Late Smith and the African's War Dance: Contested Values and Temporalities In Liberal Aesthetics

Abstract:Adam Smith's often overlooked "Of the Nature of that Imitation which Takes Place in What Are Called the Imitative Arts" (1795) reveals his innovative understanding of the overlaps and conflicts in valuation in the emerging discourses of aesthetics, moral philosophy, and political economy. Placing his praise for an African performing a war-dance in the context of eighteenth-century aesthetic theory and representations of Africans (including Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative [1789]) clarifies current debates over the viability of liberal modes of valuation and cultural pluralism in a post-Enlightenment world grappling with the implications of imperialist violence, especially the Transatlantic trade in enslaved people.