About the Book
This book investigates memorials and monuments to slavery throughout the African diaspora, but with an emphasis on Europe. It analyses not only the increasing number of physical monuments, but also the practice of remembering (and forgetting) in museums and plantation houses, and in contemporary cultural forms – visual arts, literature, music and film. A series of case studies, ranging from the 18th to the 21st century, from Senegal and Montserrat to Manchester and Paris, explore issues such as the Lancashire cotton famine, the debates around the first quayside memorial to the victims of the slave trade in Britain in Lancaster, black soldiers in World War II and the 2007 commemorations of abolition in regional museums. The book also looks at ‘guerrilla memorialisation’, its refusal to consider amnesia as an option, and the artistic interventions it has provoked.
The study promotes a wide Black Atlantic perspective, while the case studies emphasise a decidedly local approach to memorialisation. Using theoretical work on memory and memorialisation, the book expands on these ideas to include the work of contemporary thinkers and writers on the Black Atlantic, such as Toni Morrison, Jackie Kay and Caryl Phillips. Comparisons are made with monuments to the holocaust and critical writings on the way it has been memorialised.
The book interrogates a range of complex issues, and makes a case for the continuing importance of the legacy of slavery, whilst looking at what kind of monuments and memorials are appropriate and effective.
Table of Contents:
List of illustrations Acknowledgements 1. Tracing Slavery's Routes and Viewing Inside the Invisible: The Monumental Landscape and the African Atlantic 2. Discovering Traces of Slavery in a City Fraught with Amnesia: Creating Memorials and Building New Identities in Lancaster 3. Revealing Histories, Dialogising Collections and Promoting Guerrilla Memorialisation: Museums and Galleries in North-West England Commemorating the Abolition of the Slave Trade 4. The Cotton that Connects, the Cloth that Binds: Memorialising Manchester's Civil War from Abe's Statue to Lubaina Himid's Cotton.Com 5. 'Black Music across the Ocean Waves': Toni Morrison, Jackie Kay and Jazz as African Atlantic Memorial 6. 'Fighting Nazism, Jim Crow and Colonialism too': Creating Radical Memorials in Honour of African Atlantic Struggles in the War against Fascism 7. Accounting for the Bodies and Revealing Ghostly Presences: Utopian and Dystopian Imaginations of the African Atlantic in the work of Ellen Gallagher, Godfried Donkor and Lubaina Himid Bibliography
About the Author :
Alan Rice is Professor in English and American Studies and Co-Director of the Institute for Black Atlantic Research, University of Central Lancashire.
Review :
Written with passion and commitment, Rice's breadth of learning, enthusiastic and engaged scholarship, as well as commitment to freedom and equality, has resulted in a book that fills the reader with conflicting emotions...anger, sadness and perhaps above all amazement...both that the cultures grown out of the slave experience are so vibrant, but at the same time that racism and exploitation still flourish. Alan Rice's engrossing study of the legacy of chattel slavery and the slave trade in the African Atlantic analyzes literary works, visual art, music, film, and stone monuments in order to document and champion "guerrilla memorialisation" and its power to disrupt the amnesia and repression often perpetrated by official history. This interdisciplinary project, with its wide range of reference to the enormous and growing literature on the memory of collective trauma, is an insightful and often moving critical response to the diaspora-wide search for memorials "that conserve memory without being conservative." What Rice manages to do is join the dots between yesterday and today to show how the impact of the genocide has seeped into contemporary culture by the tools, skills and crafts of the artistic world. He takes the reader on a journey through music and the visual arts to remind the reader that we, the people of the African continent and Diaspora are strong survivors not merely victims-decedents of the blood of history. Through a set of broad, diverse and provocative investigations Alan Rice seeks to "dialogise" the history of Atlantic slavery with other forms of remembrance and accounting, especially biography, folklore, memorials and artistic representations. Rice is clearly opposed to the essentialising of the experiences of Atlantic slavery for the purpose of producing narrowly-nationalistic narratives, whether that implies the triumphal remembering of British abolitionism or the commodification of the middle passage by African American entrepreneurs. Instead, Rice is keen to recover the circum-Atlantic weave of these experiences and, through this, to promote an alter-remembering of Atlantic slavery in the various public spheres of the circum-Atlantic world. This "guerilla memorialisation" works to rewrite the stories of slavery from the bottom up, to reflect a "more accurate and human face" of the enslaved, and above all to rescue the experiences of slavery from their antiquarian documentation so as to testify to the way the legacies of slavery resonate affectively and effectively in the contemporary world. Rice embarks upon a dazzling set of engagements with various forms of guerrilla memorialisation. In Lancaster, where civic memorials focus on the merchant class of the slaving era, Rice draws attention to the various prose and poetries that re-animate Sambo, the unknown slave who occupies a lone grave in the town. Seeking to commemorate the enslaved rather than the merchants, Rice documents the activities of the Slave Trade Arts Memorial Project. Rice then explores the subversion of permanent collections in various museums and galleries of the north west of the UK. He investigates the work of various artists who recontextualise the official representations of the past by inserting links between the objects of curators and the Atlantic world of slavery. Deepening this focus on the north west and its connected history to New World slavery, Rice examines artworks that weave together cotton and cloth to expose the relatively linked fortunes of freed (European) and coerced (African) labour. Often documented in opposition to each other, Rice shows how artwork can retrieve the radical past of Manchester labourers regarding their support for abolition and Lincoln's North during the US civil war. Rice then moves to other locales and, in a key chapter, focuses upon the circum-Atlantic resonance of Jazz as both trope and subject. Engaging primarily with Toni Morrison, Rice explicates the Jazz aesthetic as a form of guerrilla memorialisation to the extent that the practice of improvisation constantly renews the dialogue of the slave past with the post-emancipation present. By exploring the work of Jackie Kay, Rice also reveals how Jazz acts kinetically to connect the experiences of the African Diaspora in less examined locales such as Scotland. However, Rice injects a note of caution with regards to the dangers of African-American voices overriding the experiences of others in the Diaspora, and I shall return to this point presently. Subsequently, Rice turns to the contribution of African Diaspora troops to the allied struggle in World War Two and charges the official memorialisation with separating this struggle from those against segregationist policies of the allied powers. Rice mobilizes contemporaneous poetry and contemporary novels to retrieve the struggle against Jim Crow segregation of African-American troops in the UK so as to expose the way in which Black troops effectively fought a "double war" for democracy at home and abroad. Finally, Rice turns to artistic explorations of the African Diaspora that, by situating their representations within the water of the Atlantic itself, refuse to be both nationally bound or categorically separated from African shores. On this note, I would like to