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, Hartman offers a gendered reading of figures of black women and girls in Atlantic slave stories. Hartman’s work emphasizes a Foucauldian “failure of history” and the impossibilities of sufficient redress or reparation. For Hartman, in “Venus in Two Acts,” the stakes are clear: “My account replicates the very order of violence that it writes against by placing yet another demand upon the girl, by requiring that her life be made useful or instructive, by finding it in a lesson for our future or a hope for history. Impossibility captures the simultaneous attempt and failure: to point us to the archive of slavery, which is to also point the finger at ourselves, and to acknowledge the violence at work in reading and writing about dead figures of enslaved women in the Atlantic. How do we reckon with the critical knowledge that we make our marks? More specifically, I consider Ligon’s desire for language in the text next to questions relating to a historiography of the present: How do we relate to the past in our writings? Why is my own desire to find something, anything, in the representations of these women so insatiable?
Elaborating on Hartman’s conceptualizations of the violence in historical research, in this article I demonstrate that tracing Ligon’s fixation on the mouth, a site of language, repulsion, and desire at once, offers an unsettling yet unyielding parallel for my own interpretation of the black women who appear in his History. Situating the archival turn in black studies alongside Ligon is not new, however, my position here is that contending with taste and its aftermath disturbs the reader’s desire for closure by provoking uncomfortable physical and psychic sensations as well as political intensities. This essay argues that Ligon’s History represents taste as an appetitive desire for language from anonymized subjects, which in turn produces an ambivalent aftertaste for the contemporary reader, a sensorial concept indexing debates in black studies about the relationship between the past and the present. Through my focus on these literary figures of African women in History, I contend that an attention to aftertaste exposes reading and criticism as a libidinal practice. Ligon’s fixation on mouths as an erotic symbol and gustatory locale produces its own often ambivalent aftertaste: a demand for language from figures of anonymous black women that also troubles the contemporary researcher’s search for redress and recovery. In other words, Ligon’s seventeenth-century text teaches us about the figuration of the “Negro woman”—entangling desire and disgust—as she functions as a narrative device of arrangement and composition, and an opportunity for tangents, interruption, and nothingness. It is Ligon’s focus on mouths, his desire to taste as a desire for language, that moved me to make a parallel with the black feminist critic’s own desires to enter an early modern text such as Ligon’s and negotiate these anonymous literary figures who were so constrained by the capitalist logics of racial slavery. At stake more broadly is how questions of taste, aftertaste, the mouth, and ultimately desire inflect discussions in black studies about the indeterminacy of archives, history, language, and temporality in the face of understandings of race and gender in contemporary capitalism.
Aftertastes linger. An aftertaste is typically a disagreeable sensation left in one’s mouth produced after some initial, different taste. As an analytic drawing on both its figurative and literal meanings, aftertaste, read through Ligon, interrupts the expectation of continuity between what Stephen Best calls the “slave past” and the “black political present” by centering an embodied relation to temporality, textual material, and slavery that is practiced and yet, at every turn, stalled Because of the negative connotations surrounding aftertaste (one often wants to get rid of an aftertaste), my intervention in this article is to sit with aftertastes as a way of reading that destabilizes our relationship to the figures of the racial past by way of letting discomfort persist and inhabiting the text. Furthermore, as my reading of Ligon’s searching for taste demonstrates, aftertaste is likewise unavoidably obtained through carnal means constitutive with inner-consciousness.
M. Nicole Horsley has recently theorized “the aftertaste of slavery” in the context of contemporary culture, sexual autonomy, erotic freedom, sexual violence, and antiblackness She writes that the aftertaste of slavery “persists as an unpleasant taste lingering on tongues and in mouths and interrupts presumptions of dominance by way of encounters with estrangement and tenderness. For my reading of Ligon, I expand the meaning of aftertaste to index the embodied and psychic aftereffects of encounter with his text. While, in Horsley’s exploration of what Jennifer C. Nash calls “the black body in ecstasy,” Horsley emphasizes how aftertaste is “a practice of rebellion,” I instead invoke aftertaste as phenomenon of reading that insists on reckoning with difficulty and desire The aftertaste of a text are those things that stay with us without material referent. The contemporary reader is drawn into the text through (mis)recognition, discomfort, and fantasy, albeit these are desirous processes that produce remarkable historical revisions such as those by Johnson and Adjoe. The location of both taste and aftertaste is typically the mouth, which operates as an erogenous and linguistic zone, as well as a vestibular site of passage to the interior. Taste and aftertaste in this article operate as both a specific thematic exploration of gustatory politics and an analytic for studying the production of critical, intellectual, and writerly desire more generally. Aftertaste is a concept for understanding how reading is an embodied practice that produces recollections and unwanted leftovers. A phrase like “aftertaste of slavery” comes with it a kind of uneasiness and inadequacy but it is uneasiness that is necessary to sit with, especially as it revisits iterations of an “afterlife of slavery,” which has been so foundational to black studies, American studies, and other fields. The interface my argument presents between black studies’ wrestling with the past (after) and the libidinal and sensorial pull of gustation (taste) has implications for black feminist studies, especially because of renewed academic interest around care, regard, and reparation
