Over on Dead Voles, Carl points us to a discussion on another site called "The Long Eighteenth Century." There the topic being discussed is Simon Gikandi’s Slavery and the Culture of Taste, a book that argues that the eighteenth century's obsession with creating a refined, autonomous, rational self was rooted in its opposite, the crude, submissive, sensuous other, the black African slave, whose labor also provided the wealth on which upper class bourgeois lives were based. Something here for almost everyone.
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