Politics of Memory: Making Slavery Visible in the Public Space ed. by Ana Lucia Araujo (review)

Ana Lucia Araujo introduces this collection of essays on the subject of the public memory of slavery, the latest in Routledge’s Studies in Cultural History series, by invoking the spirit of Maurice Halbwach’s “collective memory.” Araujo argues that collective memory takes on a public character when used as a political tool for the construction of group identities. The 14 chapters that make up this book explore and historicize the diverse and fragmented practices of groups vying to articulate visions of slavery in a transnational context. While the book is not without its flaws, which I will discuss later in this review, the sheer breadth of research on the monuments and memorials used to remember slavery in the public sphere in different global locales at different points in history makes it a valuable contribution to the study of public memory, slavery, race/racism, the African diaspora, and cultural history.

Araujo’s introduction argues that the dominant narrative surrounding slavery has largely been tied to the memory of the descendants of slave owners and merchants and thus tends to obscure, silence, or ignore the memory of descendants of slaves. However, due in part to the end of colonial rule in Africa and the emergence of the civil rights movement in the United States, oppressed groups and the descendants of slaves began contesting dominant public narratives about the history of the slave trade, bringing new commemorative practices to the fore and putting pressure on institutions, nations, and individuals to recognize the centrality of the slave trade to transatlantic histories. The goals of this collection, as outlined by Araujo, are to explore the political implications of the commemorative practices of both the descendants of the enslaved and the descendants of slaveholders in a transnational context.

The book is divided into two sections. In the first section, “Slavery and Slave Trade in National Narratives,” each of the eight chapters examines the difficulties of commemorating slavery in different global locales, attending to nations in Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Chapter 1, written by Araujo, examines how the memory of slave merchants dominates the public memory of slavery. In chapter 2, Alice Bellagamba’s ethnographic fieldwork examines the relationship between visibility and silence in the West African nation of Gambia. In chapter 3, Mathieu Claveyrolas describes the conflict between Creole (African) and Indo-Mauritian memories of slavery and indentured servitude as they relate to the processes of establishing and contesting national identities in the island nation of the Republic of Mauritius. In chapter 4, Quito Swan studies the debates in Bermuda surrounding the monument to Sally Bassett to show how contestations over memory disrupt myths of benign slavery. Margot Minardi’s contribution in chapter 5 examines how nostalgia for a postemancipation racial order shapes public memory of slavery in New England. Nelly Schmidt looks in chapter 6 at how colonial authorities in the French Caribbean developed policies that lead to the forgetting of French slavery. In chapter 7, Renaud Hourcade analyzes local memory entrepreneurs’ contribution to public memory of slavery in the former French slave ports Bordeaux and Nantes. Renée Ater, in the last chapter of the first section, examines the Unsung Founders monument at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the North Carolina Freedom Monument Project in downtown Raleigh to explore how visual forms and debates surrounding memorials illuminate the way various actors and institutions remember slavery.

The second section, “Slavery and Slave Trade in the Museum,” contains six chapters about museums that commemorate slavery in England, Brazil, and the United States. Chapter 9, by Geoffrey Cubitt, and chapter 10, by Richard Benjamin, examine museums in Britain. Chapter 11, by Kimberly Cleveland, and chapter 12, by Francine Saillant and Pedro Simonard, explore museums in Brazil. Chapters 13 and 14 are set in the United States, with Kathleen Hulser looking at the New York Historical Society and Regina Faden looking at...