Taste is already a broad yet dense category with references that range from aesthetics and popular culture to biology and food studies. For the purposes of this article, I am conceptualizing taste loosely and associatively, however, less along the lines of an aesthetic register so theorized in European thought by the likes of David Hume, Immanuel Kant and Aristotle or the accounts in the last fifty years that offer critical analyses of taste such as those by Pierre Bourdieu and Simon Gikandi, though the resonance are certainly there, chiefly when it comes to the relationship between cultivation, civilization, leisure, citizenship As Lauren F. Klein has argued in An Archive of Taste: Race and Eating in the Early United States, the meanings of taste “span from the sensory experience of eating, to personal preferences for certain flavors, to more general inclinations toward (or against) certain cultural expressions. Analyzing early American archives, Klein notes that only certain citizens were able to use taste as a source of knowledge and social standing. And indeed, Carolyn Korsmeyer has contended that Ligon’s century was when the metaphoric meaning of taste in the West as a matter of creative judgment began to really take hold
A History itself also has various valences through which to apprehend taste. As Ligon gives an account of his voyage to Barbados, typically in catalog-style, he also gives an account of himself through autobiography and reflection. Writing from debtor’s prison, Ligon presents a self that is a complex aristocratic-meets-cosmopolitan subject and invokes images of a pre-English Civil War life, the good life where one is well-rounded and educated in manners of theater, hunting, art, mathematics, architecture, design, science, and music. In addition to spending time in scenes of feasts, Ligon also literally tastes several tropical fruits, plants, and animals—from pineapple and sugarcane to sweet hog flesh—and attempts to properly describes each individual item alongside its look and feel. As Kyla Wazana Tompkins has argued, erotic and oral pleasures are inextricably linked While my essay not entirely grounded in food studies itself, I call on Tompkins’s approach that “seeks to render discursive two kinds of matter toward so much human appetitive energy is directed: food and flesh. For Ligon, taste was a way of attending to the stated intentions of his text as an empirical survey but it also belies more libidinal impulses.
For a book with Barbados in its title, it certainly takes some pages to get to Barbados, a place that at the time Ligon was writing in the mid-seventeenth century “became England’s first colony wholly committed to slave labor. After an introductory few pages at sea, what I will call the St. Jago section lasts for just under twenty pages and appears before the reader, almost as if finally, gets to Ligon’s first sight of that “happy Island” of Barbados. Ligon dips his toe into the idea of the tropics—leisure, domination and sweetness—before he gets there, illustrating how formal and narrative delimitation bubbles up and spills over surmised constraints. In this article, I focus my reading on a curious section in History, which happens enroute to Barbados. Known as St. Jago to Ligon, this location is current-day Santiago in the Cape Verde archipelago, and it is where he makes a requisite pit-stop after leaving London. In Santiago, he engages in trade to procure the necessary food, potable water, and other goods for the remainder of the trip. St. Jago is not only a place for preparatory business and provisions stocking; “There Ligon saw a black woman for the first time,” writes Morgan Off the coast of the African continent, Cape Verde thus operates as a place to stock up on nourishment, and it is also here where, attending to the mouth and the body, Ligon affords himself a little more room for tangents. From Ligon’s own stated intentions for the text, moments in the text where black women’s bodies mark spaces of feigned order propel in Ligon a bursting out of his methodological mission, or a “flying out” as he puts his digressions on lust and beauty himself The exotic, threatening, sexualized, and scandalous presence of black women in Ligon’s text is used, contradictorily, to construct his sense of morality and mastery of language
Thus, while Ligon’s undertaking, ever ambitious, in A History is about sugar production and attracting potential English investors, the text does more than what it sets out to do, which is to be a guide into new colonial endeavors and to “describe Barbados for English consumption. Ligon’s aspiration for scientific truth, reason, and exactness points to the relationship between the burgeoning capitalist modes of production, the natural environment, and the island’s inhabitants. Privileging a sense of order, Ligon attempts to govern editorial content as a proxy for cataloging, observing, and describing his voyage. His use of headings and subheadings are meant to demarcate and contain professed topics. See, for example, the first of many italicized and bracketed subtitles: “[Tame beasts that are living on the Island. Camels.] Ligon’s ordering and attention to detail is apparent by his inclusion of technical images, diagrams, lists, numbers, drawings, calculations, measurements, menu plans, plant diameters, and legends of sugar mills. Historian Karen Ordahl Kupperman, who edited and wrote the introduction to the 2011 edition to Ligon’s text, situates A History within its historical context and audience. She notes that the members of The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge “enthusiastically read and endorsed Ligon’s book, proposing it as a model for the kind of scientific environmental study they want to encourage.
