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. 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. 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. Rice's book is of immense value, both in terms of its content and method. 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. 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. 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. 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". THE - What are you reading? Susan Hogan, professor in cultural studies, University of Derby, is reading Alan Rice's Creating Memorials, Building Identities: The Politics of Memory in the Black Atlantic (Liverpool University Press, 2010). "I found the installation art of Sue Flowers, featured here, particularly poignant. One piece is a jumble of 550 sugar cubes, each inscribed with a number in black ink and representing a person made human cargo on one voyage, the ephemeral and fragile medium connoting the forgotten history and forgotten lives dissolved into a void. It reminds us that we should eschew an economics devoid of compassion." 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.
