Confronting the Ghostly Legacies of Slavery the Politics of Black Bodies Embodied Memories and Memorial Landscapes

Atlantic Studies

ISSN: 1478-8810 (Print) 1740-4649 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjas20

Confronting the ghostly legacies of slavery: the politics of black bodies, embodied memories and memorial landscapes Alan Rice & Johanna C. Kardux To cite this article: Alan Rice & Johanna C. Kardux (2012) Confronting the ghostly legacies of slavery: the politics of black bodies, embodied memories and memorial landscapes, Atlantic Studies, 9:3, 245-272, DOI: 10.1080/14788810.2012.702524 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14788810.2012.702524

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Atlantic Studies Vol. 9, No. 3, September 2012, 245
272

Confronting the ghostly legacies of slavery: the politics of black bodies, embodied memories and memorial landscapes Alan Rice and Johanna C. Kardux* This introductory essay discusses the legacies of the transatlantic slave trade across three continents. It begins by investigating the historical amnesia about the trade which has only recently and in some geographies been ameliorated, taking as a point of departure observations by Nobel Prize Winners Derek Walcott and Toni Morrison, who were in the vanguard of a movement to memorialise it. The essay moves on to discuss not only traditional memorials, walking trails and artworks, but also ghostly legacies of the trade, including human body parts. Taking the small slave port of Lancaster, England, as a key case study, the essay draws on recent theoretical work on corporeality, spectrality, Holocaust studies, trauma, dark tourism, the Black Atlantic and memory studies to interrogate the meanings of these legacies. The way that black agency contributes to new understandings of the horrors of the slave trade is demonstrated by discussion of William Wells Brown’s intervention at the Great Exhibition of 1851. Such ‘‘guerrilla memorialisation’’ is shown at work historically and in recent memorialisations of the trade. Moreover, its urgent need in the wake of contemporary issues of forced labour from the African continent is discussed. The final section on memorial landscapes summarises the essays in this volume and discusses the links between the various locales. France, which is trying to come to terms with its history through legislation and the creation of memorials, is discussed as a slave power case study. The new memorial in Nantes is an important municipal response to the legacy of the trade and by its esplanade design is linked back to the city trails in Britain discussed earlier in the essay. Other geographies with slaving pasts such as Wales and Mauritius are introduced, as well as the African Burial Ground in New York. The essay ends where it started, on the West Coast of Africa, with a reflection on heritage tourism and the complex legacies of slavery on the slave castle coast. Keywords: memorials; slavery; dark tourism; heritage tourism; slave forts; slave ports; spectrality; memory; trauma I accept this archipelago of the Americas. I say to the ancestor who sold me, and to the ancestor who bought me. I have no father, I want no such father, although I can understand you, black ghost, white ghost, when you both whisper ‘‘history,’’ for if I attempt to forgive you both I am falling into your idea of history which justifies and explains and expiates, and it is not mine to forgive, my memory cannot summon any filial love, since your features are anonymous and erased and I have no wish and no power to pardon. You were when you acted your roles, your given, historical roles of slave seller and slave buyer, men acting as men, and also you father, in the filth-ridden gut of the slave ship, to you they were also men, acting as men, with the cruelty of men, your fellowman and tribesman, not moved or hovering with hesitation about your common race any longer than my other bastard ancestor hovered with his whip, but to you, inwardly forgiven grandfathers, I, like the more honest of my race, give a strange thanks, I give the strange and bitter and yet ennobling thanks for the monumental groaning and soldering of two worlds, like the halves of a fruit seamed by its own bitter *Emails: [email protected]; [email protected] ISSN 1478-8810 print/ISSN 1740-4649 online # 2012 Taylor & Francis http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14788810.2012.702524 http://www.tandfonline.com

246 A. Rice and J.C. Kardux juice, that exiled from your own Edens you have placed me in the wonder of another, and that was my inheritance and your gift. Derek Walcott, ‘‘The Muse of History’’ (1974)1 [G]hosts are never innocent: the unhallowed dead of the modern project drag in the pathos of their loss and the violence of the force that made them, their sheets and chains . . . . Following ghosts is about making a contact that changes you and refashions the social relations in which you are located. It is about putting life back in where only a vague memory or a bare trace was visible to those who bothered to look. It is sometimes about ghost stories, stories that not only repair representational mistakes, but also strive to understand the conditions under which a memory was reproduced in the first place, toward a counter-memory of the future. Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters (1997)2

It is almost a quarter century since Toni Morrison and Derek Walcott commented on the erasure of the public memory of slavery from the ‘‘colonial wharves’’3 of North American and Caribbean port cities that served as places of disembarkation for millions of enslaved Africans. In 1989 Morrison observed that visitors to Charleston, Savannah, New York, or Providence looked in vain for a place to contemplate these cities’ dark history and ‘‘summon the presences’’ or ‘‘recollect the absences’’ of the enslaved Africans who helped build them.4 ‘‘We think of the past/as better forgotten than fixed with stony regret,’’ Walcott wrote a year later in his epic poem Omeros. The award of the Nobel Prize in Literature to descendants of slaves in two consecutive years
to Walcott in 1992 and Morrison in 1993
marked not only an acknowledgement of these authors’ literary achievements, but also a growing consciousness throughout the Atlantic world of the need to restore to public memory the history of their ancestors’ enslavement. In the 20 years that have passed since then, slave descendants from Charleston, South Carolina, to New York City, from Liverpool and Lancaster to Middelburg in the Netherlands and Nantes in France, have successfully campaigned for local or national memorials in public recognition of and as atonement for these cities’ and nations’ involvement in the slave trade and colonial slavery. As a result of these efforts, the memorial landscapes of these port cities with connections to the transatlantic slave trade have been powerfully altered by the inclusion of monuments, plaques, museums, heritage trails, and public art works that call attention to and commemorate the trade in human cargo and the exploitation of forced labour on which their economies were founded historically to a greater or lesser degree. During his peregrinations in New York City, the protagonist of NigerianAmerican author Teju Cole’s critically acclaimed novel Open City (2011), for example, stumbles upon a grassy plot ‘‘surrounded by huge office buildings’’ in Lower Manhattan to which his attention is drawn by ‘‘a sculpture or architecture,’’ still under construction, whose inscription ‘‘identified it as a memorial for the site of an African burial ground.’’ This accidental discovery of what is now the African Burial Ground National Monument, which was unveiled in 2007, spurs an extended meditation on the layered history of the city: discarding the ‘‘squabble about the construction of the monument,’’ he writes, ‘‘What I was steeped in, on that warm morning, was the echo across centuries, of slavery in New York.’’5 Such echoes exist in locations across the circumatlantic world and are at the heart of Lubaina Himid’s

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call for memorialising them adequately, a call that she made in a 2003 intervention in Lancaster, which inspired the 2005 memorial in that city and which is printed for the first time in this special issue of Atlantic Studies. Other essays in this volume attest to this transformation of the memorial landscapes not only in the cities in North America and Europe where, to paraphrase Cole’s protagonist, ‘‘slavers’ ships’’ were financed, built, outfitted, insured, and launched,6 but also at various sites in West Africa that supplied their human merchandise and in long-neglected geographies of the slave trade such as Mauritius, an island some 800 kilometres east of Madagascar, off the coast of southeast Africa.