As previously mentioned, it is important to stress that the first notable passages where Ligon encounters black women is not in Barbadian slave society but on an island of then-Portuguese territory, Cape Verde. In this way, taste and aftertaste as heuristic approaches to History emphasize the temporality inherent to the text and engendered by the voyage. As Smith notes, “[t]he women Ligon encounters in Santiago, though, are not fertile bodies valuable for both their labor and reproductive capabilities; in fact, only one of the women is actually enslaved, and her labor does not produce tangible, material goods. The “free” black women in Santiago, prompting the author’s free associations, serve as foreshadows for what is to come in Ligon’s text: Barbados as a “legible” or “visible” slave society, blurring the temporal and geographic boundary of slavery itself“I have been very strict in observing the shapes of these people,” Ligon writes under the heading “Negroes,” venturing to describe the “three sorts of men” who live in Barbados This self-professed exactitude is not apparent while documenting Cape Verde. Rather, the reader is subject to intensely performed personal moments of, as Ligon puts it, “flying out. In terms of narrative, these anonymous black women function as bewildering and elliptical openings the remainder of the book. The figures form a buffer or a waiting room, holding the reader over until they arrive at what they came for as stated in the title: a true and exact history of Barbados.
It is also these passages that do not have the italicized and parenthetical headings that Ligon favors subsequently when writing about Barbados. As the reader anticipates the more official historical intervention, Ligon’s introductory passages allows for a flowery digression, a contemplation on what he calls “beauty” (and what I might call terror) As a formal excess, the St. Jago section stretches itself, surpassing the text, dislocating Ligon from his epistemological project. Sandiford calls this strategy a deferral, writing that the “impetus for deferral is extended further to produce the Cape Verde interlude as a narratively and structurally significant pretext to the titular public history. At this juncture, part of the intellectual burden is the residue of these African women’s presence lingering as he travels to Barbados. Insofar as the absented presence of black women as figures or tropes disrupts the ostensible propriety of the text, Ligon, as taster, also transmutes an aftertaste with which the contemporary reader must contend. In this vein, I cannot help but be upfront about my personal attachments; what do I, a black woman scholar and descendent from Caribbean people, desire from representations of Ligon’s “black Mistress,” a “Negro of the greatest beauty,” pretty young Negro virgins,” the “young Maids [who] have ordinarily very large breasts” Ligon’s taste for black women, next to his taste of food, yields an ambivalent aftertaste for the black feminist that rubs up against received modes of recovery and recuperation. Instead of an aspiration toward precise informational representations of the natural world—fauna, flora, and climate—Ligon’s failed address with anonymous “Negro girls” and his desire for their language exaggerates how we might today desire to fill gaps and consume speech, communication, and understanding from figures of the past. The desire for language from an other is also a desire for a different kind of order, a desire to make sense of something, to be on the same page, to recognize and to be recognized but, as we will see from Ligon, desire can become demand, and demand for language also acts as a performance of control.
The passages I turn to now occur within pages of each other and on the same island of Santiago. Near the beginning of the text, Ligon meets Padre Vagado, the Commander of the Island, and his “Negro mistress” after an elaborate and mesmerizing meal. Ligon begins his description of this beautiful woman by moving part by part, first surveying her exterior elements of dress. Ligon writes, “A Negro of the greatest beauty and majesty together: that I ever saw in one woman. Her stature large, and excellently shaped, well favored, full eyed, and admirably graced. After describing her clothing in detail, Ligon’s curiosity moves from these surface embellishments—materials such as silk, lace, leather, fringe, pendants, and pearls—to an admission where her eyes become a decorative detail. “But her eyes were her richest Jewels, for they were the largest, and most oriental that I have ever seen,” Ligon writes The black woman’s big eyes, metaphorized as glistening jewels, get muddled as another rarity at disposal for Ligon’s records, written in his typical superlative tone that foreshadows his later encounter with pineapples, with which he was notably fascinated, noting that “the taste is beyond” even the finest fruit in Europe In addition, as Cassander Smith notes, the “ethnographic moment reduces the woman to the cultural landscape. Along with the rest of the goods, from the herbs with “salt, Oil, and the best Vinegar” consumed at dinner to now the woman’s clothing, “a Petticoat of Orange Tawny and Sky color,” everything is the absolute best, a sensorial complexity that, perhaps counterintuitively, intensifies insatiability The use of superlatives marks how “both plant and product are negotiated into aesthetic objects of transcendent mystical properties whose essence was vaunted to produce a wholesome moral economy. The identifying and stylizing of garnishes, from edible ones like herbs to non-digestible ones like “silver lace,” are also part of the consumption process Since taste is a sensorial mode of attention, a heuristic for practical discovery, the woman is inferred as another delicacy to consume, a dessert to the delightful meal which Padre hosts and Ligon was a guest. Kupperman notes how cuisine during this period was in the midst of becoming gastronomic, a recreational and aesthetic experience of personal cultivation and access to civilization, more than mere necessary nourishment. As evidenced by her foundational essay, bell hooks might say the black mistress here was an Other to eat[xlvii] Taken in its entirety, there is obviously much more to the tasting of food apparent; Sarah Lewis-Cappellari might call this a form of “racial tasting.