push Rice to explore further the importance of African shores for guerrilla memorialization. Even though he is aware of the dangers in doing so, Rice focuses primarily upon the African American experience and the way in which it resonates through the Atlantic world. By doing so, he possibly over-represents the African Diasporic experience through the tropes common to cultural studies of African-American modernity and dominant in the US-centred Western academy. Consistently, Rice primarily evokes images of hybridity and flux. It is not that these evocations do not capture some fundamentals of the African Diasporic experience - they do. Yet there are others. What if Rice had incorporated a chapter that focused solely upon Caribbean tropes, especially those arising not from Jazz but from Reggae and in particular the Rastafarian imaginary? For in this trope the emphasis slides more towards African roots than it does towards American hybridity. Must the guerrilla memorialisation of Atlantic slavery necessarily affirm the tropes of Western modernity, or can it also affirm something perhaps more radically subversive of the Western public sphere: un-modern tropes that grasp African roots for the redemption of humanity? Nevertheless, Rice's book is of immense value, both in terms of its content and method. In fact, Rice's argument can be read as an implicit critique of political economy. As historians of Atlantic slavery have increasingly argued, the representation of those made invisible and silent in official records requires - not so much a categorical turn away from but - a creative complementing of empirics with other "sources" be they oral histories, folklore, art forms, spiritual expressions, or poetry and prose. And while much has been written and contested regarding the economic significance of New World slavery to European industrialization, it remains the case that the ledgers of slave traders and insurance companies do not directly reveal the fundamental experiences and actions of the enslaved, nor the way in which the resonances of these experiences effectively triangulate the beating heart of the modern world market. Rice's book focuses upon the UK and, in the main, the USA; but it invites an in-depth engagement by scholars of African political economy with the method and substance of "guerrilla memorialisation". Interdisciplinary work is often called for but rarely achieved. Alan Rice's Creating Memorials, Building Identities is a striking example of how it is best done. With this new book, British "heritage" is considerably enriched and diversified. Rice's book is of immense value, both in terms of its content and method. One of the most impressive aspects of the book is the rare balance it achieves between the author's personal rage at the subject he confronts, and the need for its analytical, intellectual dissection based upon scrupulous historical research. It is itself a testament to the author's own political commitment, and thus again aligns itself with a distinguished tradition of radical British history. Well written, in an accessible style on an important topic that deserves wider readership than an academic audience. Paul Gilroy's now classic The Black Atlantic (1993) was as much a call for a fresh cultural focus as it was an analysis of a past transnational experience. Alan Rice's fascinating-and often moving-- new book, Creating Memorials, Building Identities, is the ideal complement to Gilroy's work. In seven chapters packed with historical detail and striking generalizations, Rice shows, first of all, how Britain in general and northeastern England(Manchester and Lancaster) in particular has been part of a black Atlantic culture. Whether it is analyzing new memorials to Britons of African descent or exploring the history of the grave near Lancaster of an obscure black man, Rice's engagement with what he calls "guerrilla memorialization" reminds us that he is not just an accomplished scholar of the black Atlantic but also an activist who has been instrumental in raising money to finance some of these memorials. A particular strength of Rice's study is the way his chapters move around and across the "circum-Atlantic" from London and Bristol to Scotland, from the Caribbean to the US South, from New York to Paris and Amsterdam. His historical reach shows an analogous ability to roam around in time-from the economic and human costs of the slave trade and slavery down to black cultural expression in the contemporary black Atlantic world. In doing this, he skilfully tacks back and forth between the transnational and the local; turns his critical eye to everything from literary texts to sea shanties, and reads paintings and sculptures in interesting ways. Interdisciplinary work is often called for but rarely achieved. Alan Rice's Creating Memorials, Building Identities is a striking example of how it is best done. With this new book, British "heritage" is considerably enriched and diversified. Alan Rice's new book on the politics of memory in the Black Atlantic is written with passion and commitment. He examines how writers, curators, musicians and artists attempt to engage us in dialogue with the unrepresentable and the invisible histories of Black slaves and their descendants, and the experiences which have resulted in attempts to commemorate and articulate these lost lives as well as determined efforts to keep these ghosts under lock and key. Focusing on strategies such as "guerrilla memorialization", Alan Rice demonstrates in practice how monuments (whether of stone, words or musical notes) can only convey so much, and the task of the historian is to "stimulate a rethinking of the past". However Rice is not concerned just with the past as something to be excavated and housed in a museum. He also desires to link slavery and its violences in the past to the deaths and exploitation of contemporary enslaved workers, victims of people-trafficking and the often impoverished existences of theoretically "free", but in practice commodified, migrant workers. The holding pens of slavery are echoed in the detention centres for so-called "illegal" immigrants and asylum seekers, many of whom are themselves from Africa. Rice's breadth of learning, enthusiastic engaged scholarship, and commitment to freedom and equality, has resulted in a book that fills the reader with conflicting emotions...anger, sadness and perhaps above all amazement...both that the cultures grown out of the slave experience are so vibrant, but at the same time that racism and exploitation still flourish. The word expert is often (too) liberally banded about; it becomes particularly irksome when the "expert" is not of the group under research. Alan Rice wears this mantle comfortably and deservedly so as an English man determined to bring the truth of the horrors of the slave trade to our generation. What Rice manages to do is join the dots between, yesterday and today to show how the impact of the genocide has seeped into contemporary culture by the tools, skills and crafts of the artistic world. He takes the reader on a journey through music and the visual arts to remind the reader that we, the people of the African continent and Diaspora are strong survivors not merely victims-decedents of the blood of history. Alan Rice's latest book builds on strands of thinking and scholarship that characterised his 2003 book Radical Narratives of the Black Atlantic. The earlier work drew on personal stories. In Radical Narratives the coincidence of Rice's grandfather working on the same estate where an Edwardian African, Pompey, had been employed but forgotten became a starting point for exploring the importance of remembering traces of the Black Atlantic. In Creating Memorials the relationship between personal and broader public histories is also strong. Rice features in the narrative not only, of course, as the author of the work but as a protagonist in developing public memorials including 'Captured Africans' in Lancaster and the Trade and Empire: Remembering Slavery exhibition in