Alan Rice

Revealing Histories, Dialogising Collections: Museums and Galleries in North West England Commemorating the Abolition of the Slave Trade

This article discusses exhibitions at the Whitworth Gallery in Manchester and in museums in Lancaster that responded to the commemoration of the bicentenary of the ending of the slave trade in Britain in 1807. It argues, using Bakhtins idea of dialogism, that these institutions used their own collections as the starting point for radical interventions that sought to complicate traditional historical narratives. Both featured the work of contemporary artists including Godfried Donkor, Lubaina Himid and Sue Flowers as key elements in the dialogisation. The article examines the curatorial decisions of the teams involved in the exhibitions and contextualises them for both their historical and contemporary significance.

Tracing slavery and abolition's routes and viewing inside the invisible: The monumental landscape and the African Atlantic

Abstract This essay analyses Lubaina Himids satirical performance piece “What Are Monuments for? Art of the Black Diaspora: Possible Landmarks on the Urban Map” (2009) and juxtaposes it with other memorial pieces. She uses collaged additions to manipulate a glossy guidebook to the world cities of London and Paris to imagine what might have been if the contributions of African diasporan peoples to the capitals had been fully taken on board in the memorial landscape over the last three centuries. Her commentary in the same self-satisfied style of the touristic voyeur populates London and Pariss history in radical new ways. Through image and text, she subverts the imperial national narrative and makes the landscape speak its hidden and diverse history. The citys amnesia and her act of remembrance are counterpoints that create new multiple possibilities in the often monological cityscape. This essay argues that Himid is working against the apolitical notion that a city gives up its meaning without any work on the part of its citizens. The essay shows how her work is related to that of Yinka Shonibare, whose dramatic Nelsons Ship in a Bottle (2010) is the latest work to be introduced on the Trafalgar Square fourth plinth. Like Himids work, Shonibare introduces ideas of the absence of black historical memorialisation in London. The essay discusses Himids work in the light of recent London, Paris and Amsterdam memorials for victims of the slave trade by Michael Visocchi and Lemn Sissay, Fabrice Hyber and Erwin de Vries. These works exemplify how national memorials can be stymied by conservatism and how municipal memorials can be undermined by apathy when there is an absence of community involvement. The essay uses the authors theory of “guerrilla memorialisation” developed from theoretical paradigms around memory and memorials by Pierre Nora, Édouard Glissant, James Young, Stuart Hall and Paul Ricoeur to show that the right kind of political response to amnesia can make art that is effective and dynamic, enabling nation states, cities and localities to create memorial landscapes that are affecting, truly radical and worthy of a transatlantic abolitionist legacy.

Confronting the ghostly legacies of slavery: the politics of black bodies, embodied memories and memorial landscapes

Abstract This introductory essay discusses the legacies of the transatlantic slave trade across three continents. It begins by investigating the historical amnesia about the trade which has only recently and in some geographies been ameliorated, taking as a point of departure observations by Nobel Prize Winners Derek Walcott and Toni Morrison, who were in the vanguard of a movement to memorialise it. The essay moves on to discuss not only traditional memorials, walking trails and artworks, but also ghostly legacies of the trade, including human body parts. Taking the small slave port of Lancaster, England, as a key case study, the essay draws on recent theoretical work on corporeality, spectrality, Holocaust studies, trauma, dark tourism, the Black Atlantic and memory studies to interrogate the meanings of these legacies. The way that black agency contributes to new understandings of the horrors of the slave trade is demonstrated by discussion of William Wells Browns intervention at the Great Exhibition of 1851. Such “guerrilla memorialisation” is shown at work historically and in recent memorialisations of the trade. Moreover, its urgent need in the wake of contemporary issues of forced labour from the African continent is discussed. The final section on memorial landscapes summarises the essays in this volume and discusses the links between the various locales. France, which is trying to come to terms with its history through legislation and the creation of memorials, is discussed as a slave power case study. The new memorial in Nantes is an important municipal response to the legacy of the trade and by its esplanade design is linked back to the city trails in Britain discussed earlier in the essay. Other geographies with slaving pasts such as Wales and Mauritius are introduced, as well as the African Burial Ground in New York. The essay ends where it started, on the West Coast of Africa, with a reflection on heritage tourism and the complex legacies of slavery on the slave castle coast.

Shadows of the slave past: memory, heritage and slavery

‘The Brazilian Imperial army was not a laboratory for citizenship and the expansion of individual rights; rather, it was a pre-bureaucratic agency with manifest incapacities’ (133). In sum, this monograph succeeds admirably in its primary objective: to demonstrate how wars potentially enabled weak nations to make new claims on citizens, free people of colour and slaves. It makes a valuable, long overdue comparison of two foundational conflicts fought by the last independent slaveholding societies in the Americas.

