City Libraries, City of Gold Coast

Creating memorials, building identities, the politics of memory in the Black Atlantic, Alan Rice

eng

Includes bibliographical references and index

platesillustrations

index present

non fiction

Creating memorials, building identities

bibliography

Alan Rice

Liverpool studies in international slavery, 3

the politics of memory in the Black Atlantic

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. -- Description from http://www.bokus.com (Oct. 25, 2011)

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