Manchester. This multi-faceted approach to history including the written word of the academic and the public protagonist in the memorial landscape underpins the book. History, as Rice realises, is not about a past that is finished, settled or gone but a process by which the past is brought into the present. This book is a work that recognises and values the materials existing outside the archive. It is also a work that realises that the past is never settled and that the public historian has a role in intervening to ensure that forgotten voices are heard. While some have chosen to see public history as simply the presentation of 'the' past to 'the' public this is not Rice's argument. By recognising the nature of memory and different forms of presentation a distinctive historical practice can be developed. Significantly, as Rice demonstrates in his own practice and analysis, the engagement in different ways with people other than professional historians including artists, teachers and activists as creators of meaning will influence significantly the type of history being developed. Rice skilfully analyses the ways in which the work of artists such as Lubaina Himid or the black heritage campaigner Ken Martindale have been key in creating awareness of the impact of the slave trade on British capitalism. Rice analyses at some length the imaginative memorial at Fen Court in the City of London, 'The Gilt of Cain'. The work by Lemn Sissay and Michael Visocchi is both creative and thought-provoking. As he notes, it was the first memorial for the victims of the slave trade erected by the City of London Corporation. As Madge Dresser has argued, the way in which slavers were formerly memorialised 'contributed to a culture of silence around the City's collusion with slavery in all its cruelty'. Yet the memorial that juxtaposes the language of city traders with both figurative sugar cane and the platform used at a slave auction - or possibly a pulpit in which abolition was preached - is not in the Guildhall or outside a financial institution. While it is erected in the former graveyard of the church now joined to the parish in which John Newton, former slaver and then abolitionist, worked for many years and this specific positioning is drawn out on the accompanying plaque nevertheless, as Rice argues, it is 'paradoxical'. While the memorial is site specific and 'shows the paradox of trying to express' both London's 'tortured involvement in slavery and the triumph of the abolitionists' in 'slippery verbal and visual languages whose ambivalences never enable the viewer/reader to come to a "closed position"'(p.23). Thus this is a different project to the satirical commentary of Himid in the form of an imaginary guidebook described by Rice as summoning ' the ghosts of black presence that guidebooks elide, bearing witness to how London and other cities might look, if only we paid attention to these forgotten figures' (p.17). For Rice, such works are characterised as 'guerrilla memorialisation' (p.74) opening up debate instead of than closing it 'by seemingly authoritative and all-encompassing interpretations' (p.69). Of particular interest is his discussion of his curatorial work. Here he describes the debates that took place around the attempt to challenge the 'morbidity of heritage' (p.45) by creating an exhibition that explicitly included the very debate the curators had had about the objects they should display. The discussion of this process was particularly illuminating over the inclusion of 4 doll-like models of slaves created by the Samuel family to apparently mark the freeing of their slaves. While the figures were individualised and dressed imaginatively they were also crude caricatured images. There was discussion whether the cost of conserving such models was even justified and realised that 'the very unveiling of such troubling objects could prove problematic for many visitors'(p.69). Eventually the objects were displayed alongside labels showing the discussion amongst the co-curators which revealed that even they did not agree on a reading of the dolls. In addition visitors were invited to add their comments which, as the book shows, criticised the curators' critical stance by arguing that they were not intended to be racist (p.69). Such an exchange is rare in museum displays when curators are fearful of being seen to permit potentially racist comments. However this example demonstrates very well the value of engaging with ideas rather than closing down debate. In similar vein Rice analyses the way in which a slaving past is brought explicitly into a landscape of remembrance in Lancaster, the fourth largest slave port in Britain. Rice describes the work of STAMP (Slave Trade Arts Memorial Project) that involved community activists, creative workers, councillors and academics. The project obtained funding to engage with schools and community groups and to create a memorial 'that would adequately represent generations to come as well as the past and the present: a memorial that converses memory without being conservative' (p.43). The result was 'Captured Africans' by Kevin Dalton- Johnson erected on Lancaster's quay. While noting the local opposition - as well as support - Rice explains the committee's wish to create a 'different engagement with the past than would normally happen in the cityscape' (p.48). Rice tells us that he became the project's academic advisor (p.44) but we are certainly not being presented with a project in which 'the experts' told the 'people' the facts of a moment of history and corrected any perceived misunderstandings. Rather STAMP was an exemplary public history project in which, as Michael Frisch has described it, there was ' a broadly distributed authority for making new sense of the past in the present'. The project achieved new ways of thinking about the past and bringing it into the present not by the scholarship of an individual academic but by all those involved in the project 'reaching in to discover the humanity they share'. Rice's role within the project inevitably drew on his scholarship but this cannot be separated from his political commitment to facilitating broad understandings of the past, and his belief that there are many pasts that should be remembered. The radical representation of the past in the present challenges the 'limitations of the historical record or the visual archive'(p.189). As Rice illustrates, particular African Atlantic artists 'work with and against the grain of written and other archival records to create new work that challenges our visual map of slavery admits consequences' (p.189). Yet this book does not end in a celebratory tone. 'Guerrilla memorialisation' has its limitations. Although the Victoria and Albert museum commissioned an exhibition 'Uncomfortable Truths' by Himid during 2007 the figures created on accounting paper that commented on 'the tainted nature of some objects displayed there' were deemed unsuitable for the gallery space. Rice comments, 'It is, of course, a supreme irony that in the very year the ending of the slave trade was celebrated in the UK, a black artist was forced to compromise her vision in order to be able to show her work at all' (p. 215). The chapters on music and literature, interesting though they were, were less engaging, at least for this reader, than those that emphasised praxis. The book is well produced with stunning illustrations and published by Liverpool University Press which is, in some ways, a pity. Clearly the book will thus receive the sort of status needed in these difficult times for those working in higher education. It is, however, well written in an accessible style on an important topic that deserves wider readership than an academic audience. Black remembrance in the arts by the subjects of the Black Atlantic (1993) as configured by Paul Gilroy grew out of an absence. In an epoch when blacks played their most conspicuous role in the prosperity of old and new worlds, the national narratives of both, seemed, ironically, to elide the