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.
Rezensionen / Stimmen
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."
Arlene R. Keizer 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.
Richard H. King 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.
Geoff Quilley, Journal of American Studies, Roundtable Well written, in an accessible style on an important topic that deserves wider readership than an academic audience.
Hilda Kean, Journal of American Studies Roundtable 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.
Johanna C. Kardux, New West Indian Guide 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. 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.
SuAndi, National Black Arts Alliance * National Black Arts Alliance * Rice's book is of immense value, both in terms of its content and method.
Robbie Shilliam, Journal of African Political Economy * Journal of African Political Economy * 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. * Wasafiri #71, Vol, 27.3 *
Reihe
Sprache
Verlagsort
Zielgruppe
Für höhere Schule und Studium
Maße
Höhe: 239 mm
Breite: 163 mm
ISBN-13
978-1-84631-471-1 (9781846314711)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Klassifikation
Alan Rice is Professor in English and American Studies and Co-Director of the Institute for Black Atlantic Research, University of Central Lancashire.
Autor*in
Department of Humanities, University of Central Lancashire (United Kingdom)
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