In Laboring Women, Morgan points out Ligon’s idiosyncratic invocation of the monarchy when he drools over Padre Vagado’s mistress Even as Ligon stands out among early modern English writers because he sees some aesthetic beauty and gustatory sensuality in black feminine figures, where his peers could only see attractiveness in whiteness, his laudatory tone and seemingly praise-filled address to the mistress is not sustained when he experiences a plurality of black women, ungendered by the back-breaking labor of slavery. Morgan probes Ligon’s changing posture toward black women throughout History, noting that:
He wrote that their breasts “hang down below their Navels, so that when they stoop at their common work of weeding, they hang almost to the ground, that at a distance you would think they had six legs.” In this context, black women's monstrous bodies symbolized their sole utility—the ability to produce both crops and other laborers
Although there are different “types” of representations of black women, they work with and against each other by reinforcement and referral to other bodies but also to other features of the natural world. Ligon’s awe of black women’s beauty is an extension of the colonial project that was naturalizing and buttressing slavery. In this passage, Ligon’s use of a simile (breasts as legs) enforces the unhuman perception of the bodies of black women that were nonetheless constructed as biologically suited to agricultural labor.
Furthermore, Morgan describes the representational strategies in History as ones of progression and accumulation:
Taking the female body as a symbol of the deceptive beauty and ultimate savagery of blackness, Ligon allowed his readers to dally with him among beautiful black women, only to seductively disclose their monstrosity over the course of the narrative. Ligon's narrative is a microcosm of a much larger ideological maneuver that juxtaposes the familiar with the unfamiliar—the beautiful woman who is also the monstrous laboring beast
The apparent contradiction between the beautiful and the monstrous woman is undermined when they are considered as part of the gendered racial ideologies of the time that were so bound up in antiblack colonial sovereignty that enslaved black people. The St. Jago section positions a contrast between the twinned figures of the desirous black woman and monstrous black woman that counterintuitively reveals they are constitutive of one another, while also setting up other parallels and serve a narrative purpose. For instance, the surface-level and shape-driven description of Padre Vagado’s mistress foreshadows later descriptions of poisonous trees, the wildlife, and the general feminization of the plants said to be native to Barbados. Take, for example, Ligon’s description of a macaw tree where the tree is described with female third-person singular pronouns, and with body parts mimicking those of an idealized woman:
It bears at top a large tuft of fruit, which we call Apples, but they are not a fruit to be eaten; their color as their leaves, willow-green, and just such for shape as the Cyprus tree bears. Sure, Nature formed this tree to some great purpose, she is so armed; for neither man nor beast can touch her, without being wounded. She is well shaped, her body straight, her branches well proportioned, her top round
The man, so to speak, has good taste in trees. Despite the depictive parallels, Padre Vagado’s mistress is not the same as a tree if only because Ligon can command more from her than he can a tree. Looking and observing, already instantiations of violence, is not enough. When Ligon writes that “[s]eeing all these perfections in her only at passage, but not yet heard her speak,” ocular engagement passes through to movement The more rousing engagement is one of accessing things inside. Ligon wants to penetrate through her silence and access the mistress’s speech, a representation of knowing her more deeply.
As a narrator, Ligon fashions his desire through the lens of curiosity, writing, for example, “[p]artly out of a Curiosity” and by way of a “knowledge [that] wrought this Curiosity in me. Attempting to satisfy this curiosity, Ligon’s organization begins with the Cape Verdean woman’s outermost layer, clothing and accessories, and then moves to her figure and shape, like the fruit-bearing tree. His observations reach an impasse at the mouth, an orifice marking the boundary between inside and out, symbolizing language and interiority. Ligon’s oral obsession, which originates at a surface, goes deeper, a bit inside, to the teeth, and then swings into a command for language. Later, in a moment of address, mediated by an interpreter, Ligon is almost satisfied by his gustatory cravings masquerading as pseudo-scientific investigations, as he verifies the “loveliest smile that [he] has ever seen. About her mouth he writes first akin to a clinical examination for cleanliness and behavior, debunking a “common error” or clarification of fact over the “general opinion, that all Negroes have white teeth […] But look nearer to them, and you shall find those teeth, which at a distance appeared rarely white, are yellow and foul. Insofar as the Ligon used the black female body to impact his authorial self, the mouth, as a site for the entanglement of aesthetic, cerebral, and biological taste, was an especially lucrative vehicle for imperial notions of hygiene that index how desire and disgust are linked.
Foregrounding racist discourses of physiognomy as they intertwine with imperial notions of practicality, hygiene, and commonsense, Ligon fixates on the racialized mouth: as it has the capacity for smiling; as the container for teeth; as where chewing happens; as an alimentary canal and an aid to eating; as an orifice prompting sensual seduction; and as a tool for vocality and oral communication. Also referencing hooks, in Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century, Kyla Wazana Tompkins notes that “the black mouth is a site of political intensity itself and pre-empts the domination of white desire. Indeed, in Ligon’s history, the mouth is an essential yet vestibular site for the discovery of both beauty and monstrosity. His preoccupation with the black woman’s mouth toggles between a desire for the body and a demand for language. Ligon’s demanding desire for language materializes in the text initially as a fixation on the black woman’s mouth.