contributions of blacks. When whites imagined blacks in their paintings and novels, black figures served to enhance the humanity of whites and circumscribe that of blacks. An unintended consequence of this turned out to be a dual contradictory one: not only were blacks made to feel sidelined by these configurations, their partial presences in these white constructs served to politicize them about the true extent of the neglect of their role in recent history. In Playing in the Dark (1993), Toni Morrison aptly named this phenomenon the 'absent presence' of black people in such white-imagined worlds. Morrison's critique excoriates the white American literary landscape in that her articulation of this condition exposes an illiteracy of the white imagination when faced with conjuring a fully-realized American world, that is, one with all peoples under one watchful God (another presence in the American psyche not quite excised from public life). Slave narratives written by contemporary black and white writers took up the public role of commemorating black lives. These fictions made intuitive journeys back in time in order to recover the lost stories of ancestors. As the novels spoke the lost gained a presence articulated out of their absence in what amounted to marvelous, inclusive acts of the imagination, acts of conjuring, a summoning of likely events intuited from the slightest of instances, such as, an anecdote, a bill of sale, a grave for an African without a name. Readers found that these fictions included an additional moral imperative to the usual contract between text, reader, author and the world. The morality resided in a kind of pressure exerted by the text on the reader to reconstruct the story in terms of a felt intelligence, a kind of intuitive remaking of the history that lacked a black perspective. But for all its quality as a living thing, a book is not a public monument. We know one when we see one. You can stop and stare at them and walk around some of them, and touch others, and frequently, they are open to the seasons in prized public spaces. They mean something in this time and in this space to the living, though they speak from the past on behalf of the dead and aspire towards making concrete links with the present. Toni Morrison, the doyen of feeling thinkers about the black historical body, defined the abject absence of a black experience in America's public commemorations of its history in these terms, There is no place you or I can go, to think about, or not think about, to summon the presences of or recollect the absences of slaves; nothing that reminds us of the ones who made the journey and of those who did not make it. There is no suitable memorial or plaque or wreath or wall or park or skyscraper lobby. There's no 300-foot tower. There's no small bench by the road. There is not even a tree scored, an initial I can visit, or you can visit in Charleston or Savannah or New York or Providence, or better still on the banks of the Mississippi. (A Bench by the Road, 1989) Her riff cuts to a psychic need that reveals the American present for what it is: a compact with amnesia. The nation, as a result of this neglect, once again resembles a plantation, and looks twice removed from its creed. Telling the stories about slaves from the viewpoint of the enslaved helped to clarify the need. The monuments stage of this nation-narrative may be seen as the final chapter (assuming Queen Mother's Moore slavery reparations movement won't find traction) of full participation by blacks in the grand nation-making narratives. Alan Rice took years of careful thought to chart his particular course through this rough and bruising terrain of what the existing monuments mean and for whom, and where to locate the ones that are nowhere to be seen. His tone is celebratory for those who embody this metaphoric ideal (artists, Lubaina Himid, Ellen Gallagher and Godfried Donkor) and scathing for those who avowedly do not (African American tourists of Forts on the African Gold Coast, and American tourism of Southern plantations). Rice says about the Wye plantation, a Great House near Baltimore on Maryland's eastern shore, that "by the twenty-first century all that is left are the big houses themselves, which have become eye candy for the tourists who flock to them to indulge in Gone With the Wind myths of an honorable south destroyed by the ravages of the American Civil War." (p.10) In fact, Rice provides one reason why a group with a partial view might visit these places. For the blacks who go there other motives abound, including a view of these Great Houses as contemplative sites, as repositories of presences elided in the popular narratives about the place since blacks visualize the labor which underscores the grandeur of these places. In other words historical sites have ambivalent resonances and function in contradictory ways for the various groups that comprise the nation. Rice usefully names cities around the US, such as Baltimore, in Maryland, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where a monument to its slave past would be the decent thing to do. But in the contest between groups for the grandest birth-of-the-nation narrative there is little decency. For the most part competing narratives swirl around in the academy and in the legislative wings of local and central government in search of a constituency. A moral imperative, powers a black aesthetic invested in correcting the collective American illusion that America owes its grand past to white ingenuity and black servitude. But the dollar and political opportunism drives the initiatives. In a black story that is more than a back story, slave labor earns its rightful place as part and parcel of constructs about American glory. Even so the resistance to enshrining a black slave past as a permanent fixture on an American landscape cannot be characterized in neat binary terms, that is, black desire for such monuments meets white indifference, some of it originates, somewhat surprisingly, from some blacks. The argument runs something like this: blacks do not wish to be portrayed in demeaning ways from a past they had no control over. Rather than confront them with permanent fixtures of their shame, the resources should go into finding positive images from the past and present of black achievement as well as invested in areas where blacks need it, in the inner cities and in education, in alleviating the march of poor black men from youth detention centers to adult incarceration, in health care, and the list goes on. The most energetic objectors to this particular interpretation of metaphors from the past in the present consistently paint a de-historicized picture of blackness in America as a way to circumvent the pitfalls of victim-narratives. A feisty attitude coupled with present-tense narratives about money, gender, youth and race abound in music, murals and popular fiction. It is not simply a case of young minds resisting history lessons but of different imaginative approaches to a demanding American landscape that is, simultaneously, ruled by a history of black oppression, and founded on principles of economic opportunity for all. Among his many telling examples of historical memory meets artistic imagination, Alan Rice examines the 2008 City of London memorial to slavery, The Gilt of Cain, by the Scottish sculptor, Michael Visocchi, and the black British poet, Lemn Sissay. The installation-cum-sculptor features seventeen totem poles of varying heights situated in front of a big concrete block with three stone steps leading to a raised platform. The totems resemble bamboo. The block and steps suggest a pulpit or stage set for a sermon or auction, I suppose, and the artist is quoted by Rice this way, "the idea was that I could somehow use these sugar cane shapes so that they could be read as figures, anthropomorphic forms." (p.18) As Rice points out, the number seventeen denotes the amount of years abolitionists took to convince the British parliament to abolish the trade. There is