Ghostly legacies But let us first return to the two epigraphs at the beginning of this introduction, which introduce themes crucial to the memorialisation of the slave trade and its aftermath that the essays in this special issue interrogate. Firstly, the Nobel Prizewinning, St. Lucian poet Derek Walcott dwells upon the legacy of a history in which black and white, African and European bear responsibility (even if not in equal amounts) for the ravages of a trade that brutalised both themselves and their victims, but which led to the forging of new rich cultures in the Americas and beyond. Walcott’s ghosts ‘‘whisper history’’; Avery Gordon’s idea is that such whispers should be seen as increasingly important for the understanding of the development of the modernity that the slave trade, as we know from Paul Gilroy, Robin Blackburn and Ian Baucom (amongst many others), helped to usher in.7 This introduction and the essays will interrogate some of the ‘‘bare trace(s)’’ located often in ravaged slave bodies in Africa, Europe and the Americas and what these mean for memorialising these histories in an amnesiacal world, providing what Gordon calls ‘‘a countermemory of the future.’’ As Hortense Spillers has argued, the corporeal is central in any discussion of the Black Atlantic: I would make a distinction in this case between ‘‘body’’ and ‘‘flesh’’ and impose that distinction as the central one between captive and liberated subject positions. In that sense, before the ‘‘body’’ there is the ‘‘flesh’’ that zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse or the reflexes of iconography . . .. If we think of the flesh as the primary narrative, then we mean its seared, divided, ripped-apartness riveted to the ship’s hold, fallen or escaped overboard.8

And this dismemberment continued beyond the Middle Passage experience in the lives of enslaved Africans on all its Atlantic shores. It continues into the post-slavery period as a key element of remembrance for tourists and residents in cityscapes as well as plantation locations and their hinterlands where slavery created profits through exploited lives. Jessica Adams describes the resonances of such dark tourist environments:9 . . . there is a comprehensive social genealogy to be found at tourist sites, in those places where the dead are prominent. The body exists as a means of remembrance, a location of cultural memory. But it also gets dismembered, both literally and figuratively, and its pieces circulate through postslavery tourist economies.10

248 A. Rice and J.C. Kardux To illustrate this circulation and the meaning the dismembered black body makes in the Black Atlantic, we present an extended anecdote and the first dismembered body/ghostly presence in this introduction. In the mid-1990s our colleague and the writer of the definitive history of the Lancaster slave trade, Melinda Elder,11 was approached with a strange request. What should be done with a historical remnant from an old Lancaster slaving family? This was no ordinary memento from the trade, a manilla or cowrie shell that had been used as currency for buying enslaved Africans or a shackle or branding iron used to control them. This was something much more personal and in its way gruesome. It was a mummified black hand, perfectly preserved and meant for display. It had been a central feature of the domestic scene in a white British family home as late as the 1940s and thereafter was passed down as a legacy. As Eliza Dear explains in her autobiographical pamphlet: My story starts in the 1940s, in the Gloucestershire countryside where my parents had settled after coming South from Lancashire. The three of us lived in a rambling Elizabethan house, its walls covered with antlers, heads of animals and pictures of horses. In between these in prize position over the fireplace, was a black hand. It was dried, the bones were cut neatly and I was told it had belonged to someone’s favourite slave. My mother was very proud of this hand. I used to play with it and, as I was often lonely, I used to wish the owner of the hand was there with me.12

This narrative is particularly intriguing in a British context precisely because of the openness of the display. By the mid-twentieth century, any traces linking slaving families or institutions to their dark pasts were usually obliterated as shameful indices of pasts that were hopefully long forgotten. In this family it seems to exist almost as a trophy placed amidst hunting ephemera and like these indices of wealth and power, exhibiting the heft of the old merchant family. The incidental details from Dear’s recollection are chilling. The hand had ‘‘belonged to someone’s favourite slave,’’ the implication being that it was perfectly within the rights of the owner to continue their custodianship of the body after its death. Her mother’s pride in this frankly grotesque family heirloom is chilling, but not as disturbing as her young only daughter being allowed to use it as a plaything. Dear’s mother was ‘‘very proud’’ of the hand and her pride and that of her ancestors, which made them believe they had the right to cut off the hand and retain it as a memento, can be understood best in light of Dionne Brand’s astute observation of the way slave-owners inhabit the bodies of their slaves: [They are] the captors who enter the captive’s body. Already inhabiting them as extensions of themselves with a curious dissociation which gave them the ability to harm them as well. Slaves became extensions of the slave owners
their arms, legs, the parts of them they wished to harness and use with none of the usual care of their own bodies . . . projections of the sensibilities, consciousness, needs, desires and fears of the captors.13

For Eliza Dear’s mother, then, the hand is not treasured because it remembers a family slave/servant she never knew, but because it represents nostalgia for a lifestyle and power the family once had and exercised through their ownership of human beings. The hand had almost certainly belonged to Frances Elizabeth Johnson (Fanny) born in St. Kitts in the West Indies in 1751 and brought to Lancaster by her

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owner John Satterthwaite in 1778. He had married Mary (Polly) Rawlins from the Rawlins plantation on St. Kitts in 1777 and this marriage had combined two significant Lancaster-connected families who made their money in the slave and West Indian trades and abroad. They had considerable investments in plantations as many other families did in the period when the city was the fourth largest slave port in Britain. Fanny Johnson was a privileged house slave, probably Mary Rawlins’ personal maid and hence crucial to her comfort on the journey and once abroad in a new home in England. The Satterthwaite family were originally Quakers, but this had not inhibited their slavery activities and, by the time John entered his father Benjamin’s ignoble trade, they had turned Anglican, maybe a direct reaction to the Quakers’ opposition to the trade. John’s letter book discusses the business with the commercial objectivity and indifference to human suffering scholars of slavery have become used to. In September 1781 he writes to Michael Hethering: I am concerned in a small guineaman the Sally, Captain Harrison, who [sic] may be expected at St. Kitts pretty soon after this letter may reach you, that if it is agreeable for you to take her up, will you be so obliging on receipt here of to drop Mr Robinson a line acquainting him what you think a small cargo from about 100 to 150 slaves might fetch at your island.14

Such a discourse, common throughout the literature of the business of slavery, enables the black presence to be marginalised and made foreign to the home port of Lancaster. It is a business whose profits returned, but whose bodies, broken and mutilated, remained elsewhere. What the returned public appearance of the hand does is to interrupt such convenient elision and introduce the black flesh on which such profits were made and of course the traumatic histories it carries with it. Cathy Caruth reminds us that ‘‘history, like trauma, is never simply one’s own, that history is precisely the way we are implicated in each other’s traumas.’’15 Timothy Brown talks of the power of artefacts that recall such trauma, describing how they powerfully invoke the ghosts of the past: . . . the artefact is an analogue for traumatic repetition, it is symbolic for trauma’s literal return, which engenders and forestalls the materialization or dissolution of symbolic and political power. It is the symbolic nexus of society’s wounds and celebrations.16

The freight carried by the hand is the traumatic history of the local slave traders themselves and its link to a global history of abuse. Saidiya Hartman describes how ‘‘the body of memory
that is the dominated, social collectivity of enslaved Africans and the brutal operation of power on these captive bodies’’17
is always elided in the master narratives of the powerful like the letter above with its bland detailing of commercial operation. However, the severed hand haunts those who promote such wilful amnesia. The agency of black people in opposition to such elision is documented in slave narratives and through practices such as slave song, dance and religious praxis. However, there was little of communal black culture available for the slaves/house servants in Lancaster and unsurprisingly the documentary trace of blacks in the late eighteenth century is almost nonexistent. There was no nascent community as there was in London or Liverpool at this time amongst whom Fanny Johnson could have gained succour, though there were African descendants in the city. A black man

250 A. Rice and J.C. Kardux named Thomas Brunson, a sailor from Sunderland Point, can be located, for example, who in 1781 signed his own marriage bond to a Mary Tomlinson, showing that some free blacks had access to rudimentary education.18 His black writing hand is a rare one. The Day-Book of Henry Tindall19 begun in 1759, recently discovered in Lancashire, refers to payments to a black man called Oxford running tasks for the slave trade merchant in the city and probably, because of the money paid to him, a free black; but in the middle of the eighteenth century he and Fanny would have stood out in the town where there were at most only a few dozen blacks. These nebulous records of black presence in a city whose major Georgian buildings and commercial success in the eighteenth century was built on the slave and West Indian trades exemplify the importance of looking between the lines of the written record and indeed of going beyond it to gain an understanding of the ghostly shadow underpinning the city (Figure 1). Thousands of miles from her home and family, Fanny’s nebulous position as slave-servant meant the only ‘‘family’’ within reach were her master and mistress and their family. The only words we have describing her life come from her baptismal record dated April 1778 at the Lancaster Priory church. ‘‘Frances Elizabeth Johnson, a black woman servt. to Mr John Satterthwaite, an adult aged 27y.’’ The mummified

Figure 1. 20 Castle Hill, Lancaster (1720), home to the Satterthwaite family and their slave/ servant Frances Elizabeth Johnson from 1778-? Photograph with the kind permission of Amy Rice (5/6/2012).

