If we say that these imperialist texts have an untouchable status as objects of aesthetic value and if we say that literature cultivates the human, inspires and activates ethical living; if those verities are to be held; if we are to take these generalities that describe what literature does as "common"— then the experience of a Black reader like me cannot be anything but the cultivation of a continuous dread. And it must be acknowledged that books such as those texts where scenes of Black life are a stage for white ambition and desire and progress have a profound, stultifying, disorienting effect upon a reader like me. Such accounts in these novels of imperialism only elicit anxiety from readers like me, since as we read, we encounter time in the novel even as we simultaneously are meant to encounter these verities and generalities. A white reader encounters the flow of time, we encounter stasis. We know the duration of slavery, and we know no other life is possible for the Black protagonist/subject, no trajectory to freedom, since the novel's bedrock of landscape, character and desire self-evidently contain us as chattel. The range of emotion in these works is limiting, in that there can only be grief and fear and melancholy, not happiness or love or wonder (except the wonder in horror). In other words, the full range of emotions and repair that a novel might offer and is said to offer are, a priori, foreclosed to a reader like me. And put another way, in these scenes, Black dread is ligatured to white experience— one could even say this is done typographically, since the effect on a reader like me is to notice the formation of the ligatures in each sentence and experience them as a cataclysm. If we say that a Black reader like me ought not to notice that cataclysm, ought not to notice that the text is active, but only acknowledge its assignment through the lens of refined taste, then a reader like me is, to quote Gikandi in his Slavery and the Culture of Taste, "excluded from the domain of modern reason, aesthetic judgement and the culture of taste."