Reading Ligon’s attention to the mouth, its location, processes, and symbolism, we can attend to how desire turns to demand. Ligon has been described as “more liberal and human than [that] of the generality of planters”—for whatever that is worth However, the discourse around Ligon demonstrates that despite his use of sexually violent language throughout his encounters with black women, for example, presuming who he will “find […] both ready and willing,” this assumption of sexual availability and violability is bound up with liberal and humanist machinations. It is not quite right to say that Ligon writes the black woman as of a piece with the natural and animal worlds. Even the desire to do more than look and dominate, that is, to communicate in an exchange, is bound up with a libidinal economy of slavery The libidinal character of this uneven exchange culminates as an appetite for “her rows of pearls, so clean, white, orient, and well shaped. Ligon’s concentration on these aesthetic and gustatory elements is digested into a liberal desire for language as a sign of humanness and reciprocity. Ligon expresses exaltation as the mistress is a specimen of perfection. Though, as Morgan contends, he was “anxious to hear her voice,” he only ends up getting a smile He wants more. But what exactly does he want? For our purposes, that he wants more of something, anything, is enough. Does Ligon want the Negro mistress to speak? Or does he want to have access to and command over the orifice from which she speaks? The mouth, spurring thoughts of taste, conjures a fantasy of exchange offering entry into imagined interiority.
A brief word on the interpreter and his invisibility: language difference itself is also a particularity interrupting Ligon’s wish for exchange between author and figure. The translator here might in fact stand in for Ligon as mediator between Barbados and his contemporaneous reader. Sandiford, for instance, has argued that History is a “technology of power” translating on-the-ground colonialism for his audience Both the readership at the time and today are sometimes reduced to experiencing colonialism at a remove, either geographic or temporal, all the while benefiting from its profits, systems, and afterlives. The radical speechlessness of the figure of the black woman is counterposed to what it means to revisit this archive.“Embracing the underlying cause of aftertaste,” Horsley writes, “means returning to the master archive, the Black female body. The black feminist scholar’s desire to remember, recollect, renew, revisit, and possibly mourn the past is not a precise parallel with Ligon the discoverer’s power-stricken desire for black women’s mouth, however, the encounter does shed light on the ethical difficulty of engaging with those who cannot speak. The persistence of sensation, affect, and emotion after the time of slavery reveals its presence, its aftertaste, while also signals the idealizing demands of the reader.
When encountering these marked yet anonymous women, History produces feeling for the reader of slowing down relative to the whirlwind and fragmented descriptions of the landscape, trees and fruit in Santiago. This inaugurates a similar descriptive passage that takes place the morning after Ligon’s extravagant dinner and is set outdoors near a fountain. Upon reaching a fountain overflowing with water and women, Ligon pauses on the unrepresentability of two characters in particular, young women Ligon surmises to be “[i]nnocent […] their ages about fifteen. They are “[w]anton, as the soil that bred them, sweet as the fruits they fed on. This scene echoes the passage with Padre Vagado’s mistress only a few pages earlier especially in the way that before and during the moment of address, the encounter with these women is framed by an illustration of their adornments: hair, pendants, beads, bracelets, fake pearls, striped silk petticoats, taffeta, and ribbon. Instead of an enclosed interior with one woman being the object of Ligon’s affection, now there is even more media to contend with, more natural things to reckon with, and not one beautiful Negro woman but “many pretty young Negro virgins. Instead of a concubine in Padre Vagado’s home, we have “free Negroes. Mirroring these two passages and these various exploits who “commit rapes upon our affections,” Ligon draws our attention to the mass anonymity of the figures, its capacities to collate individuals of the past into a usable theory—a consolation, a gift—in the present, to make an imprint on the future Black women held a symbolic burden for Ligon, which has permuted into a theoretical burden in black feminist studies. That critical wanting presents an impasse because let us not forget that although the focus is on these specific figures of black women in the text, they may or may not correspond to a singular comprehensible life. As Hartman contends, “[t]here are hundreds of thousands of other girls who share her circumstances and these circumstances have generated few stories.
Encountering such literature where the figure of the black woman subtends the authority of the writer is a scene of loss that also has an “allure” or “taste” of its own. Spillers’s invocation of a “hunger of recorded memory,” which opened this article, can be thought alongside the complex relationship between C. L. R. James’s insistence on “the particular burden which is the special inheritance of the black skin” and the allegedly trivial and non-narrative encounter with the archive, that is to say, the taste or preference of a writer Recall Michel Foucault’s opening lines in his essay “Lives of Infamous Men” where he admits that “[t]he selection found here was guided by nothing more substantial than my taste, my pleasure, an emotion, laughter, surprise, a certain dread, or some other feeling whose intensity I might have trouble justifying. Here, taste corresponds with emotional forces that cannot exactly be put into words. In “The Taste of The Archive,” Brent Hayes Edwards, coming across a rather affecting photograph in Claude McKay’s archive at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, describes a “mysterious relation […] as something integral to the taste of the archive, to the sensation of encountering a past through it. He goes on to cite Arlette Farge (Le Goût de l’archive, translated by Thomas Scott-Railton as Allure of the Archive) and Foucault (“Lives of Infamous Men”)—two French academics who have both tried to put language to what Farge calls a “secret” or “affective agitation” and Foucault names as a “vibration” and “intensity. What Edwards, Farve, and Foucault locate is a personal, psychic, and emotional experience with archival research that is difficult to translate into an academic container. Something spills over. “A taste for these ragged tatters of words and actions will always shape the way you write about them,” Farge contends If there is a taste, there is an aftertaste. And this aftertaste, of course, is racialized and gendered, attesting to the instrumentalizations of untold stories of literary-historical figures.
