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Getting in Touch with Slavery and Freedom
Mark M. Smith
| Any essay on the history of skin and touch is necessarily suggestive simply because, historiographically at least, there is not much to go on. Unsurprisingly, debates among those who study the history of touch—how best to interrogate its history, how best to conduct research on the topic—are virtually nonexistent, and anything resembling a school of thought among the handful of historians who work on the topic is years away.1 Theorists of touch have tried to explain why scholars have generally adopted a hands-off attitude toward the sense of touch. Little has been written on the sense, suggested Constance Classen, originally a religious studies scholar and now a student of cultural history, because scholars have inherited a framework that treats the nonvisual senses as either unreliable or irrelevant to the emergence of modernity. Indeed, earlier thinkers, such as Immanuel Kant, thought that the physical, direct nature of touch made it an unexamined form of knowledge, largely unthinking and intuitive; conversely, he thought sight detached, rational, and a more certain avenue to truth. Much later work, most notably by Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong, suggested that the print revolution, with its emphasis on seeing and knowledge, combined with developments in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment—which supposedly stressed the association between seeing, believing, and perspective—gradually diluted a general belief in the reliability of the other senses so that smell, taste, touch, and, to a lesser extent, hearing, no longer possessed the authenticating, empirical power they had prior to the sixteenth century. Although scholars increasingly question the accuracy of those arguments, they still retain currency in a variety of disciplines.2 |
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While theoretically very interesting, this emphasis on why scholars have remained insensitive to touch has proven distracting because we currently need more and better empirical evidence and less theoretical consideration if we are to think beyond—as well as test—the eye-as-modern framework. Historians of antebellum slavery and abolitionism are well positioned to aid in this endeavor because they have offered intriguing hints on how touch might have functioned in the past. Here, I try to show how meaningful a history of touch and skin—what some scholars have termed "hapticity"—can be to historians interested in antebellum slavery and humanitarianism. Part of this effort entails acknowledging, not how touch operated independently, but how it worked in concert with other senses—what the anthropologist David Howes has termed "intersensoriality." Skin and touch enjoyed a close relationship with vision especially and, in antebellum American discourse about slavery, with sound too. For historians there is a methodological imperative to research tactility in an intersensorial fashion. After all, touch leaves behind no direct evidentiary record. Like smell, it is a fleeting sense that usually enters the historical record in accounts of what people saw and, sometimes, heard. Attending to the multisensory dimension of touch captured in printed evidence has proved most helpful in my own endeavors to understand the history of touch in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century American South.3 |
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My main points are these: first, I want to show, even if in adumbrated fashion, that there is a history of hapticity in America and that the claims made by at least one very important recent study of the history of slavery—Walter Johnson's Soul by Soul—rest on the importance of skin and touch. Second, I use Johnson's text as a pivot for the argument that to understand more fully the emergence of sensibilities regarding slavery, capitalism, and humanitarianism in the antebellum period, we need to pay attention to how contemporaries, north and south, thought about skin and the function of touch. For slaveholders, skin and touch marked status, ownership, commodification, and paternalism; for abolitionists and northern reformers generally, hapticity was a conduit for "feeling" the plight of others and for understanding free labor and individual rights, a conduit for a broadly constituted humanitarian sentiment. Many antebellum northerners claimed that the centrality of touch to southern slaveholding indicated barbarity while their own abandonment of tactility in mediating labor and defining punishment signaled a march toward capitalist, humanitarian modernity. For many antebellum Americans seeing was often believing, but they placed faith in the original English formulation of the phrase: "Seeing is believing, but feeling's the truth."4 |
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