Monument Building, Memory Making and Remembering Slavery in the Contemporary Atlantic World (original) (raw)
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Anny-Dominique Curtius, 2020
In Silencing the Past, Michel-Rolph Trouillot observes: Theories of history have a rather limited view of the field of historical production. They grossly underestimate the size, the relevance and the complexity of the overlapping sites where history is produced, notably outside of academia. […] We are all amateur historians with various degrees of awareness about our production. We also learn history from similar amateurs. Universities and university presses are not the only loci of production of the historical narrative. (1995: 19-20) Memorials and museums in Martinique have long been related to the history of colonization, but for the past twenty years new dynamics have been reconfiguring the memorializing landscape of Martinique. From the renaming of streets and squares in the southern towns of Le Diamant 1 and Rivière-Pilote, 2 for example, to memorializing performances or the creation of associations such as Mi Mès Manmay Matinik (AM4) 3 [Here are the Traditions of Martinican People], new memorializing initiatives remap collective memory within communities and in urban landscapes. In dialogue with Trouillot's argument, this essay examines how three memorials encapsulate and commemorate the entangled and traumatic memory of the transatlantic slave trade and slavery while interrogating and challenging the very definition of a memorial,
Over the last twenty years the public memory of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery emerged as a global phenomenon in various Atlantic centers in the Americas, Europe, and Africa. Places of remembrance of the Atlantic slave trade, such as memorials, museums, and monuments, very often emphasizing victimhood, depict naked and starving black bodies packed in slave ships. In Gorée Island, Cape Coast, Elmina, and Ouidah, these traumatic journeys are represented by gates and doors of no-return that mark the transition to confi nement, forced migration, and forced labor. However, o cial initiatives, most of them led by UNESCO, also had unexpected outcomes. In Brazil, Benin, and England, memorialization of slavery has also helped rehabilitate the memory of the perpetrators of crimes against humanity. By considering this complex context, this chapter examines the public memory of three slave merchants who were deeply in involved in the Atlantic slave trade in three di erent societies located in three di erent continents (Brazil, presentday Republic of Benin, and England): Francisco Félix de Souza (1754-1849), Joaquim Pereira Marinho (1816-1887), and Robert Milligan (1746-1809). This chapter seeks to explain how despite the o cial international projects aimed at promoting the memory of the victims of the Atlantic slave trade, the memory of these perpetrators continues to occupy a prominent place in the public space. Although these three individuals plied their slave-trade activities in three di erent continents, several elements of their public memory remain very similar. Indeed, in Brazil, England, or Benin, these three slave merchants are almost never depicted as perpetrators, but rather as benefactors and great businessmen. This chapter attempts to shed light on the public representations of these slave merchants and how these three societies, which were deeply involved in the Atlantic slave trade, dealt with the memory of the victims and the memory of the perpetrators in the public space.
For a long time, the impact of Atlantic slavery on European societies was discussed in academic circles, but it was no part of national, regional and local histories. In the last three decades this has changed, at different rhythms in the former metropolises. The 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in France (1998) and the 200th anniversary of the prohibition of the slave trade in Great Britain opened the debates to the broader public. Museums and memorials were established, but they coexist with monuments to slave traders as benefactors of their town. In Spain and Portugal the process to include the remembrance of slavery in local and national history is developing more slowly, as the impact of slave trade on Spanish and Portuguese urbanization and industrialization is little known, and the legacies of recent fascist dictatorships are not yet overcome. This article focuses on sites of commemoration and silent traces of slavery.
Monument, Memory and Destruction: Voices from the Past and Cries in the Present
Monuments, tombs, statues, artistic performances and digital images, driven by the issue of memory, through the movement of criticism and destruction, are the key concepts of this article, which was composed as a joint (two-author) essay. These concepts are intertwined with Walter Benjamin's thought and inferential examples, mostly connected to the politics of the past and its echoes in the present. The political issues quoted in the essay are related to colonial times as well as to the present, accentuating the racial mixture of the Brazilian people expressed through an allegorical type: the caboclo/cabocla.
A voice for the past: making 'public' slavery heritage in Rio De Janeiro
This article discusses the first steps of slavery heritage making in the port region of Rio de Janeiro, after the prolonged institutional forgetting of the city's slave past. The material presented shows that this slavery memorialisation interweaves with the contemporary flourishing of affirmative action in favour of Afro-descendants in Brazil, which aims to redress historically-rooted social inequalities and to include 'minorities' in the nation. In spite of its inclusive aims, however, the making of slavery heritage in Rio also exposes old and new social imbalances. Some imbalances are revealed, for example, by the different times that certain social actors (i.e., black social movements) have joined the process of public memorialisation in relation to others (i.e., archaeologists and the city council). Other imbalances are revealed through the political meanings that black activists now attach to slavery heritage in support of their struggle.
THE THOUGHTFUL MUSEUM Remembering and Disremembering in Africa
In remembering the attainment of political emancipation, post-independence African countries have learned to narrate the official national narrative and to forget other stories. Commemoration of the nation's past almost always goes hand in hand with officially decreed national amnesia. Therefore, the story of the nation has to be narrated and remembered by forgetting certain aspects of the colonial past. By implication the dual act of remembering and forgetting sets the pattern for how the postcolonial African nation narrates itself in the postcolonial moment. Focusing on Kenya as an example, this paper argues that the national commemoration of political emancipation from colonial rule tends to silence narratives of opposition and political incarceration that emerge in the postcolonial moment. The outcome is a remembering-and-forgetting battle that has implications for how diverse individuals conceive of themselves collectively as a nation and how they forge or fail to forge a coherent collective memory.