a populated look to the exhibit because of those granite columns but the gray color and hard texture makes the whole scene austere and severe. Lemn Sissay's poem faces the audience of seventeen, inscribed on the diamond-shaped block his poem makes a version of the spoken word addressed to the seventeen on their behalf (since 'they' embody silence) and equally intended for a presumed viewing public in a gallery of open space that surrounds the open air exhibit. Having seen the site, I am interested in this collaboration between a poet and sculptor (the dialogue between them, if you will) around a single idea informed by history for several reasons. First, it demands an historical awareness of both artistic imaginations. Second, it is the result of a coalition of two mediums, one plastic and the other scribal. Third, this exhibit and others like it, form the premise for Alan Rice's book which makes us wonder about the adequacy of representations of slavery's history as objects for public consumption. Fourth, the exhibit promotes the notion of public art as proper redress for a sizable group's protracted neglect. Therefore it is worth saying something about the poem. As a speech act, Sissay's poem is public address; as installation it asks that the viewer doubled as reader, contemplate its manifold meanings. The poem's rhetoric aims to vilify, illuminate, instruct and provoke in a limited field where implication and insinuation govern articulacy in a restricted space. The poem's four octaves in neat rhyming couplets and rough iambic pentameter thrust package thought much like the commodification of Africans as slaves and their production of sugar that are the poem's twin subjects. Thrown overboard into the exchange to drown In distressed brokers' disconsolate frown. In accounting liquidity is a mounting morbidity But raising the arms with such rigid rapidity... Oh, the reaping, the raping rapacious fluidity, The violence, the vicious and vexed volatility. (from The Gilt of Cain, p38, Listener, 2008, Cannongate, UK) The rampant assonance and alliteration throttle poetry's usual open field delicately scored by non-intrusive thought subordinated to the greater mission of an emotional impact. In the quote commerce is equated with the cruelty of the treatment of slaves at sea. Here the 'exchange' is the sea and that sea figures in Turner's famous painting among other resonances. The word-sounds resemble blows or a willful, repetitive wounding. Money-making and savagery belie the decorous pretence of civility of those who prosper from slave labor. The lines work by declaring their fracture into two or three independent clauses that are interchangeable, especially when pressed in concrete and liable to be read in part, in passing, and out of sequence. As sounds the lines wish to lend themselves to easy memorizing as much as they seek to memorialize. Their high volume rendition reminds us of their identification with orature so that they wish to break free of their stone confines and take to the air in reenactments of liberty. The book contains many pleasing color reproductions of works discussed in satisfying depth by Rice. His experience as a curator adds authenticity to his story of just how much hard work goes into shepherding a memorial project from idea to committee to spatial fact. Not all of it is without reward or humor. He recounts the famous story of Henry 'Box' Brown, a Virginia slave who posted himself in a cramped box from Richmond to Philadelphia in 1849. His journey of 350 miles took twenty-seven hours and he emerged a free man with his story serving as a ready-made metaphor for chattel slavery's long and arduous road (not without its need for ingenuity) towards liberation. Between 2001 and 2006 I worked as Curator of Fine Art at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, that complex (in the fullest sense of the term) of extraordinarily significant memorial sites and buildings at the heart of British maritime-imperial identity; which has, at its centre, the oldest surviving component of this extensive heritage site, one of the most iconic monuments to, and manifestations of, the abstract ideals of beauty in the western classical tradition: the near-perfect geometries and pure white facades of Inigo Jones's Queen's House. With 2007 looming, the Museum was acutely conscious of its historical inattention to - indeed, its ideological avoidance and forgetting, or in Joseph Roach's felicitous term, its 'surrogation' of - the centrality of the slave trade to British maritime history. It entered a rapid spin over the most appropriate way to commemorate the bicentenary of the Act of Abolition. I had my own private thoughts on this issue, to which I shall return later, but my initial instinct was that the Museum should be provocative, outspoken and risk-taking, rather than simply politically correct, which I sensed (correctly, as it turned out) would be the Museum's automatic reflex, and would be perceived at best as lacking impact, and at worst as bland establishment tokenism: the national museum of maritime culture seen to be doing its duty but lacking the courage to put its head above the parapet and engage fully with the powerfully raw, conflictual issues surrounding the place of slavery and the slave trade in the cultural memory of the 21st-century British Atlantic world. It is perhaps indicative of that perceived tokenism that the Museum's careful and sensitive display of its Atlantic Worlds gallery - which presented a new permanent historical exhibition on the Atlantic Ocean in which the slave trade was (is) centrally placed - receives barely a glance in Alan Rice's important new book devoted to (mainly British) memorialization of black Atlantic heritage. However, it is also reflective of the preoccupations of Rice's book, focussed substantially as it is on a local rather than a national politics of memory, as a deliberate move towards a strategy of what he terms 'guerilla memorialization'. This seeks actively and politically to challenge and subvert the grand narratives of 'official' national and imperial histories with their gaping lacunae, by offering a radical counter-history rooted in the locally contingent, the unwritten record (oral, musical and visual traditions are to the fore in his discussion), and the conventionally marginalized. So the setting for the book's early chapters is overwhelmingly non-metropolitan, largely the north-west of England, between Liverpool and Lancaster, Rice's own territory (and it is worth noting that it is appropriately and commendably published by Liverpool University Press). It is also a highly personal (though not subjective) account: Rice is very sensitive to his own positionality as a scholar and author and exploits this to effect. One of the most impressive aspects of the book is the rare balance it achieves between the author's personal rage at the subject he confronts, and the need for its analytical, intellectual dissection based upon scrupulous historical research. It is itself a testament to the author's own political commitment, and thus again aligns itself with a distinguished tradition of radical British history. This localized focus then shifts and expands into a transnational, diasporic perspective through discussions of jazz as black Atlantic memorial, the memorialization of black servicemen in World War II, and three contemporary African Atlantic artists' engagement with the problem of representing the 'invisibility' of the slave trade. Even here, however, the anchor in British culture is not lost, since these separate case studies treat, respectively, of the formal structures of jazz music as a key influence on the writing of Toni Morrison and the black Scots novelist, Jackie Kay; the Memorial Gates erected in London in honour of the black veterans of the two world wars; and with the Cape Verdean-Irish-American artist Ellen Gallagher and her British-based counterparts Godfried Donkor and Lubaina Himid. Although comprising a series of case studies, therefore, which sometimes do