Ligon endows taste with values of epistemology and research. Reading Ligon in this way is uneasy as it asks the contemporary feminist to consider forms of complicity in ongoing colonial and capitalist projects. Instead of the previous passage’s begging for speech, Ligon here leaves room for a gulf of silence—rhetorically at least. Ligon is now performing his inability to adequately express himself. He is unable “to express all the perfections of Nature, and Parts, these Virgins were owners of. The loveliness of these two figures is so confounding for Ligon that even the most famous artists would have trouble truly capturing their aura. Despite claiming “my pen may well be silent,” Ligon goes on to describe these free Negroes, their hair and dress, for a few pages
As Hall writes: “Ligon’s stay in Santiago is characterized by a careful dance of engagement and withdrawal, a series of encounters in which Ligon flirts (sometimes literally) with desire for Black women only to hold back at the last moment, curtailing desire and refusing mixture. Toggling between withholding and granting contact, Ligon finally addresses the girls. He writes,
Upon my addresses to them, they appeared a little disturbed; and whispered to one another, but had not the Confidence to speak aloud; I had in my hat a piece of silver and silk Ribbon, which I perceived their well shaped eyes, often to dart at; but their modesties would not give them Confidence to ask. […] They drank again, but all this would not give them the confidence to speak, but in mute language, and extreme pretty motions, showed they wanted neither wit nor discretion to make an Answer. But it seemed it was not the fashion there for young Maids to speak to strangers in so public a place
Ligon acknowledges that it might be strange for the reader, as he says, “that a man of my age and gravity should have so much to do with beauty and love. He is overcome by doubt, imagines the two girls, twins, to be “conjoined, and so made, one. Bringing them together is one way to sooth Ligon’s desire to make these two-in-one manageable, yet still, it is “a passion not to be governed.
My excerpt above used ellipses to gloss over an important moment where the sharing of drink is meant to lubricate this interaction and aid in their speech. There are at least two levels of lubrication done in the act of luring these two girls: the gifting of silver and ribbon and the offering of “English spirits. When the material goods do not work to Ligon’s favor, he tries for something that the girls can swallow. They take it, have an aversion to its taste (“finding it too strong for their temper”), and mix it with water but still do not say anything at all Ligon calls it a lack of confidence, a feminist reading might call it something like refusal, Fred Moten might call it resistance of the object, and I might say it is not possible to read A History without getting, as the idiom goes, a sour taste in my mouth
An aftertaste, an ephemeral sensation, indexes a loss that cannot be recovered. Lynda E. Boose writes that the black woman is “unrepresentable” in early modern English writing as she “threatens nothing less than the wholesale negation of white patriarchal authority. Smith has demonstrated how these women’s silence might proffer a kind of refusal to Ligon’s demands and, by extension, the order of things—a kind of speechless mouthing off What does it mean to look for, as Ligon puts it, “mute language” in a textual figure How, in my reading for black women’s presence in this Englishman’s study, did I find some of the black feminist reader, too, in Ligon, as he searches for language? It is the very speechlessness of the women who appear in History that make their presence even pronounced. Although tempting as a mechanism for redress, it would be naïve to suggest that these anonymous women touch power in their encounters with the narrator, and then, with us. Rather, the presence of anonymous women as textual markers or symbols of colonial curiosity and racialized desire speaks to an impossibility of knowledge while at the same time mines our collective desire to know. Even if it feels—and is—impossible, we keep writing, just as this article reads how Ligon addresses (or does not address) these women by way of his tract.
Despite History’s aspiration toward order, practicality, and usefulness, the passages where Ligon desires language from black women seem to fall outside of his methodology. He is unable, among these black women, to satisfy his desire to enumerate the Caribbean sugar complex and the African slave trade. In the St. Jago section, filled with dalliances, the women provoke in Ligon a desire for language, a “wild extravagancy” that is then negotiated as only part of the story because, as Ligon writes, “the main reason of this flying out, is, I had little else to say, for the Island being a place of very little or no Traffic, could not afford much of discourse. The descriptions and engagements with women are framed as a kind of substitution for the more scientific and mathematical attempts at accuracy and the study of the environment. There was just not much happening, Ligon claims, not much to survey, record, and count, and thus the intended natural-historical mode is uprooted.
But so has happened since between now then, and black feminists have produced a wealth of knowledge about Ligon’s racial and gendered encounters in Santiago, relating them more generally to slavery’s dominant modes and discourses. Black feminist scholarship has refused to accept the paucity of records as an emblem for nothingness. In making use of silence, an instrumentalization takes place that requires acknowledgment. This article questions the invalidity of silence as, attempting to contribute to debates about indebtedness and responsibility and allowing us to trace questions around intellectual desire, bringing into focus a clearer picture of why we study the past. Digesting and consuming Ligon’s History, its intimations of black gender pathology,has, for me, produced a bitter aftertaste. Intervening in Ligon’s taste for taste, my argument here has been to sit with the unpleasant aftertaste in Ligon’s text as History circulates and recirculates in scholarly conversation, instead of rushing to cleanse one’s palate. In feeling for what does not seem to fit in a proclaimed “true and exact history” and speculating about what gets away while all the while knowing that what gets away—whether that be anonymous black women, sexually violated girls, unsaid words, a glance askew, whole lives—can never be grasped, we can increasingly understand our relationship to the past as an impossible yet intimate one, threatened by the Adamic impulse to name. By exploring the scenes where Ligon desires and demands language, the motif of the mouth clarifies how aftertaste, which is coherency chaotic and affectively unbearable, is embedded in critical encounters with language, history, and archive.