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hand is left to speak for her presence beyond the parish register. We can conjecture that her hand had been kept in a sentimental act of appropriation by the Satterthwaite family to remember a ‘‘cherished’’ slave/servant; in effect their ownership of her body was not even interrupted by her death. In 1997 a few years after Eliza Dear had approached Melinda Elder with her strange legacy, Fanny’s mummified hand was buried in a special ceremony at the Priory church where she was baptised. Dear had worried about what to do with the hand, how to appropriately dispose of it. Travels to the Caribbean led her to realise that taking it back to St. Kitts would not necessarily enable a homecoming as most of Fanny’s adult life was probably spent in Lancaster. She did procure some soil from the Rawlins plantation on the island and it was buried along with the hand in a casket, a memento of her home island. The hand is buried in the Garden of Remembrance alongside the Priory Church with an inscription ‘‘F.E.J. 2 April 1778.’’ This date
her baptismal date
is the only marker we have, apart from the hand, of Fanny’s life. Nevertheless, it still seems a strange date to choose as defining her life, being her entrance into and the only record of her in written English history (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Memorial tablet for Frances Elizabeth Johnson placed in Garden of Remembrance at Lancaster Priory Church, 1997. Photograph with the kind permission of Amy Rice (5/6/ 2012).

Despite such ambiguities, the hand and the biography enable us to begin to reconstruct and transcend the limited space allowed to it within white Lancastrian discourse. It stands as a material spectre to remember other such black lives that made little or no mark on the written record and whose presence we need to save from the obliquity of sentimentalist or other inadequate appropriations. Sadiya Hartman articulates this persuasive idea when she thinks of the lives ravaged by slavery:

252 A. Rice and J.C. Kardux [T]hese traces of memory function in a manner akin to a phantom limb, in that what is felt is no longer there . . .. The recognition of loss is a crucial element in redressing the breach introduced by slavery. This recognition entails a remembering of the pained body, not by way of a stimulated wholeness but precisely through the recognition of the amputated body in its amputatedness . . . in other words it is the ravished [ghostly] body that holds out the possibility of restitution, not the invocation of an illusory wholeness.20

The mummified black hand is literally a phantom limb, a powerful symbol of such amputated bodies which refuse over-easy closure. Here we can see the body acting, as Hershini Bhana Young contends, ‘‘as a form of memory . . . non-linear, heterogeneous, resistant and, above all, lived.’’21 Hartman and Young’s compelling arguments cut across glib redemptory readings of the lived history of slavery and abolition that either glory in the triumph of Emancipation and gloss over the horrors that went before or wallow in sentiment, showing how slave bodies, anonymised and broken, can intervene as spectres to perform their narrative work of radical revisionism, to complicate shallow, self-serving readings, to show how, as Simon Gikandi reminds us, ‘‘slavery functioned as the great unconscious in the infrastructure of modern identity.’’22

Guerrilla memorialisation But how does this radical revisionism work and go beyond the pages of academic treatises, however important they are? A partial answer might be found in community actions that begin to reclaim the cityscapes that have traditionally been designed to articulate the heroic stories of merchant adventurers and to make amends and finally tell the underside, ghostly narratives of those on whose backs the profits were made. As Lubaina Himid tells us of Lancaster, which is of course true of many others living under the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade: Behind doors in attics and underground are the hidden histories of a few almost invisible African people who were owned by families engaged in a legitimate, but immoral strategy to make a lot of money fast.23

Making these individual diasporan African stories live and breathe is a political action that Alan Rice has called elsewhere a ‘‘guerrilla memorialisation,’’24 a signal intervention into a landscape that has traditionally elided their presence. In Lancaster, this was done most effectively by a Slave Trade Town Trail which was unveiled in 2006. Funded by Global Link, a locally based development education charity, the Trail was made by primary school children in Lancaster under the direction of artist Sue Flowers and historian Melinda Elder. All the texts and drawings were, however, composed by the children themselves. It was the first comprehensive trail on the subject for the city and is now sold cost price to tourists at many venues throughout the city as well as being available as a free download from the website.25 Its composition by the schoolchildren is vital to its success as, unlike other trails usually written by local historians and drawn by professionals, it has the unmistakable stamp of citizen engagement. Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace has discussed the efficacy of Slave Trails for the rewriting of histories in slave ports with especial reference to Bristol. Her discussion of the importance of such

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‘‘embodied practices for understanding history’’26 as ‘‘present day walkers evoke absent historical players’’27 are particularly pertinent here. She writes: Indeed through their dialogue with the ghosts of the past, walkers can also be seen as performers . . .. As walkers traverse modern city streets, they participate in the making of another historical reality . . . then walkers move toward an alternative political reality, one in which they both recognise the need for redress and become aware of the need for social action.28

The use by Kowaleski-Wallace of performance theory to explicate the way Slave Trails have the potential to educate and politicise their audience is an exemplary intervention that shows that the performing of guerrilla memorialisation is made possible by a civic engagement that might involve merely the walking of a city with new information that provides radical new perspectives that transform the cityscape. The conclusion made about the effect on the story of Bristol can be transposed to Lancaster in particular in relation to the idea of ‘‘respectability’’ or ‘‘gentility,’’ which had been the traditional narrative enabled by beautiful Georgian houses, relics of thriving merchant warehouses and memorial stones to ex-mayors and city dignitaries. The Trails in both cities teach that such respectability is now understood to cover a range of behaviours, attitudes, and positions which must be scrutinized beneath their surface appearance. Trade itself is now understood to connect and adjoin both place to place and people to people, facilitating fortuitous gain for some and tragic loss for others.29

The performative act of walking the city, trail guide in hand, enables new understanding and complicates and indeed undermines boosterist narratives that traditionally have been promoted by official trails. The Lancaster Slave Trail describes the Priory Church where Fanny Johnson was baptised as containing ‘‘the memorial inscriptions to the Lindow family (outside the church) and Hinde Family (inside the church), who both made money through the Slave Trade.’’30 Both are now commemorated in a more shameful way by the Trail itself and by the Lancaster Captured Africans memorial by Kevin Dalton Johnson unveiled in 2005 that names each of them.31 Also named there is Dodshon Foster who, we are told in the trail, was a very wealthy man. He owned two small ships, which during five voyages carried 650 people. Many of them died on the ships. Maybe he built his house next to his warehouse so he could see what was going on on the Quay. Dodshon Foster was a Quaker. Some Quakers would later argue and say that slavery was not allowed, but he thought differently.32

Sue Flowers, who had worked with the children conceiving the trail, remembered Foster when she made her installation ‘‘One Tenth,’’ produced for the Lancashire Museum Service’s Lancaster-based project Abolished? in 2007.33 Flowers’ work comments acerbically on the building in which it is housed. An oil portrait of Dodshon Foster (1730
92) replete with iconography that glories in his status as merchant in tropical goods had always been centrally displayed in the old Custom House, now the Maritime Museum. Built in 1765, this building is key to the slave

254 A. Rice and J.C. Kardux trade as it was where ship owners paid their taxes for the goods they were trading. Flowers, though, in the wake of the Memorial and the Trail’s revisions of history, wanted to highlight not Dodshon’s bourgeois respectability as a Lancaster merchant whose house and warehouse adjoined the building, but his ‘‘criminal’’ involvement in the slave trade through his ship the Barlborough’s voyages in the 1750s. Her installation dialogises the portrait (which is retained in its usual place in the room) by making images of Foster as a criminal and having them put behind bars in the windows. Flowers writes: The installation attempts to subvert our daily understanding of Lancaster and its history. Here the wealthy merchant is transformed into a man of our times and becomes trapped into the very fabric of the building. Here one man is criminalised
reframed inside a building which represented his wealth and power. A new representation of the man is created in a new portrait and a series of images have become trapped behind the protective bars of the window frames.34

The new representation of Foster reflects contemporary interpretations of his ‘‘respectable trade.’’ There are three views of him from the front and from both sides
as if posing for a modern police headshot
with the designation ‘‘Dodshon Foster/ White European’’ and the headline text: Crime ID Reference No: 550 The Barlborough Domicile: Lancaster, United Kingdom Crime: Enslavement of African People35

The juxtaposition of the iconography of contemporary criminality with the historical veneration of the portrait is meant to bring the viewer up short and present a new and radically altered interpretation of Foster’s transatlantic trading. Flowers’ installation also contains images of sugar and sugar cane to emphasise the goods which were exchanged for the slaves. The way in which enslaved Africans were made abstract by the Middle Passage is represented at its most extreme in the 550 numbered sugar cubes that are featured in another section of the installation. Here, the black numbers on the white cubes are dramatic, clean-cut evocations of the economics at the centre of the slave trade that deny humanity. Flowers, though, goes further, modelling Foster’s head in fibre-glass that resembles sugar, dramatising the way his criminal pursuit of wealth has dehumanised him, turned him into the very commodity he selfishly pursued. As Flowers writes, ‘‘the work acts as a memorial for the dead as much as an indictment of the criminal’’36 and this is its strength: a sitespecific work of art that speaks to the ghosts of Lancaster’s slave past in the very building where much of that trade was recorded. It is a supremely effective guerrilla memorialisation that dramatically intervenes in the narrative of the city and attempts to rewrite the story from the inside, right from the belly of the beast, in the Custom House which was built to feed the insatiable desire in Lancaster and its hinterland for the slave-produced goods and the profits they engendered. Although only a temporary installation, the guerrilla work done by the piece was so effective that the portrait of a criminalised Foster has been retained. Now his portrait designed to enable us to revel in his bourgeois respectability is haunted by its criminal shadow.