not sit easily with each other (the discussion of jazz in particular deviates from the preceding discussions of visual culture and museology), the structure of the book enables connections to be made between the local and the transnational, above all through the linking figure of Lubaina Himid. Indeed, the book might almost have been a monograph on Himid's work, as it features substantially in five out of the seven chapters. Not that that would be a bad thing: Himid's important and challenging art, in confronting the ideologies and politics of representation and, as it were, the representation of (non-)representation, deserves much greater recognition. Yet, in dealing with memorialization and the African Atlantic in contemporary visual culture, Rice's spotlighting of Himid also draws attention to some surprising absences in his discussion: where, for example, are Yinka Shonibare, Chris Ofili or Keith Piper, whose work deals explicitly with these and related issues? Arguably, such artists have already received considerable critical attention, while others, whose work is of equal merit, have been sidelined and need scholarly study to give a fuller, more accurate sense of the scope of contemporary British art; or else, the book's focus on the 'politics of memory in the black Atlantic' makes any comparisons or consideration of the wider ambit of African Atlantic art secondary to its over-riding concerns. All of which is understandable, yet it would have been useful to compare Himid's engagement with the African Atlantic and the erasure of memory with that of, say, Shonibare, not least because their work was shown together (along with that of Piper's and others') at the 2007 Uncomfortable Truths exhibition at the V&A commemorating the bicentenary of the Act of Abolition, which is discussed briefly in the final pages of the book. As Rice observes, Himid's deeply challenging and almost overwhelming installation Naming the Money, consisting of 100 life-size cut-out figures of vivid, dancing Africans/slave-servants, was shown in the V&A display in such diluted form that the figures perversely and unintentionally recalled the role of black servants in an eighteenth-century conversation-piece: marginal and tamed. The same was true of the other works in the display, perhaps with the exception of Shonibare's: intended to be a provocative intervention and destabilization of the cultural and ideological assumptions embedded in the museum's traditional layout and modes of display, their commentaries were instead submerged by the mass of objects around them and, unless the visitor was actively looking for them, could all too easily be misunderstood or missed and overlooked completely. With horrible irony, despite the best curatorial intentions, the way they were finally included in the vast spaces of the museum allowed these works of African Atlantic art dealing with black Atlantic memory to be effectively 'invisibilized'. Here, then, was a stark politics of memory at work, which raised difficult questions about institutional politics and the ownership of memory. The work still needs to be done to expand the parameters of British contemporary culture and its institutionalization, to include fully artists such as Himid and the others discussed in Rice's book, alongside Ofili, Shonibare and the other 'big' names, to register the extraordinary richness and complexity of black Atlantic heritage for modern visual culture. There are other important academic dimensions to this as well. While Rice's book importantly goes a long way towards identifying and opening up these issues, his methodological emphasis on 'guerilla memorialization', important as this is in advocating an actively political, interventionist scholarship that seeks to subvert establishment doctrine, perhaps inhibits other perspetives that could valuably add to his discussion. What would it mean, for example, to consider Himid's work not only alongside that of a broad range of African Atlantic artists, but also as impicitly critiquing both the bland, comfortable sensationalism of the YBAs and all they represent, and the orthodoxies of modernism and the visual tradition? Damien Hirst's infamous bisected shark would look very different from a black Atlantic perspective, while Himid's painterly abstraction has vastly divergent connotations from, say, Jackson Pollock's. As Rice notes, in a fine and illuminating reading of Himid's Cotton.com, the abstract patterning in the series of paintings comprising this work in fact turns the principles of formal abstraction on their head, by filling the emptied semiotic spaces of gestural abstract expressionism with historical, dialogic meaning, in that the paintings become representational surrogates for the patterned fabrics and warp and weft of cotton cloth produced by the exploited labour of workers in nineteenth-century Carolina and Manchester. Again, the art-historical work has still properly to be done to think through the ways in which contemporary African-Atlantic culture is a critique of modernism and its historiographies: establishment art history continues to sideline black Atlantic history and its enormous implications for the discipline. One of these is once more a fascinating aspect of Himid's practice, that Rice touches on obliquely and that recurs below the surface in his book: the question of slave labour versus artistic labour. This emerges, for example, in the discussion of Morrison's writing as analogous to the improvisatory foundation of jazz performance, which prioritizes a need to 'make the creative act look effortless, as though no sweat went into its creation, [as] an important legacy of the jazz tradition' [121]. (As it happens, a similar aesthetic emphasis, known as sprezzatura, was also a feature of western artistic practice from the late Italian Renaissance onwards: the intent to make the artist's role appear spontaneous and labour-free.) The dialectics of labour here are significant, since artistic labour, romantically construed as both the quintessential epitomization of the wholly free, unconstrained, unalienated labour of the total individual, and also as the result of individual genius (and thus implicitly arising out of effortless inspiration, rather than perspiration), may be seen as the diametrical opposite, or counter-side, of the anonymized, collective, back-breaking, wholly alienated labour of the slave plantation. This dialectic is one that Himid plays upon consistently in her art, both explicitly as being central to its dominant subject-matter and concerns, for example in Cotton.com or Naming the Money, and also by implication as a reflexive concern with the significance and value of her own labour in producing the 'work' of art. It calls into question the identity that is 'built' out of her practice as an artist producing the kind of work she does, and how she as an artist sees her own work in relation to that of the slave labourers that in various ways forms its subject-matter. As Rice observes, the paintings in Cotton.com all share 'repetitions of the core motifs in the mode of patterned cloth': they all represent the fabric of patterned cloth produced out of the Atlantic cotton trade, but are not the cloth itself (except, significantly, insofar as they are on, presumably, cotton canvas). What, then, is the relation of the labour that produced the paintings to the labour that produced the original cloth? This is not an issue that Rice is concerned to explore explicitly, but could offer rich potential for thinking further about the creation of identity through memorial in the black Atlantic. As Himid herself states about Naming the Money in an interview with the author: It's not so much that I am not an artist, it's that this [Naming the Money] maybe is not art, which is a slightly different thing. I'm undoubtedly an artist - if not then we are in a dangerous place [211] She is an artist who is clearly conscious that, in the type of challenging, interventionist, interactive engagement she wants her work to provoke, her art - that 'maybe is not art' - differs from and contrasts with prevailing artistic practice and the expectations of it: 'You bring your history, your story to the work and then we move amongst each other with it. I don't think that is what contemporary art is meant to do' [211]. What, then, is her position as a contemporary artist? She is 'undoubtedly an artist', but does not do 'what contemporary art is meant to do': she is both inside and outside, participating but also providing a detached critique through the work she makes of the culture of contemporary art and the visual traditions from which it derives. This is one of the most fascinating, compelling and elusive features of Himid's work. The dialectics surrounding the issue of artistic labour might offer one route to analysing these issues further. I have said that Rice's book is not directly concerned with this relation of artistic work to the creation of cultural identity. Yet, in another sense this is perhaps its over-riding theme. For, what emerges passionately and forcefully throughout its pages is the insistence on the positive creation of Atlantic cultural identities out of the trauma of the slave trade and its heritage; an eschewal of memorializing slavery in terms of victimhood in favour of a vibrant, vital memorialization through visual art, music and literature that actively connects the past with the present and the future, much in the way that Himid's vivid, energetic, dancing, music-making figures in Naming the Money emerge out of the combination of their identities as African and slave-servant. This comes through most strongly in the lengthy central chapter on jazz, as a performative memorial to African Atlantic heritage. It would be interesting to speculate on how far contemporary jazz might still be taken as such a memorial, given its sprawling diversity of form, style and performer, or whether other musical forms, such as rap, might be more logically seen as the successors to jazz's transgressive, counter-cultural, African-Atlantic foundations; but Rice's argument is keenly felt and strongly made, and rightly stands at the heart of the book. A key issue here and throughout the text is ownership of memory (it might also be asked what is the difference between memory and memorialization?): who performs, builds or otherwise lays claim to the memorial has a key bearing on its signification. If there is a politics of memory - and Rice demonstrates clearly that there is - then it also assumes proprietorial connotations: whose memory is at stake? Which brings me back finally to the Queen's House and the National Maritime Museum's quandary over how to commemorate the 2007 bicentenary. My own idea was that the pure rectilinear whiteness of the landmark of the Queen's House should be painted black for the occasion. However, realising that such a proposal would never get through the initial stage of the Exhibitions Committee, never mind the Board of Directors, English Heritage, or the Trustees (with Prince Philip as the Museum's Patron), I confided it, half-jokingly, only to a few trusted colleagues (mindful of my future museum career), who treated it as just that - a joke. Whether or not it was a good or appropriate idea (it certainly would have been provocative), it was beyond thinking that such a thing could be carried out. There is a form of institutional racism at play here, in which I was a participant, whereby the social, political and organizational structures of an institution such as the Maritime Museum disable and disappropriate certain modes of thinking and certain forms of memory and memorialization, such as the idea of a black Queen's House. A more realistic proposal was to install Lubaina Himid's Naming the Money in its complete form in the Queen's House, and it remains a great disappointment that I was unable to persuade the Museum's executive to agree to this: it would have looked splendid (and still would) in its expansive classical spaces. However, despite the acknowledged merits of the work, the proposed idea was turned down essentially on the basis that Himid was an insufficiently well-known artist. I need not go into the absurd irony of such reasoning, but it raises a very serious point: that such institutional ownership of the physical and ideological spaces of memory perpetuate the marginalization of the black Atlantic and its cultural heritage. And, despite its necessity and importance, Rice's methodology of 'guerilla memorialization' inevitably entails a similar risk of academic and institutional marginalization, even ghetto-ization, by the establishment it passionately and rightly challenges. This is a finely crafted, carefully argued and important book: I hope it is read and its messages heeded by the people that need to do so. Rice's Creating Memorials, Building Identities: The Politics of Memory in the Black Atlantic is a fine study of the complications involved in memorialising slavery in the black Atlantic is a discourse which touches upon Africa, the Caribbean, the United States and the United Kingdom. Adopting a comparative approach, de Mul's Colonial Memory: Contemporary Women's Travel Writing in Britain explores the overlap between memory, gender and colonialism in contemporary Dutch and British women's travel writing. Drawing on a vast number of authors and artists - ranging from Toni Morrison, Lemn Sissay, Caryl Phillips and Dionne Brand to Godfried Donkor, Lubaina Himid and Michael Visocchi - Rice's study focuses less on physical memorials than the process, or performance, of remembering - a process he calls 'guerrilla memorialisation'. The term usefully describes the act of remembering to counter the wilful amnesia that has accompanied the postcolonial condition. Interventionist in approach, guerrilla memorialisation enables the remembrance of slavery in its many guises. His study is divided into seven chapters. The first chapter provides case studies of memorials from several locations in the black Atlantic that illuminate the difficulties of remembering the traumatic history of slavery and its trade. Examining case studies such as African Americans visiting Senegal and Ghana and the old plantation manor, Wye in Maryland, where Frederick Douglass was born, to London with Lubaina Himid's performance piece 'What Are Monuments For?', and Michael Visocchi and Lemn Sissay's sculpture and poem in Fen Court, Rice demonstrates how official historical amnesia can be countered by acts of the imagination. Importantly, he argues that local acts of remembering can indeed be more powerful than national, official commemorations. Rice spends the rest of the book exploring local case studies of guerrilla memorialisation. He focuses on the African cabin boy Sambo, who died in the northern town of Lancaster in 1736. The repeated acts of memory performed by visitors to his grave, he argues, prevent Sambo's story from becoming a dry historical record. Rice also draws upon his own involvement as curator of an exhibition in the 2007 bicentenary commemoration of the abolition of slavery. He discusses, among other issues, how writer, artist and co-curator, SuAndi, undertook a guerrilla memorialisation through her unconventional use of old doll-like models of African slaves brought to Britain in the 1830s. While the dolls represented the infantilisation of Africans through slavery, imperialism and colonialism, their inclusion in the exhibition acknowledges the necessity of narrating, as far as possible, a fully nuanced story of slavery. The thoroughgoing, communal and politically charged representation of the dolls, argues Rice, brought out the many meanings contained within the objects themselves. This allowed for new conversations and contexts that could reshape the act of remembrance so that amnesia is no longer viable. Following Paul Gilroy's work on the black Atlantic, Rice goes on to investigate the interconnectedness of African diasporic and white communities in Manchester. He examines the cotton industry through Lubaina Himid's work Cotton.com. Hamid's painting on