Creating Memorials, Building Identities

Reviews / Votes

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 *