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What these examples of a developing consciousness of the haunting ghost of slavery in Lancaster are designed to demonstrate is the importance of harnessing a community to have investment in such guerrilla memorialisation in order for consciousness to be altered. Hence, the story of Fanny’s hand can be interpreted in the context of new understandings of the deeply embedded nature of slavery in the city’s history. More than this, though, Lancaster’s Trail is not content with history in the immediate context but includes on its reverse side information on the horrors of modern slavery, indicating how the ghosts of a historical slavery can be the spur to political action against this contemporary scourge. As Hershini Bhana Young contends, it is only by engaging with traumatic history that we can ever hope to come to terms with it. ‘‘Reparations and reconciliation are achieved not by pressing the ghost back into its grave, but rather by multiple historical re-engagements with the spectres that haunt (national) bodies in ways that resist closure.’’37 It is this learning and engagement in and from the past that Paul Gilroy identifies as key to contemporary agendas that promote human rights in the here and now: As well as fixing the mechanisms whereby a common indivisible humanity might be recognised, the struggle against racial slavery tested the idea of rights, opposed the racial boundaries placed upon citizenship and identified limits to capitalism’s moral economy. In turn, those battles generated a huge conflict with the idea of racial hierarchy . . . a conflict that continues around us.38

Taking up positions against reactionary ideas and racially distorted histories with an informed pro-human rights agenda is, as Gilroy asserts, not merely a contemporary phenomenon and the City Trails outlined above continue a polemical and performative tradition developed by a range of abolitionist activists in the nineteenth century throughout the circumatlantic world. For instance, Frederick Douglass promenading through British towns on the arms of white women to outrage the racists on his British tour 1845
47,39 or Henry Box Brown reprising his outlandish escape from slavery in a box (in Leeds most famously in 1851) are only the most infamous of actions designed to highlight oppression and encourage opposition to the ravages of slavery and its racial hierarchies during their ‘‘liberating sojourns.’’40 Such activist interventions in Europe were an important aid to the overthrowing of the system of slavery in the United States. One particularly interesting example which seems to us an exemplary act of historical, politically motivated, guerrilla memorialisation has been recently discussed by Lisa Merrill. In 1851, Merrill contends, the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace presented a unique performance opportunity to stage encounters in the public sphere that dramatized both the plight of enslaved persons and the vicissitudes of interracial social acceptance in the United States and Britain. William Wells Brown, noting this dramatic potential, described the Great Exhibition as ‘‘one great theatre, with thousands of performers, each playing his own part.’’41

William Wells Brown determined that he would use this ‘‘theatre’’ for a performance that would dramatise the evils of slavery. At the centre of the American contribution to the exhibition was the alabaster white statue of a Greek Slave by the American sculptor Hiram Powers. This depiction of a white woman failed dismally to articulate

256 A. Rice and J.C. Kardux the plight of the millions of black women still enslaved in the Americas. Brown, astonished at the partiality of this narrative, used a recent caricature published in the satirical magazine Punch, ‘‘The Virginian Slave: Intended as a Comparison to Power’s [sic] ‘Greek Slave,’’’ as a prop to lambast the inaccuracy of Powers’ lily-white depiction. This caricature, as Merrill contends, ‘‘both allegorized and visually mocked the United States’’ for its hypocrisy.42 Brown placed a copy of the caricature in the enclosure by Powers’ statue as a provocation ‘‘as its most fitting companion’’ to disrupt the statue’s elision of American racial realities. He announced, ‘‘As an American fugitive slave, I place this Virginian slave by the side of the ‘Greek Slave’ as its most fitting companion.’’43 Brown’s guerrilla intervention works against the silencing of the existence of slavery on American soil and uses the performative public space of the Great Exhibition in Britain to make his point as dramatically as possible by exposing the hypocrisy of his homeland at the heart of its national rival. He uses his own performing black body to symbolically undermine the hierarchies of race coloration promoted by the white statue. Such political acts of guerrilla memorialisation sought to highlight the human rights abuses of slavery but as we have sought to show, they are still necessary today in order to protect the historical record from amnesia, special pleading or falsification in all locations where slavery’s legacies survive. As Paul Ricoeur reminds us, [T]here is a privilege that cannot be refused to history; it consists not only in expanding collective memory beyond any actual memory but in correcting, criticizing, even refuting the memory of a determined community, when it folds back upon itself and encloses itself within its own sufferings to the point of rendering itself blind and deaf to the suffering of other communities. It is along the path of critical history that memory encounters the sense of justice. What would a happy memory be that was not also an equitable memory?44

It is the ‘‘critical history’’ undertaken by contemporary enlightened memory workers, artists and curators that work to summon the ghosts of the Black Atlantic so that they are not forgotten, marginalised or rendered mere victims of history
so that justice can be done to their historical agency and memory. Ricoeur’s generalised idea of a ‘‘determined community’’ using its own suffering past to quell the knowledge of the suffering of others has some resonances for our case study of the Black Atlantic. However, the special circumstances of its horrific history engender a reckoning of a different order, as Kobena Mercer articulates: Descendants of enslavers and enslaved alike share in a predicament arising from the unrepresentability of the past. While the former may be unreconciled with a history that has been wiped out of collective memory, the latter, it may be said, are haunted by too much memory; ghosted by the floating bodies of lost and unnamed ancestors buried beneath the sea.45

Mercer’s ambivalent and troubling idea that the enslaved descendants ‘‘are haunted by too much memory’’ in a context where at the same time specific aspects of their history have been obliterated from the historical record is redolent for many of the case studies in this introduction and in the volume as a whole. But if there is an excess of Middle Passage memory, in the last two decades there has also been the return of

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actual African bodies crammed onto ships, trafficked and then washed up on Mediterranean shores
the ghostly memories become emblems of a new and horrific by-product of globalisation. Nineteenth-century slave narratives now have their twenty-first century equivalents in refugee narratives that summon Middle Passage ghosts. Eritrean Feven Abreha Tekle writes of a journey from Libya to Italy in her book Libera (2005): After the guards selected us and ordered us to follow them, the camp was almost emptied . . . . I looked around: we were a silent crowd like timorous and dreamy, nightly ghosts, all immersed in their own thoughts . . . . I was reminded of having read somewhere that the slave ships of two centuries earlier that were used to transport African slaves to America were impregnated with a characteristic smell that was impossible to erase and which was felt at a distance of many miles. On that fishing boat it was the same thing.46

These recapitulations of sea-crossings with crowded, unsanitary conditions and high death rates, happening beyond the consciousness of many in the rich North, mean that contemporary attempts to resurface the hidden histories of slavery through guerrilla memorialisation have an added urgency to engender political consequences that will alert contemporary citizens to the horrors on Europe’s doorstep. Hershini Bhana Young links oppression across the centuries: Furthermore, contextualising slavery situates it within the exploitative networks of global industrial capitalism, showing it, not as an anomaly but as part of other forms of involuntary labor. Slavery thus is not as an aberration of modernity, as liberal humanists claim, but rather essential to its paradigm.47

It is to the credit of many who have been involved in the latest memory work around slavery that they have used their interventions to remould the meanings extant in the archive as a political move to highlight such contemporary malpractice and horrors. For instance, the new International Slavery Museum opened in Liverpool in 2007 refuses to be limited to portraying the evils of historical slavery but highlights contemporary human rights abuses (including modern slavery) in a dedicated and prominent section at the conclusion of the display in the museum.48 So there is little redemption in the past and the uncannily similar abuses of the present seem to mock us with their nightmarish simulacra. Saidiya Hartman in her meditations on the Middle Passage sums up the despair at a history with little hope of redemption: History is a battle royal, a contest between the powerful and the powerless in ‘‘what happened’’ as well as in the stories we tell about what happened
a fight to the death over the meaning of the past. The narrative of the defeated never triumphs; like them, it ekes out an existence in the shadow of the victors. But must the story of the defeated always be a story of defeat? Is it too late to imagine that their lives might be redeemed or to fashion an antidote to oblivion? Is it too late to believe their struggles cast a shadow into the future which they might finally win?49

