Mark M. Smith: Shouldn't we think of slavery in terms of smell, taste and other senses?
[Mark M. Smith is a professor of history at the University of South Carolina and editor of Stono: Documenting and Interpreting a Southern Slave Revolt (University of South Carolina Press, 2005). This excerpt is from How Race Is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses, published this month by the University of North Carolina Press.]
... modern discussions of race and racial identity are hostage to the eye. With few exceptions, popular writing as well as many academic works — even the most theoretically sophisticated ones — tend to treat race as an exclusively visual phenomenon, so much so that the panacea for modern ills is, by some lights, a colorblind society. Even though we know that race is a construct, an invented category that defies scientific verification, we still understand that construction as a largely visual enterprise. "Color" is always seen. But the preference for "seeing" race is as much a social construction as "race" itself. This tendency is so pervasive that many historians seem largely unaware that when they search for "perspective" or try to "focus" on the problems of race and racism in U.S. history, they unnecessarily stunt understanding.
There are certain physiological explanations for our ocularcentrism. After all, we are largely visual creatures, our eyes enabling us to accumulate information rapidly and at distances greater than the reach of our other senses unaided. But it is also worth noting that the way we look, the relative emphasis we place on seeing as opposed to, say, hearing, changes over time and place. While we readily appreciate the importance of the ways we look and are looked at, what we see and choose not to see, there are other ways of understanding, ways that are far more visceral than the cool, rationalizing gaze of an eye always searching for Enlightenment perspective and balance (itself a product of the Age of Reason). We seem to have lost sight of other ways to understand beyond vision and, in the process, have quietly endorsed the longstanding Western tendency to denigrate the nonvisual, "lower" senses.
As a growing literature on the anthropology of the senses suggests, there is no compelling reason for historians to fixate on what was seen rather than heard, smelled, tasted, and touched; nor is there any compelling reason to treat the senses as unchanging "natural" endowments. To understand the function of the senses is essentially a historical enterprise.
What if we begin to restore the other senses — hearing, smell, touch, taste — to our understanding of the ideology of race and racial identity in Southern history? Such a restoration does not amount to a wholesale dismissal of seeing race. Plainly, seeing remains — and always has been — extraordinarily important for locating racial identity. But remembering that race was mediated and articulated in ways in addition to seeing helps profile ordinarily hidden dimensions of racial thought and racism — at base, the belief in race — and tells us a good deal about the nature and workings of antebellum Southern slavery, the rise of formal segregation in the late-19th-century South, the meaning of the segregationists' reaction to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, and the nature and significance of African-American behavior in the face of white racism.
Although sensory history has made great strides of late, historians of the senses have been surprisingly quiet on the topic of race. Sustained scholarly treatments of the sensory aspects of race and racism do not exist, and so any initial effort to chart the topic is necessarily speculative and skeletal.
Taking seriously the sensory history of race and racism helps us appreciate just how unthinkingly race is made, how racism is learned, and how the ideologies of race and racism have arisen historically. Limited to just seeing race, we expect people to behave rationally, coolly, in a calculating, stable manner. After all, Enlightenment eyes tend to strive for focus, balance, perspective, considered insight. Without denying the emotional content of particular sights, a wide range of research suggests that some of the other senses in particular historical contexts and circumstances appeal more to the gut than to the mind. Once we begin to understand that people sensed their worlds — heard sounds they did not want to hear (we are without ear lids, after all), had to smell smells they did not want to smell, used the putatively premodern, proximate, nonvisual senses to invent modern racial stereotypes — we begin to understand the historically conditioned, visceral, emotional aspect of racial construction and racism....
Read entire article at Chronicle of Higher Education
... modern discussions of race and racial identity are hostage to the eye. With few exceptions, popular writing as well as many academic works — even the most theoretically sophisticated ones — tend to treat race as an exclusively visual phenomenon, so much so that the panacea for modern ills is, by some lights, a colorblind society. Even though we know that race is a construct, an invented category that defies scientific verification, we still understand that construction as a largely visual enterprise. "Color" is always seen. But the preference for "seeing" race is as much a social construction as "race" itself. This tendency is so pervasive that many historians seem largely unaware that when they search for "perspective" or try to "focus" on the problems of race and racism in U.S. history, they unnecessarily stunt understanding.
There are certain physiological explanations for our ocularcentrism. After all, we are largely visual creatures, our eyes enabling us to accumulate information rapidly and at distances greater than the reach of our other senses unaided. But it is also worth noting that the way we look, the relative emphasis we place on seeing as opposed to, say, hearing, changes over time and place. While we readily appreciate the importance of the ways we look and are looked at, what we see and choose not to see, there are other ways of understanding, ways that are far more visceral than the cool, rationalizing gaze of an eye always searching for Enlightenment perspective and balance (itself a product of the Age of Reason). We seem to have lost sight of other ways to understand beyond vision and, in the process, have quietly endorsed the longstanding Western tendency to denigrate the nonvisual, "lower" senses.
As a growing literature on the anthropology of the senses suggests, there is no compelling reason for historians to fixate on what was seen rather than heard, smelled, tasted, and touched; nor is there any compelling reason to treat the senses as unchanging "natural" endowments. To understand the function of the senses is essentially a historical enterprise.
What if we begin to restore the other senses — hearing, smell, touch, taste — to our understanding of the ideology of race and racial identity in Southern history? Such a restoration does not amount to a wholesale dismissal of seeing race. Plainly, seeing remains — and always has been — extraordinarily important for locating racial identity. But remembering that race was mediated and articulated in ways in addition to seeing helps profile ordinarily hidden dimensions of racial thought and racism — at base, the belief in race — and tells us a good deal about the nature and workings of antebellum Southern slavery, the rise of formal segregation in the late-19th-century South, the meaning of the segregationists' reaction to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, and the nature and significance of African-American behavior in the face of white racism.
Although sensory history has made great strides of late, historians of the senses have been surprisingly quiet on the topic of race. Sustained scholarly treatments of the sensory aspects of race and racism do not exist, and so any initial effort to chart the topic is necessarily speculative and skeletal.
Taking seriously the sensory history of race and racism helps us appreciate just how unthinkingly race is made, how racism is learned, and how the ideologies of race and racism have arisen historically. Limited to just seeing race, we expect people to behave rationally, coolly, in a calculating, stable manner. After all, Enlightenment eyes tend to strive for focus, balance, perspective, considered insight. Without denying the emotional content of particular sights, a wide range of research suggests that some of the other senses in particular historical contexts and circumstances appeal more to the gut than to the mind. Once we begin to understand that people sensed their worlds — heard sounds they did not want to hear (we are without ear lids, after all), had to smell smells they did not want to smell, used the putatively premodern, proximate, nonvisual senses to invent modern racial stereotypes — we begin to understand the historically conditioned, visceral, emotional aspect of racial construction and racism....