This article proposes an interpretation of the term "racial enclosure," and examines its conceptual relevance for the field of African American literature and for Black Studies, more broadly. Enclosure's definitions and applications proliferate-it is at once a spatial and geographic form, a historical and legal process, and an epistemic system of individuation and taxonomy. I ask how we might work with a historically grounded concept of enclosure that does not reduce it to, nor dismiss entirely, its abstract and symbolic applications. I suggest that it is precisely the relationship between its historical and material valences and its abstract and conceptual valences, that makes "racial enclosure" an urgent formulation for scholars of black life, history, and culture.
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.