Hartman’s interrogations are central to this volume’s concerns and yet, like all of the best questions, they remain only partially answered. Amongst other redemptory gestures, effective guerrilla memorialisation means that the story of the defeated is

258 A. Rice and J.C. Kardux not always a story of defeat
sometimes there is contemporaneous or retrospective element of justice for the victim, as we have tried to outline in this introduction. To an extent, redemption itself might be a prize not worth the having. What we mean by this is that those millions of victims of slavery and its aftermath might be best left at least partially unredeemed, lest their full redemption undermines the memory of their suffering by essaying an over-easy closure. As James Young asserts, in discussing Holocaust victims and their memorialisation: [T]he memorial uncanny might be regarded as that which is necessarily antiredemptive. It is that memory of historical events which never domesticates such events, never makes us at home with them, never brings them into the reassuring house of redemptory meaning. It is to leave such events unredeemable, yet still memorable, unjustifiable yet still graspable in their causes and effects.50

Such a call for the value of irresolvability, unhomeliness and incompleteness might seem a damp squib of a clarion call. The historiography of slavery is, however, replete with examples of its victims being used for the political aggrandisement and/or the redemption of others. Maybe what is needed is a modesty of aims in the face of slavery’s tremendous horrors whilst remembering that these narratives must be told, remembered and judiciously fashioned because they are vital. Hershini Bhana Young reminds us of the . . . centrality of diasporic Africans to the building of modernity. Black bodies were the indispensable coerced mechanisms of labor, the Other against whom the whiteness of the imperial subject was formed. Diaspora Africans are both inside and constitutive of modernity and outside and negated by modernity: both haunted and haunting.51

This liminal positionality is not comfortable, but it is replete with possibilities that African diasporan writers and artists have used to mould future-directed texts, artworks and artefacts (memorial spaces) that haunt the transatlantic imaginary with their power and beauty: it is amidst and in answer to these various memorial spaces that this special issue hopes to weigh anchor and be haunted by ghostly presences that can interrupt an all-too-facile closure.

Memorial landscapes In May 2001 France was the first European nation to officially acknowledge responsibility for its slavery past by adopting the Taubira Act, which recognised the slave trade and slavery as crimes against humanity and thereby lent strong moral support to grassroots movements that were mobilising around the creation of slavery memorials elsewhere in Europe.52 However, it took three years before the bill, which was introduced into the French National Assembly in 1998 by Christiane Taubira, a black representative from French Guiana, who in May 2012 was appointed as Minister of Justice by newly elected President Franc¸ ois Hollande, became a law. This delay, partly caused by redraftings of the bill to avoid reparation claims, indicates that public recognition of the nation’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade and colonial slavery did not come easily, but elicited contestation and strife. In his essay on the memorialisation of slavery in France, Charles Forsdick sees an empty plinth in the Panthe´ on in Paris, left vacant when plans to place the remains of

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Toussaint Louverture there failed, as emblematic for what he argues is the continued silencing of slavery and the absence of the enslaved in French national memorial practices. Since the late 1940s French memorialisation practices include celebration of the 1848 abolition of slavery, casting white oppressors in the self-congratulatory role of emancipators. Moreover, by representing the enslaved as passive recipients of the French gift of liberty, this national narrative elides the history of black resistance and revolutionary agency that marked the first abolition, in the early years of the Haitian Revolution. Ironically, this emphasis on abolition is perpetuated in the traditional broken chain symbolism of the national slavery monument Le Cri, L’E´crit, which was unveiled by President Jacques Chirac in 2007 but whose impact is greatly diminished by its location amongst a host of other, unrelated statues. Forsdick points out, however, that the ambiguity of these memorial practices in France, which tend to forget whilst they remember, paradoxically enables alternative monumental practices that allow the inscription of contesting memories into the public space whether it be in the form of vandalism of imperial statues or artistic interventions such as Lubaina Himid’s guidebook collage on Paris, which imagines how the French capital would appear different if the historical presence of peoples of African descent had been included in its memorial cityscape.53 Moreover, Forsdick notes the increasingly important role that museums play as ‘‘sites of remembrance and recognition.’’ Although there is no French equivalent of the International Slavery Museum (ISM) in Liverpool or the National Institute for the Study of Dutch Slavery and its Legacy (NiNsee) in Amsterdam, the city museums of the trading ports Nantes and Bordeaux began to call attention to the cities’ slave trading histories in the early 1990s and have now successfully integrated this history in various prominent exhibits on the two cities’ history. The most distinctive memorial project, however, is the Memorial to the Abolition of Slavery in Nantes, which was opened in March 2012, after the completion of Forsdick’s essay. The product of fruitful collaboration between community activists and the city council, this memorial museum dramatically intervenes into the memorial landscape. Conceived of as an ‘‘urban, political and art project’’ and designed by the artist Krzysztof Wodiczko and architect Julian Bonder, it consists of two layers: a pedestrian esplanade at the very spot on the city’s waterfront where slave ships used to dock as well as an underground walkway beneath it (see Forsdick Figures 4 and 5, 292
3). Visitors are invited to contemplate the nearly 2000 small commemorative plaques embedded in the pavement of the street-level esplanade, displaying the names and dates of all French slave ship expeditions as well as the numbers of slaves transported and slaves who died during the voyage, and to reflect on the abolitionist texts that flank the underground passage, whose low ceilings and exposed supporting beams are meant to evoke the atmosphere and soundscape of the holds of the slave ships. Although the memorial is dedicated to abolition, the performative act of walking along the passage, like the slavery trails in Lancaster, challenges visitors to come to an embodied sense of understanding the history and experience of slavery that radically undermines the reductionist narratives of abolition that long dominated memorial practices in France. The turn to museums as civic spaces of commemoration and remembrance and the promotion of the new memorial in Nantes by the local tourist board54 signal a new phase in the memorialisation of slavery and its legacies that is also evident in other locales. As Marian Gwyn shows in her essay, in the approach to the 2007

260 A. Rice and J.C. Kardux commemoration of the bicentenary of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, museums and heritage organisations throughout the United Kingdom considered, often for the first time and not without intense debate and mixed results,55 how to interpret their nation’s role in the historical trauma of the slave trade and seek recognition for hitherto unexplored regional and local links to this shameful history of enslavement. Focusing on heritage sites in Wales, a country that in a postindustrial age has come to rely heavily on heritage tourism, Gwyn explores how the bicentenary enabled a revisioning of Wales’ past. While Wales’ heritage industry is traditionally centred around its romantic, castle-dotted historical landscapes as well as its industrial past and radical labour history, both governmental and nongovernmental heritage organisations and local museums faced two challenges: firstly, educating visitors as to the full extent of Welsh involvement in Atlantic slavery, from which not only the Welsh landed elite had profited but also, albeit indirectly, its artisan, merchant and labouring classes, and secondly, attracting non-traditional visitor groups to their exhibitions. One of Gwyn’s three case studies, the travelling exhibition ‘‘Everywhere in Chains . . . Wales and Slavery’’ developed by the government-funded CyMAL, Wales’ Museums, Archives and Libraries service, expressly and successfully sought diverse community engagement in developing the project. Gathering advice on which stories to tell and how to tell them, the project was able to engage young black groups as well as members of various minority groups, including asylum seekers and refugees
groups that in the past were often excluded from and hence alienated by Welsh heritage presentations. An important contribution they made to the project was that, at their behest, the commemorative project was expanded to include human rights and fair trade, as well as contemporary forms of enslavement and human trafficking. Gwyn’s second case study, the National Trust’s contribution to the 2007 bicentenary commemoration, produced mixed results. Gwyn discusses one castle owned and managed by the National Trust that organised a successful exhibition on ‘‘Sugar and Slavery,’’ addressing not only the former owners’ connections with the West Indies but also establishing a link with the family’s history of poor labour relations with the slate quarrymen on their Welsh estate. Other properties within the National Trust, however, either remained silent or made only half-hearted or misplaced efforts to display connections with slave-based economies in the West Indies, evincing the same kind of ambivalence that often vex attempts to include slavery in the interpretations of plantation museums in the US South. Gwyn’s third case study, however, Gateway Gardens Trust’s ‘‘Bittersweet’’ project is an example of more politically engaged memorialisation. Established in order to broaden access to Wales’ historic grounds and gardens, the Trust brought ‘‘multicultural, disabled, and socially excluded groups’’ to its heritage gardens in the bicentenary year, trying to engage them with the history of slavery by showing how the globalisation of trade connected with the transatlantic slave trade is also reflected in the plant variety found in the gardens. Like the quays of Nantes and Bordeaux and the marshlands of Lancaster, the romantic Welsh countryside too is a memorial landscape. Anne Eichmann’s essay takes us to a part of the world that has been largely neglected by scholars working on the memorialisation of slavery: Mauritius, a small island in the Indian Ocean, some 800 kilometres east of Madagascar. The island’s current multiethnic population reflects a history of colonisation by one European nation after another, all of whom imported enslaved Africans, as well as, after