The presence of these black women figures presents a predicament, maybe even a problem, but at the very least, their presence presents an ethical decision to engage with received terms of representation. While reading and writing, my intellectual attraction has been to the places where black women “appear” in Ligon’s text. Their presence is one thing, and the desire for their words and their names is an entirely other juggernaut of agency, sovereignty, desire, intensity, and sentiment. The extent to which we fetishize access to “black voices” aside, the women I focus on here never speak. And yet without having said a single word, their presence allows me to make an argument from my current standpoint, one where blackness rolls off the tongue as a category for understanding modernity.
History is a jumping-off point for black studies debates about the relationship between the past and the present. Ligon’s focus on gustatory mechanisms and our reading of his writing on black female mouths prompts a consideration of what comes after. Aftertaste is a theoretical articulation that arose for me out of trying to account for a position at the threshold of embodiment under contemporary capitalism, one that might defamiliarize our relationship to the past. Ligon’s attempts at lubrication, his yearning for mouths and vocality from unnamed black women, paralleled this article’s desire to revisit those women, but all we are left with is an aftertaste, a taste without redemption or recovery, yes, but also without nutritious substance for consumption.
bell, hooks. “Eating the other: Desire and Resistance.” In Black Looks: Race and Representation,21–39. Boston: South End Press, 1992. Print.
Best, Stephen. “On Failing to Make the Past Present.” Modern Language Quarterly 73.3 (2012): 453-474. Web. 4 Mar. 2014.
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Hall, Kim F. Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995. Print.
Hartman, Saidiya. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Trade. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007. Print.
—. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe 26 (June 2008): 1-14. Web. 14 June 2014.
James, C.L.R. You Don’t Play With Revolution: The Montreal Lectures. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2009. Print.
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—. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. Print.
Moten, Fred. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Print.
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1Hortense Spillers, Black, White and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 203.
2Regarding subjection and subjectivity in black feminist theory, see Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997) and Christina Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies: Making PostSlavery Subjects (2019). Ungendering is a concept established by Spillers in “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” and taken up in an assortment of fields including black studies and trans studies and their intersections.
3Spillers, Black, White and in Color, 209.
4Richard Ligon, A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, edited and introduced by Karen Ordahl Kupperman (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 2011). A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados will be referred to as History for the remainder of the article.
5Rebekah Mitsein, “Humanism and the Ingenious Machine: Richard Ligon’s True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados,” The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 16, no. 1 (2016): 95.
6See, for example, Peter Rickson, “Representations of Blacks and Blackness in the Renaissance,” Criticism 35, no. 4 (1993): 499-527; Lynda E. Boose, “‘The Getting of a Lawful Race’: Racial Discourse in Early Modern England and the Unpresentable Black Woman,” in Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker, eds., Women, “Race,” and Writing in the Early Modern Period (Routledge: London, 1994): 35-54; Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995); and Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women Laboring Women: Gender and Reproduction in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); and others. For more recent considerations see also Molly Farrell’s “Accounting for Black Women’s Freedom in Early America,” which reviews Morgan, Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021); Jessica Marie Johnson, Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020); Erica L. Ball, Tatiana Seijas, and Terri L. Synder, eds., As If She Were Free: A Collective Biography of Women and Emancipation in the Americas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020); Karen Hook Bell, Running from Bondage: Enslaved Women and Their Remarkable Fight for Freedom in Revolutionary America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).
7Sara E. Johnson, Encyclopédie noire: the Making of Moreau de Saint-Méry's Intellectual World (Williamsburg, Virginia: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2023), 5. Johnson’s introduction, “Notes toward a Communal Biography of Moreau de Saint-Méry,” further explores her unique methodological approach to the archive (1-21).
8Nicole N. Adjoe, Creole Testimonies: Slave Narratives from the British West Indies, 1709-1838 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
9Cassander Smith, Black Africans in the British Imagination: English Narratives of the Early Atlantic World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2016); Hall, The Sweet Taste of Empire: Sugar, Mastery, and Pleasure in the Anglo Caribbean (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025).
10I am thinking specifically of Hartman’s “Venus in Two Acts” and Michel-Rolph Trouillot. See also Stephen Best’s article “On Failing to Make the Past Present” in which he both situates and critiques the “melancholic turn” in African-diasporic cultural criticism. Best, “On Failing to Make the Past Present,” Modern Language Quarterly 73, no. 3 (2012): 456. Hartman, “Venus Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 1-14. Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1995).
