Humiliated Silence: Multiculturalism, Blame and the Trope of “Moving On” (original) (raw)
Related papers
The issue of slavery has received wide public and media attention in response to the bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act of 1807. In this context, admissions of guilt and apology are potent and confronting as they threaten to disrupt the collective self-understanding of Britain and Empire. As such, the silenced narrative of minority groups found little place within the British cultural semantics for remembering Abolition. This paper will examine the rhetorical resources drawn upon in policy, media and public discourses to understand and soothe the traumatic history of the exploitation of African people, and uses critical discourse analysis to do so. The result, it will be argued, is a way of talking about the transatlantic slave trade which we have labelled the ‘abolition discourse’. The data used emerges from formal institutional talk (parliamentary debates and political speeches), media reporting and everyday talk (observed through a range of computer-mediated communication forums).
Forgetting to Heal: Remembering the Abolition Act of 1807
This paper investigates the ways in which the cultural memory surrounding the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade was negotiated and reaffirmed in Britain. It examines official government responses and those of visitors at a number of museums. It also considers its replication in popular culture, drawing on its dissemination through the film Amazing Grace. In comparing the discourses weaving their way across these various genres, our aim is to demonstrate how collective social consciousness became lodged in a wider political agenda. This paper thus highlights the rhetoric employed to distance the past of the transatlantic slave trade from the present, thereby contributing to a process of historical erasure rather than tackling the lingering social and political affects of a traumatic past.
Troubling recognitions in British responses to modern slavery
The British Journal of Criminology
This article interrogates the advent of modern slavery policy in Britain, explaining how the police and NGO sector have welcomed an organized crime model, politically conceived in 'excessively positive' terms. Deploying Christopher Bollas' (1993: 167) concept of 'violent innocence', defined as a defence against the 'desire to be innocent of a troubling recognition', we argue that the politics of modern slavery render it difficult for many to imagine offenders as anything other than the 'evil' nemesis of 'innocent' victims. The article argues for the need to be mindful of Britain's historical role in the advent of slavery and practices like it, and recognition of the extent to which immigration control practices exacerbate the vulnerabilities to exploitation modern slavery policy attempts to tackle.
Debating the Slave Trade: Rhetoric of British National Identity, 1759-1815
2009
Based on the impressive corpus of documentation on display here, I came away willing to be persuaded of proto-racism, or the development of an available language of race that figured prominently in the subsequent expulsion of the moriscos and the rise of the plantation complex in the Americas. Enemies and Familiars brings both arresting detail and rigorous analysis to the question of late medieval slavery, discrediting the traditional domestic model of integration. Combining social, cultural and legal history, Blumenthal's work recaptures the lives of labourers and masters alike, a rare feat among histories of the premodern era.
2014
This thesis maps the public, collective memory of slavery in Liverpool from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the present day. Using a discourse-analytic approach, the study draws on a wide range of 'source genres' to interrogate processes of collective memory across written histories, guidebooks, commemorative occasions and anniversaries, newspapers, internet forums, black history organisations and events, tours, museums, galleries and the built environment. By drawing on a range of material across a longue durée, the study contributes to a more nuanced understanding of how this former 'slaving capital of the world' has remembered its exceptional involvement in transatlantic slavery across a two hundred year period. This thesis demonstrates how Liverpool's memory of slavery has evolved through a chronological mapping (Chapter Two) which places memory in local, national and global context(s). The mapping of memory across source areas is reflected within the structure of the thesis, beginning with 'Mapping the Discursive Terrain' (Part One), which demonstrates the influence and intertextuality of identity narratives, anecdotes, metaphors and debates over time and genre; 'Moments of Memory' (Part Two), where public commemorative occasions, anniversaries and moments of 'remembrance' accentuate issues of 'performing' identity and the negotiation of a dissonant past; and 'Sites of Memory' (Part Three), where debate and discourse around particular places in Liverpool's contested urban terrain have forged multiple lieux de memoire (sites of memory) through 'myths' of slave bodies and contestations over race and representation. Through its approach, structure and methods of analysis, this thesis argues that Liverpool's memory of slavery has been complicated by varying uses of the past alongside contemporary circumstance and context. However, and as the long durée approach has demonstrated, ongoing engagements with this history continue to impact and influence subsequent commemorations, creating mnemonic legacies across time. Additionally, the memory of slavery in Liverpool has been further complicated by the ongoing memory of context; the place of other significant moments in the city's social, economic, political, and, especially racial history. The discourse-analytic approach, moreover, demonstrates memory's active and interactive dynamics, which incorporate broader societal discourses, and reveal the social processes of collective memory.
Communication, Culture and Critique, 2022
Recent discussions on “decolonizing” knowledge production have often foregrounded the importance of centering “marginal” perspectives, which is crucial but insufficient as it risks leaving the canon untouched. Jürgen Habermas’ book on the bourgeois public sphere is one of the most frequently cited and debated canonical texts in media and communication studies. Drawing on the case of London’s coffee houses and newspapers, this article argues for a critical re-engagement with canonical thinkers. It examines what the emergence of a bourgeois public sphere in 17th- and 18th-century England looks like if we re-read it within the context of slavery and the slave trade. The article demonstrates that race does not simply provide another “prism” to examine the bourgeois public sphere but instead enables and is constitutive of it. The reproduction of canonical silences through the continued circulation of influential texts has implications for how we conceptualize racialized publics in contemporary times.