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abolition, indentured servants from India, imported by the British to replace the slaves. Government initiatives in the mid-1980s to break the silence surrounding Mauritius’ history of slavery had little effect, but the slave heritage sector was revitalised in the later 1990s with the unveiling of a monument to the Unknown Slave in the capital Port Louis and a reconceptualised exhibition in the National History Museum in Mahebourg. Shortly thereafter, in 1999, Le Morne Mountain in the southwest of the island became a focal point in the heritage landscape owing to its historical association with the Maroons, who used it as a hideout. Comparing the monument and the exhibition from the late 1990s with the memorialisation of Le Morne, which was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2008, Eichmann identifies an important paradigm shift that also is reflected in the ways the memory of slavery is narrativised elsewhere. Whereas the 1990s monument and exhibition represent the enslaved as passive victims, the Le Morne project, taking its cue from the Maroons’ successful resistance against slavery, has produced a narrative that stresses their agency, resilience, and liberation. Eichmann links the heritage paradigm of ‘‘victimage’’ with local public debates in the 1990s about the malaise creole, a theory reminiscent of (controversial) sociological theories about the black family and black poverty in the United States in the 1960s,56 which perceived high unemployment rates, poverty, and low education levels amongst the contemporary Creole population of the island as a legacy of slavery. The agency and resistance model of slavery heritage, on the other hand, emerged after a violent uprising in Mauritius in response to the death of a popular Creole singer, allegedly due to police brutality, in 1999. In the wake of the uprising it was increasingly argued by intellectuals and others that the social pathology and victimisation discourse actually contributed to Creole marginalisation rather than helping to explain it and that a more positive Creole identity was needed to break out of this vicious circle. Representations of the Maroons of Le Morne as freedom fighters would allow Creoles to take pride in their slave heritage, potentially leading to self-empowerment and emancipation. Thus Eichmann shows that the shifting constructions of slave heritage in public debates as well as in memorial figurations and museum interpretations can be, and are being, mobilised for both liberal and conservative purposes. On the one hand, Le Morne as a local symbol of slave resistance and agency serves as source of racial pride and black self-empowerment, but on the other hand it also serves a national political interest in that it provides an opportunity to deflect attention from the more divisive aspects of slavery heritage: social inequality and exclusion. Eichmann’s astute observations about the racial and national politics of the construction of slavery heritage can also be applied productively to other (trans)national contexts. At the same time, Eichmann argues that the older slavery monument in Port Louis, depicting the enslaved as a depersonalised mass of victims, allows for a more liberal political reading as well. By inviting visitors to walk around it, the circular monument, like the trails in Lancaster or the recently opened memorial of Nantes, can produce an embodied response to the history it commemorates that challenges the depersonalisation of the enslaved. The narrative construction of memories of slavery and collective African diasporic (and local African) identities is also the subject of the last two contributions to this special issue, which both focus on Ghana, West Africa. In contrast with Europe and the United States, in Ghana heritage tourism was a

262 A. Rice and J.C. Kardux primary motive for the memorialisation of the transatlantic slave trade. In developing the slave fortresses Elmina and Cape Coast Castle as tourist sites in the 1990s, as anthropologist Edward Bruner pointed out in 1996, most Ghanaians were not particularly concerned with slavery but primarily saw these historic buildings as a resource for economic development; any historic value these 500year-old constructions might have had to them extended beyond the 250-year period in which they were the main nexus in the trade between European and African slave traders. For the African American tourists they hoped to draw to these sites, however, the castles were ‘‘sacred ground’’ and their return to Africa a homecoming.57 It is precisely this ‘‘heritage dissonance’’58 between Ghanaian entrepreneurs and African American heritage tourists that was central to the ‘‘Homeward Bound’’ middle passage of Afro-Atlantic writer Caryl Phillips’ The Atlantic Sound (2000). Both Bruner and Phillips argue that, from a Ghanaian perspective, African Americans become, in Bruner’s words, ‘‘almost ‘too emotional’’’ when they visit the castles and dungeons where their ‘‘ancestors’’ were held before being stowed onto slave ships bound for places like Sullivan’s Island near Charleston, South Carolina, where Phillips began the journey he recounts in his book.59 However, the at times satirical detachment with which Phillips describes the proceedings at the Panafest at Elmina and the local population’s seeming indifference to the emotional history and heritage that brought the tourists for whom this annual cultural festival was organised may both be read as at once symptoms of and self-protective responses to the historical trauma of slavery. The underlying cause of both the collective amnesia Bruner describes and Phillips’s satirical distance may well be that, to quote Mercer again, as descendants of slaves and (in the case of many members of the Ghanaian elite) slave traders they ‘‘are haunted by too much memory.’’60 This reading is corroborated in the essay by Senam Okudzeto and interview with Caryl Phillips with which this special issue of Atlantic Studies concludes. More than a dozen years after the publication of Bruner’s article and The Atlantic Sound, Okudzeto, a young Ghanaian artist and scholar who herself is a descendant of both slaves and slave traders, observes a notable change in the ways that Ghanaians approach and have begun to work through their fraught history of both victimage and complicity in the slave trade as well as their complex and often conflicted relationships with Africans in the diaspora. Restoration work on the slave castles and the creation of monuments in remembrance of the slave trade, such as the one at the former trading port Atorkor that Okudzeto discusses in some detail, may have been economically motivated, aiming to attract tourism. However, together with the revenues generated by tourism, they have also gradually fostered a newly emergent recognition of the historical trauma of the slave trade and have begun to shape Ghanaian communities’ understanding of themselves in relation to the trade. Okudzeto’s own family memories and stories are amongst the new narratives of the Black Atlantic that have begun to break what Toni Morrison once called ‘‘a silence within the race,’’61 a silence that was deepened by the stigma on slave descent in Ghanaian culture, which has long complicated West Africans’ relationship with the diaspora. Though these new narratives are often conflicting or ambiguous, they are grounded in a new awareness of complicity and a culture of remorse that seeks reconciliation with diasporic Africans. In an interview with Alan Rice, conducted on the riverside of Battery Park, only a few blocks away from the African Burial Ground in Lower Manhattan (Figure 3)

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Figure 3. The African Burial Ground National Monument has become a site of pilgrimage for many African Americans. Here a group of freshmen from Howard University learn about the burial ground’s history and the African symbols on the circular wall of the lower level of the monument, which can be entered through a narrow opening in the monument visible in the background. Photograph by Johanna Kardux (October 2010).

on September 28, 2011, Caryl Phillips reflects back on the ideas and feelings that went into writing The Atlantic Sound, providing us with new insights into this extended travel meditation. When asked about the detachment with which he wrote