12This strategy of literary presence follow’s Toni Morrison’s reading practice and concept of a “Africanist presence” in American literature (she looks predominantly at Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Willa Cather, and Ernest Hemingway): “The contemplation of this black presence is central to any understanding of our national literature and should not be permitted to hover at the margins of the literary imagination. These speculations have led me to wonder whether the major and championed characteristics of our national literature—individualism, masculinity, social engagement versus historical isolation; acute and ambiguous moral problematics; the thematics of innocence coupled with an obsession with figurations of death and hell—are not in fact responses to a dark, abiding, signing Africanist presence.” Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Random House, 1992), 5.
11Ligon, History, 59.
13Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987).
14Hartman, “Venus,” 14.
15Best, “On Failing to Make the Past Present,” 453. He points out that following Morrison, other scholars including Hartman have considered the significance of a concept like afterlife of slavery, a particularly temporal concept emphasizing both black life and the decisive moments of the making of blackness in and of racial slavery.
16M. Nicole Horsley, “Aftertaste,” The Black Scholar 53, no. 3-4 (29-42).
17Horsley, “Aftertaste,” 29.
18Jennifer C. Nash, The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). Horsley, “Aftertaste,” 29.
19The seminar description for “Attending To: Regard and Care” at the American Comparative Literature Association annual meeting (May 30-May 31, 2025), where I presented, specifically references Nash’s recent interventions into black feminist studies and reparation.
20See Simon Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture of Taste (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012).
21Lauren F. Klein, An Archive of Taste: Race and Eating in the Early United States (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), 4.
22Carolyn Korsmeyer, Making Sense of Taste: Food and Philosophy (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1999), 41.
23Kyla Wazana Tompkins, Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 5.
24Ibid., 3.
25Morgan, Laboring Women, 14. Keith Sandiford writes that “nearly one third of the total volume is devoted to the production of valuable source material on the new colony.” Sandiford, Theorizing a Colonial Caribbean-Atlantic Imaginary: Sugar and Obeah (New York: Routledge, 2011), 53.
26Morgan, Laboring Women, 13, 64.
27Ligon, History, 61.
28Morrison’s Playing in the Dark taught me to read this way.
29Kupperman, quoted in Ligon, History, vi.
30Ligon, History, 110.
31Kupperman, quoted in Ligon, History, vi.
32Smith, Black Africans, 115.
33Kupperman, quoted in Ligon, History, 21.
34Ligon, History, 102, 96, 93.
35Ibid., 61.
36Ibid., 54.
37Sandiford, 53.
38Ligon, History, 54, 58, 103.
39Ibid., 21.
40Ibid., 55.
41Ibid.
42Smith, Black Africans in the British Imagination, 113-114.
43Ligon, History, 53.
44Sandiford, Cultural Politics of Sugar, 23.
45Ligon, History, 55.
46Kupperman, quoted in Ligon, History, 6.
47bell hooks, “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance,” in Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 21-39.
48Sarah Lewis-Cappellari, "Racial Tasting: On the Performance of Sugar" Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften 16, no. 1 (2022): 55-68.
49Morgan, Laboring Women, 13.
50Ibid., 13-14.
51Ibid., 15.
52Ligon, History, 128.
53Ibid., 55.
54Ibid.
55Ibid.
56Ibid.
57Tompkins, Racial Indigestion, 9.
58See Morgan’s citation of P.F. Campbell, “Richard Ligon” in Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society 37 (1985): 259, cited in Morgan, Laboring Women. See also Myra Jehlen, “History beside the Fact: What We Learn from A True and Exact History of Barbadoes,” The Politics of Research, edited by Ann Kaplan and George Levine (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1997) 127–42, as well as Smith’s engagement in Black Africans in the British Imagination.
59Ligon, History, 5.
60Ibid., 55.
61Morgan, Laboring Women, 47.
62Keith Sandiford, “Translation, Genres and the Production of Ligon’s True and Exact History of Barbados,” Cultures of Translation (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2008), 70.
63Horsley, “Aftertastes,” 30.
64Ligon, History, 59.
65Ibid., 59.
66Ligon, History, 58.
67Ibid., 59.
69Hartman, “Venus,” 2.
68Ibid., 60.
70C. L. R. James, You Don’t Play With Revolution: The Montreal Lectures (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2009), 33.
71Michel Foucault, “Lives of Infamous Men,” trans. Robert Hurley, in Power: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, edited by James Faubion (New York: The New Press, 1994): 157.
73Arlette Farge, Allutre of the Archive, 42. Foucault, “Lives,” 157-8.
72Brent Hayes Edwards, “The Taste of the Archive,” Callaloo 35, no. 4 (2012): 945.
74Farge, Allure, 122.
75Ibid., 58.
76Ibid.
77Hall, The Sweet Taste of Empire, 135.
78Ibid., 60.
79Ibid., 61.
80Ibid., 60.
81Ibid., 61.
82Ibid., 60.
83Ibid.
84Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).
85Boose, “‘The Getting of a Lawful Race,’” 46.
86See Smith, “Consuming beauty: Richard Ligon, Black African Women, and a Reciprocity of Power,” in Black Africans in the British Imagination, 113-139.
87Ligon, History, 60.
88Ibid., 61.