Viewing Inside the Invisible: African Atlantic Art in the 1990s

This article examines work by a variety of African Atlantic artists who investigated slavery and memory in the 1990s. They range from the maverick African-American artists and interventionists, Kara Walker and Fred Wilson, through the Cuban artist, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, to the Black British artist, Lubaina Himid. The article will discuss thematic and compositional synergies around the circum-Atlantic and illustrate the currency of what we might call a diaspora aesthetic amongst many of the best African-descended artists working in the 1990s. The article will argue that engagement with art from different geographical regions in the diaspora is key to a full understanding of African Atlantic art praxis in this period.

Liberating Sojourns? African Americans and Transatlantic Abolition 1845–1865

In October 2009, in front of Leeds City Museum, a black British artist emerged from a packing box, in which he had been placed for nearly three hours, to a crowd of onlookers and local media. Dressed in Victorian garb, he ventriloquised a speech that had been made close to that spot over 150 years before. Simeon Barclay had determined to do the journey from Bradford to Leeds in the box in homage to the escaped slave Henry ‘Box’ Brown. Brown, who had escaped in a packing box from Richmond, Virginia, to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1849, made the performative potential of his escape methodology the centrepiece of an abolitionist ‘roadshow’ he brought across the Atlantic and then toured throughout Britain. In West Yorkshire, he had determined to make the emergence from the box even more spectacular by having himself mailed and conveyed on the train from Bradford to Leeds. In May 1851, ‘he was packed up . . . at Bradford’ and forwarded to Leeds on the 6 p.m. train.

A home for ourselves in the world: Caryl Phillips on slave forts and manillas as African Atlantic sites of memory

Abstract This interview with the black Atlantic writer Caryl Phillips focuses on his non-fiction works and interrogates his ideas on the African diaspora and memorialisation, paying particular attention to such locales as African slave forts and European museums. It also discusses his latest work – a play about the 1940s friendship between Richard Wright and C.L.R. James. The interview discusses the long view of memorialisation on the transatlantic slave trade and interrogates the importance of the bicentenary celebrations of the abolition of the trade in Britain in 2007 to new structures of feeling and curriculum developments that have made the issues raised by the slave trade and its aftermath more central to British historiography. A final section discusses African diaspora communities and their challenge to find a home space amidst the detritus of slavery. Phillips discusses the importance of a slave manilla in his quest for an anchor for memory.

THE COTTON THAT CONNECTS, THE CLOTH THAT BINDS

Abstract This essay uses the full text of a recent interview conducted with the Zanzibar-born, Lancashire resident Lubaina Himid to explore her memorial vision as articulated in her work and her comments on it. It will discuss the varied historical contexts of the work, particularly its black Atlantic resonances. It expands on the discussion on Revenge (1992) in my Radical Narratives of the Black Atlantic (2003) by more fully fleshing out Himids preoccupation with the links between workers and slaves as articulated in her Cotton.com (2003) which used fabric patterns and text to imagine communications between these wage and chattel labourers separated by the Atlantic. It discusses the repercussions of the American Civil War for Manchester workers and Abraham Lincolns gratitude for the support of these workers in the face of the Cotton Famine caused by the embargo on Southern produced cotton. It shows the importance of the 1919 statue of Lincoln and its inscriptions for articulating this solidarity and the way that Himid uses it as inspiration for her contemporary work on Manchester and the memory of slavery and abolition.

Remembering Iconic, Marginalised and Forgotten Presences: Local, National and Transnational Memorial Sites in the Black Atlantic

This essay looks at sites of public and private memory in Britain, the Caribbean and America and discusses the cultural politics of these locations. It starts with a discussion of memorialisation around key public and private sites in America, specifically public buildings in Washington DC and the birthplace of Frederick Douglass at the Wye Plantation in Maryland before moving to a discussion of public and private memorialisation around Sambos Grave at Sunderland Point near Lancaster. The literary responses to what Pierre Nora has called “sites of memory” are discussed through the black British poet Dorothea Smartts poetic response to Sambos Grave and the Bajan poet EK Brathwaites prose description of labour and landscape in his description of a woman sweeping her yard. Both are used to show the importance of the local in nuancing Paul Gilroys discussion of the black Atlantic. The final section discusses public memorialisation in Europe through the examples of Amsterdam and Lancaster. Both cities have recently raised memorials to victims of the slave trade and the essay discusses the meaning of such willed acts of memorialisation in the context of previously unpublished remarks by the black British artist Lubaina Himid.