264 A. Rice and J.C. Kardux about his experiences at the Panafest in Ghana, he initially says that most of his emotional investment had already gone into the historical novels about slavery he had written previously and that in his travel narrative he had been mainly interested in exposing the business side of the memorialisation of the Middle Passage. However, in response to Rice’s probing questions he concedes that imagining the dungeons and manacles in his fiction before actually encountering them in Elmina may have been a way to protect himself. In this light, his satirical detachment towards both the entrepreneurial Ghanaians and over-emotional African Americans may indeed have been a ‘‘coping mechanism’’ to prevent himself from being overwhelmed by emotion, like some of the African American tourists he describes when they are confronted with the dungeons of Elmina. Because he had imagined them before seeing them in person, the slave castles to him were a ‘‘strangely familiar,’’ that is, uncanny, ghostly place. Although in The Atlantic Sound he satirises African Americans’ desire to return ‘‘home’’ to Africa, his conscious or unconscious reference to the German word ‘‘unheimlich’’
which, as Freud explains in his 1919 essay ‘‘The Uncanny,’’ means feeling at once not at home, yet strangely familiar or at home62
shows his own complex feelings about West Africa in general and the slave castles in particular. Talking first in the third person about the desperation that exists in the diaspora ‘‘to somehow exorcise the ghosts and the haunting memories of the past’’ and ‘‘arrest the haemorrhaging tide of memory,’’ Phillips then turns to the first person as he talks about the need ‘‘to stand in the actual place [of violence and rupture] and say I’m no longer afraid, . . . I can take possession of . . . the ugliest, the most difficult part of my past.’’ Rather than taking distance from a too emotional engagement with the trauma of the Middle Passage, he agrees with Rice that the past can only be ‘‘exorcise[d] . . . through possession.’’ This is precisely the memory work that not only Phillips’ novels and essays, but also all the memorial projects that are discussed in this special issue
and the volume as a whole
engage in: to exorcise the ghostly legacy of slavery by taking possession of it. At the same time, there are also important elements of reparation and restitution that go into this memory work. Talking about the historical misrepresentations of the history of slavery, Phillips expresses his sense of ‘‘social and political responsibility . . . to repair that narrative.’’ The ghosts of the slavery past will return to haunt us if we don’t enter, to borrow Phillips’ phrase, the ‘‘difficult territory’’ where they dwell and confront them, with the will to make reparations. At the beginning of her essay, Okudzeto mentions one such act of reparation: in 2009 the Dutch government returned the preserved head of Badu Bonsu II, chief of Ahanta, a region west of Elmina, to his descendants in Ghana. The severed head, a sinister counterpart to Fanny Johnson’s ghostly hand, was discovered by Dutch author Arthur Japin during his research for a historical novel on two young Ashanti ‘‘princes’’ who were brought to the Netherlands in 1837 as part of an illegal slave trading deal between the Dutch government and the Chief of the Ashanti, the father of one of the boys.63 In the Elmina records in the National Archives in The Hague, one of the repositories of slavery’s ghostly legacies, Japin came across the story of Badu Bonsu II who was killed by the Dutch during a punitive expedition in 1838. Two emissaries from the Dutch garrison at Elmina Castle had been killed by the Ahante and news had reached the Castle that their heads were hung as trophies on Bonsu’s throne. In retaliation, the Dutch hanged Bonsu and then decapitated him. His head, which was preserved in formaldehyde, was shipped to the Netherlands in

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1838
according to the records, ‘‘in the interest of science.’’64 It ended up in the depots of the Anatomical Museum of Leiden University’s Medical Centre, where as a result of the publicity around Japin’s novel it was brought to light after gathering dust there for 171 years. The restitution of Bonsu’s head and the public acknowledgement by the Dutch government in the presence of Ghanaian representatives that ‘‘Our common past also includes the infamous slave trade, which our traders engaged in and sustained’’ seem to have been genuine, if belated and flawed, attempts to offer symbolic reparation.65 A similar gesture towards reparation and reconciliation was a visit in 1995 by a delegation of chiefs from Ghana to the African Burial Ground in New York. This eighteenth-century burial place for enslaved and free Africans and African Americans was discovered accidentally during excavations for the construction of a new federal office building in Lower Manhattan in the early fall of 1991, which unearthed, quite literally, what historian George Frederickson in a different context has called ‘‘the skeleton in the American closet.’’66

Figure 4. This wall in the African Burial Ground’s new Visitors Centre displays photos of all 419 archaeological digs where human remains were found. Some artifacts found with the remains suggest cultural connections with Africa, such as a string of waist beads and cowrie shells that were found in one burial. A heart-shaped design made out of tacks on a coffin lid is associated with the Ghanaian sankofa symbol, which is used as the ABG’s logo as it signifies the need to go backward in order to move forward; however, the coffin design’s African origin has been contested. Photograph by Johanna Kardux (October 2010).

266 A. Rice and J.C. Kardux A total of 419 human remains were eventually disinterred (Figure 4), a mere fraction of the 10,000
20,000 people of African origin that are believed to have been buried at the site, which originally extended to about six acres, much of it still under some of Manhattan’s most valuable real estate.67 The skeletal remains were transported to Howard University, a traditionally black university in Washington DC, for scientific research. The historic find sparked intense and often divisive public debates about the preservation, scientific investigation, and proper memorialisation of the historic black cemetery. The African American Burial Ground remained a site of contestation and negotiation for more than 15 years; most of this time the site was an empty space amid the surrounding high rises as a spectral reminder of the erasure of slavery from the city’s public memory.68 In 2003 the remains were finally brought back to New York and ceremonially reinterred at the site. In 2007 the African Burial Ground National Monument was officially dedicated and three years later a new visitors’ centre adjacent to the monument, with an entrance at 290 Broadway, was opened (Figure 5). It was in the early stages of this highly contentious memorialisation process that the Ghanaian delegation visited both the African Burial Ground in New York and the human remains at Howard University in 1995. At the burial site, they performed

Figure 5. The final exhibit as one exits the ABG Visitors Centre links the past to the present by paying tribute to the descendant community, whose civic activism was crucial to the development of the memorial site. Competing voices and narratives are incorporated into the exhibit through recordings of short interviews, allowing visitors literally to hear the ‘‘heritage dissonance’’ amongst the site’s various stakeholders. Photograph by Johanna Kardux (October 2010).

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libations and ceremonially ‘‘asked forgiveness for what was done that caused us to be scattered all over the world.’’69 The fact that the visit was part of a trade mission and occurred at the time that Ghana was beginning to develop its heritage tourism does not necessarily make it less meaningful as a gesture of reconciliation. Visiting memorials like the African Burial Ground can be both a pilgrimage and an opportunity for critical historical reflection and reparation. Erika Doss even sees it as a source of redemption. She argues that ‘‘redemption does not have to be solely bound to national narratives of domination and denial,’’ as many scholars working on trauma and memorialisation and wary of too facile closure have suggested. Redemption may also, according to Doss, be ‘‘a critically and affectively engaged narrative that acknowledges failure, defeat, and damage as it simultaneously aims to bear witness, right wrongs, and imagine a better future.’’70 Adding historical depth to the memorial landscapes and cityscapes in which they are placed, memorials such as the African Burial Ground challenge visitors, like the protagonist of Teju Cole’s novel Open City, to reflect on the tragic history of slavery and its local and global legacies and contemporary relevance to continuing human rights violations and human trafficking. Located in the oldest part of New York, in close vicinity to Wall Street and Ground Zero as well as the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, the African Burial Ground National Monument speaks critically to the narratives of US exceptionalism that these more famous heritage and memorial sites tend to reproduce. Exposing the fact that slavery was not an institution peculiar and confined to the US South, this historic resting place of black colonial New Yorkers invites visitors to recognise and engage with a difficult history that, as the essays in this special issue show, is an intrinsic part of a transnational heritage. It is only when we confront this history that we can begin, in Dominick LaCapra’s words, to distance ourselves from its ‘‘haunting revenants’’ and lay its ‘‘ghosts to rest.’’71 Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank Eliza Dear for sharing her reminiscences with Alan Rice and Melinda Elder for first bringing his attention to this difficult history. We would also like to thank Elizabeth Burns for editorial help, Lisa Merrill for discussions about the Great Exhibition, and Dorothea Fischer-Hornung for her meticulous care, trust and infinite patience during the writing of this introduction and indeed the production of the whole volume.

Notes on contributors Alan Rice (PhD Keele) is Professor in English and American Studies at the University of Central Lancashire. He has worked on the interdisciplinary study of the Black Atlantic for the past two decades, which resulted in his first monograph, Radical Narratives of the Black Atlantic (Continuum, 2003). He has been involved as a public academic on the Slave Trade Arts Memorial Project in Lancaster, as editor in chief of Manchester’s Revealing Histories Website and as a co-curator for the Whitworth Art Gallery Manchester’s 2007
8 exhibition Trade and Empire: Remembering Slavery. His latest book Creating Memorials, Building Identities: The Politics of Memory in the Black Atlantic, published in November 2010 (paperback 2012) by Liverpool University Press, was written with the help of an AHRC research grant. He has also continued the work on black abolitionists in Britain started in his co-edited Liberating Sojourn: Frederick Douglass and Transatlantic Reform (1999) by editing a special issue of Slavery and Abolition on transatlantic abolitionism with Fionnghuala Sweeney (May 2012). He has given public lectures and keynote presentations in Britain, Germany, the United States and France and contributed to documentaries for the BBC, Border Television

268 A. Rice and J.C. Kardux and public broadcasting in America. His articles have appeared in a wide range of journals including, Slavery and Abolition, Atlantic Studies, Patterns of Prejudice, Journal of American Studies and Research in African Literatures. His latest publication is a catalogue essay for Manchester’s We Face Forward 2012 exhibition on West African Art. Johanna C. Kardux (PhD Cornell) teaches American Studies at Leiden University in the Netherlands. With Eduard van de Bilt, she has written Newcomers in an Old City: The American Pilgrims in Leiden, 1609
1620 (3rd ed. 2007) and a short book (in Dutch) on Barack Obama and U.S. racial history (2009). She is co-editor (with Rosemarijn Hoefte) of Connecting Cultures: The Netherlands in Five Centuries of Transatlantic Exchange (1994); (with Doris Einsiedel) of Moving Migration: Narrative Transformations in Asian American Literature, LIT Verlag, 2010); and (with Rocı´o G. Davis and Dorothea Fischer-Hornung) of Aesthetic Practices and Politics in Art, Media, and Music: Performing Migration (Routledge 2011). In recent years her research has focused on public memory and slavery in a transnational perspective.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6.