a cotton canvas binds various histories together and rearticulates the point that modernity has been built on the labour of both the slaves and the Manchester cotton works. Rice also explores other forms of expression, in particular jazz and how it has been fundamental to the shaping of African Atlantic identities, both in performance and through novels, such as those of Toni Morrison and Jackie Kay. After a discussion of black soldiers in World War Two, Rice moves away from the local perspective and explores how the legacy of slavery refuses to be constrained by national boundaries. Emphasising the diasporic, transnational perspective in the work of Ellen Gallagher, Donkor and Himid, Rice demonstrates how these artists confront the historical silences of colonialism by bringing forth archival stories of slavery that create contemporary identities which talk back to the past. Rice's Creating Memorials, Building Identities: The Politics of Memory in the Black Atlantic is a fine study of the complications involved in memorialising slavery in the black Atlantic is a discourse which touches upon Africa, the Caribbean, the United States and the United Kingdom. With his new book on memorialization and the formation of transnational identities, Alan Rice makes an important contribution to the burgeoning field of Black Studies in Europe. He begins with a discussion of monuments that have recently been unveiled in Amsterdam, London, and Paris, in remembrance of their nations' slave trading histories. Although the slave past has received considerable public acknowledgement in the past two decades, Rice argues that simply building monuments is not enough to dispel a collective amnesia regarding slavery and its legacies in these former imperial centers. A self-proclaimed radical cultural historian (p. 9), he proposes a more active and political form of remembering, which he calls "guerrilla memorialization." The memorial that was erected in London in 2008 and the modest gravesite of "Sambo," an African boy who died shortly after his arrival in North England around 1736, are in his view more effective and moving than the national slavery monuments in Paris and Amsterdam, with their traditional broken-chain symbolism and linear narratives. Despite their obscure or remote locations, these local initiatives have resulted in more dynamic memorial sites that challenge viewers to question dominant historical narratives and actively engage with the complex stories these sites tell. The London monument invites viewers to walk among its seventeen granite vertical structures, which represent sugar cane stems, or stand on the platform overlooking them-encouraging them to draw associations with a slave auction block, an abolitionist's lectern, or a pulpit, and to contemplate the multiple meanings of the monument's title, Gilt of Cain. At the same time, the monument's proximity to London's Financial District stimulates historical consciousness of the economics of chattel slavery and colonial exploitation and their contribution to present-day national wealth. Sambo's grave outside Lancaster similarly encourages a performative-and potentially transformative-engagement with the past. Rice recounts how, at least since the 1970s, local schoolchildren have made pilgrimages to this lieu de memoire and left painted stones there, recalling the former slave port's willfully forgotten history that brought the enslaved boy to this isolated spot. His book's dustjacket shows a photograph of the small memorial that was placed near the grave in 2009, a group of stones put on short bamboo stalks like a bunch of flowers and inscribed with messages from schoolchildren. The coastal location enhances the symbolism of the stones, which are reminiscent of pebbles washed up on the beach and thereby link the gravesite and the nearby port city to the larger circum-Atlantic world. The invocation of routes implied in the sugar cane and stone symbolism of these memorials shows how Rice anchors his study in Paul Gilroy's Black Atlantic paradigm. He argues that "to fully interpret [the] Black Atlantic resonances" of these and other memorial sites requires a "transnational, oceanic scholarship" (p. 42). He criticizes the national commemorations of the abolition of the slave trade in 2007 that tended to venerate white British abolitionists and marginalize black contributions and agency. The local memorial projects he focuses on challenge narrow notions of Britishness and heritage, aiming to make visible the black presence and tell "the complex story of trade and empire" to which that presence testifies (p. 58). Central to Rice's book is the work of African-born and Lancashire-based artist Lubaina Himid, whose art installations reinsert the "invisibilized" black presence (Himid's term, p. 25): by pasting a collaged image of a statue of Toussaint Louverture next to that of Nelson in Trafalgar Square in a guidebook of London and painting a vomiting black servant on the plate of the dinner service of a Lancaster merchant, Himid exposes what has been elided from these cities' memorial landscapes and histories and calls attention to black resistance. Rice's interest in the memorial projects he analyzes is not merely academic. Living and teaching in Lancaster, he played a pioneering role in the Slave Trade Arts Memorial Project (STAMP), which successfully campaigned for a monument to raise public consciousness of the city's slave trading past. His insider's perspective is particularly illuminating in his discussion of curatorial debates about what objects to include-and leave out-at a commemorative exhibition at the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester in 2007, of which he was a guest curator. The exhibition tried to tease out new meanings by juxtaposing objects, paintings, and music that could "speak" to each other in ironic or complementary ways. One of the colored illustrations in the book, for example, shows how the curators placed two landscapes by J.M.W. Turner, purchased and donated by Manchester cotton merchants, side by side with a daguerreotype of the black laborers that helped create the wealth that made their purchase possible. Consciously or unconsciously, Rice's interdisciplinary method and the organization of his chapters seem to mimic the collage-like form and aesthetics that are characteristic of this exhibition and Himid's art work. Each chapter brings together memorials, works of art, music, literary texts, and historical figures and events. Though this assemblage can be a bit overwhelming, the rich texture of his book often leads to wonderful insights and the discovery of little-known events. We learn, for example, that Manchester workers strongly supported President Lincoln's 1863 Emancipation Proclamation-against their own government's policy and despite the "cotton famine" the American Civil War caused in Britain's textile towns. Rice uses this story of interracial alliance and class solidarity mainly to posit a history of transatlantic radicalism, a utopian theme he develops in a later chapter. However, his brief discussion of the statue of Lincoln, erected in Manchester in 1919, and the controversy 80 years later when a plaque to Princess Diana was placed in front of it make me curious to learn more about the public debates that attended the establishment of these and other memorials and commemorations, including the national ones, which Rice perhaps dismisses too readily. Returning to his central idea of "guerrilla memorialization," he concludes that memorials are forged in battle. His erudite and passionately argued book might have been even more compelling and coherent if, instead of giving a somewhat obligatory reading of Toni Morrison's jazz aesthetic and a less relevant account of memorials against fascism in the second half of the book, he had dwelled longer on these public battles. With his new book on memorialization and the formation of transnational identities, Alan Rice makes an important contribution to the burgeoning field of Black Studies in Europe.
