Taste in Richard Ligon’s A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados and the Aftertaste of Reading

This essay argues that Richard Ligon’s A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados (1657) represents taste as an appetitive desire for language, which in turn produces an ambivalent aftertaste for the contemporary reader, a sensorial concept that indexes debates in black studies about the relationship between the past and the present. I argue that Ligon’s demand for language from figures of anonymous black women and girls troubles the black feminist search for redress, repair and recovery by prompting us to sit with entangled forms of desire and disgust as they are indispensable to reading.