7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

Walcott, ‘‘The Muse of History,’’ 64. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 22. Walcott, Omeros, 192. Morrison, ‘‘A Bench By the Road,’’ 4. On the occasion of Morrison 75th birthday, the Toni Morrison Society launched the ‘‘Bench by the Road Project’’ in 2006 with the aim of creating ‘‘an outdoor museum that will mark important locations in African American history both in the United States and abroad.’’ Besides Sullivan’s Island, commemorative benches have been placed in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, Oberlin, Ohio, Paris, France, and elsewhere. See ‘‘Bench by the Road Project.’’ Cole, Open City, 220
1. Walking on the quays of Battery Park, a ‘‘busy mercantile part of the city in the nineteenth century,’’ Cole’s protagonist remembers the historical connections of modern corporations like the City Bank of New York with the slave trade and plantation slavery, which their antebellum predecessor companies had both facilitated and profiteered from. Ibid., 163. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic, and Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery. Spillers, ‘‘Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,’’ 207. Dark Tourism is a relatively new disciplinary area which undertakes the study of sites of death and disaster and touristic visits to such environs. Pioneering work in the field is brought together in Sharpley and Stone, eds., The Darker Side of Travel. A new institute for Dark Tourism Research (iDTR) was opened in 2012 at the University of Central Lancashire. See: http://www.dark-tourism.org.uk/ Adams, Wounds of Returning, 87. Elder, The Slave Trade and the Economic Development of Lancaster. Dear, In Celebration of the Human Spirit, 3. Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return, 30
1. Quoted in Dear, In Celebration of the Human Spirit, 9. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 24. Quoted in Williams, Memorial Museums, 50. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 75. This document was displayed in the Sailors, Surgeons, Settlers - Four Hundred Years of Black and Asian History in Lancashire exhibition organised by the Lancashire Record Office at the Lancaster Maritime Museum, 2010. Day-Book of Henry Tindall, n.p. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 73
4. Young, Haunting Capital, 5. Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture of Taste, 109. Flowers and Himid, Abolished?, n.p.

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24. Rice, Creating Memorials, 13
6. 25. Lancaster Slave Trade Town Trail. More information and the download can be found at http://www.globallink.org.uk/slavery/ 26. Kowaleski-Wallace, The British Slave Trade, 55. 27. Ibid., 59. 28. Ibid., 55. 29. Ibid., 59. 30. Lancaster Slave Trade Town Trail. 31. Alan Rice discusses this memorial and its ramifications for memorialisation in Lancaster and beyond at length in his Creating Memorials, Building Identities. Most important for our discussion here is the way that Captured Africans by its naming of the perpetrators performs ‘‘a guerrilla memorialisation that works against traditional historiography. Such guerrilla memorialisation confronts Lancaster’s citizens with their past in ways that work against a traditional memorial praxis which has tended toward unifying viewers principally around sympathy with the victims,’’ 50. The memorial is pictured in this volume to illustrate Lubaina Himid’s ‘‘Monument Talk,’’ which was delivered at the inaugural public meeting of the Lancaster Slave Trade Arts Memorial Project (STAMP) who were later to commission it. 32. Lancaster Slave Trade Town Trail. 33. Sue Flowers, One Tenth. 34. Flowers and Himid, Abolished?, n.p. 35. Sue Flowers, One Tenth. 36. Flowers and Himid, Abolished?, n.p. 37. Young, Haunting Capital, 19. 38. Gilroy, ‘‘Off-shore Humanism,’’ 23. 39. Rice and Crawford, Liberating Sojourns, 1
12. 40. Rice, Creating Memorials, 62
4. 41. Merrill, ‘‘Exhibiting Race,’’ 322. 42. Merrill, ‘‘Exhibiting Race,’’ 330. 43. Quoted in Merrill, ‘‘Exhibiting Race,’’ 330. 44. Ricoeur, Memory, History, and Forgetting, 500. 45. Mercer quoted in Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic, 328. 46. Quoted in Lombardi-Diop, ‘‘Ghosts of Memories,’’ 166
7. 47. Young, Haunting Capital, 11. 48. Benjamin, ‘‘Museums and Sensitive Histories.’’ 49. Hartman, Lose Your Mother, 192. 50. Young, After Images of the Holocaust, 155. 51. Young, Haunting Capital, 47. 52. On September 2, 2001, during a speech at the first World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, Dutch Minister of Integration and Urban Affairs, Rogier van Boxtel, publicly expressed the Dutch government’s ‘‘deep remorse’’ for the Netherlands’ role in the transatlantic slave trade. He repeated these words a week later in the former Dutch colony Surinam and again on July 1, 2002, during the unveiling of the National Monument for the Remembrance of the Netherlands’ Slavery Past and Legacy. See Kardux, ‘‘Monuments of the Black Atlantic,’’ 105, n. 42. Tony Blair likewise expressed ‘‘deep sorrow’’ for Britain’s role in the slave trade; see ‘‘Blair ‘Sorrow’ Over Slave Trade.’’ Earlier, during a visit to Africa in April in 1998, US President Bill Clinton said that ‘‘Going back to the time before we were even a nation, European-Americans received the fruits of the slave trade and we were wrong in that.’’ Bennett, ‘‘Clinton in Africa.’’ All three government leaders and officials came under attack for falling short of issuing a full apology, much less full responsibility in the sense of reparations. 53. For a discussion of Himid’s 2009 satirical performance piece What Are Monuments For? Possible Landmarks on the Urban Map, see Rice, Creating Memorials, 14
6, 23
8, and Rice, ‘‘Tracing Slavery,’’ 254
8. 54. Nantes.Tourisme: The Abolition of Slavery Memorial Museum. 55. As Gwyn mentions in her essay, the main criticism of the official commemorations of the 2007 bicentenary in Britain was that, like the anniversaries in France that Forsdick

270 A. Rice and J.C. Kardux

56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

discusses, they tended to focus on and celebrate white abolitionists as the givers of freedom. On the ‘‘abolitionist myth’’ and the 2007 bicentenary, see Cubitt, Smith and Wilson, ‘‘Introduction,’’ 1
19; see also Wood, The Horrible Gift of Freedom. The influential 1965 Moynihan Report, titled The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, controversially, made a very similar diagnosis in the US, attributing black poverty and single-parent households to the legacy of slavery. Moynihan, The Negro Family. Bruner, ‘‘Tourism in Ghana,’’ 291
3. ‘‘Heritage dissonance’’ (or ‘‘dissonant heritage’’) is an influential concept in (dark) tourism studies coined by Tunbridge and Ashworth in their Dissonant Heritage. See also Eichmann’s essay later in this special issue of Atlantic Studies, 328. Bruner, ‘‘Tourism in Ghana,’’ 293; Phillips, Atlantic Sound, 172
8. Quoted in Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic, 328. Angeles Carabi, ‘‘Conversation with Toni Morrison,’’ 38. As Freud points out, the German word ‘‘heimlich’’ (meaning homely, but also secretive) is paradoxically identical with its opposite ‘‘unheimlich’’ (unhomely, or uncanny), both being derived from the German word for ‘‘home.’’ Freud, ‘‘The Uncanny,’’ 345. The story is told in Japin’s novel, which was translated into English as The Two Hearts of Kwasi Boachi (2001). Kessel, Zwarte Hollanders, 78. Corder, ‘‘Dutch Return Severed Head.’’ Frederickson, ‘‘The Skeleton in the Closet,’’ para.1. Draft Management Recommendations for the African Burial Ground. Ch. 2: ‘‘Historic Background of the African Burial Ground,’’ 13. For a discussion of these debates, see Kardux, ‘‘Slavery, Memory, and Citizenship.’’ Quoted in Goodnight, ‘‘Messrs. Dinkins, Rangel, and Savage on the African Burial Ground,’’ 521
2. Doss, Memorial Mania, 308. LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, 90.

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