Packaging Liberty and Marketing the Gift of Freedom: 1807 and the Legacy of Clarkson's Chest

How slavery should now best be remembered through the display of art and material objects is an almost impossible problem to solve. The following discussion tries to get close to three things. Firstly, I want to think about why the most successful images and objects developed by the abolition movement were made the way they were. Secondly, I want to think about the visual rhetoric of this propaganda and how well it has travelled, in other words to speculate on why some of it has remained within popular cultural currency up to this day. And thirdly, I want to think about the visual archive we are left with now - what do art objects, or indeed any objects, have the potential to tell us about the memory of slavery, and which ones have the most narrative power? When it comes to slavery, art and cultural display, we are dealing with some terrible aesthetic and moral conflicts. Should the torture implements, and restraints, used on slave bodies, or paintings and prints showing slave abuse, be put on display at all - do not these things simply invite sadomasochistic fantasy, and sentimental self-identification?¹ (Fig. 6, see catalogue no. 16.) Can, and indeed should, aesthetically beautiful work be produced about mass human trauma perpetrated on the scale of the slave trade? (Fig. 1.) Was this work made primarily by white artists, intellectuals and propagandists for an exclusively white audience, and as such can it ever truly speak for the experience of the slave, rather than for a free-white fantasy of that experience?

Bearing in mind these questions it is important to think about why Britain has decided to pour significantly large resources into a set of exhibitions and events commemorating the two hundredth anniversary of the passage of a piece of compromised and well overdue legislation. These shows celebrate the passing of a law by a series of white senior statesmen and politicians, and the 1807 Abolition Act is still generally seen as a phenomenal achievement expressive of superior British morality and religious devotion. It is, however, crucial to ensure that the extended and colossal amorality of Britain's centuries-long involvement in, and final domination of, the Atlantic slave trade does not become buried beneath a mountain of self-congratulation and biographical self aggrandizement, albeit cleverly dressed up with the sack cloth of sentiment and the ashes of nostalgia. That Britain finally abolished the slave trade was a good thing, that it constituted a moral triumph for the nation is far less certain. One thing the passage of the Abolition Act could never do was to make any form

Figure 1.

'Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On)', 1840, by Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851), oil on canvas, 90.8×122.6 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Henry Lillie Pierce fund (99.22). (© Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.)

of reparation to the millions of Africans who had already been sacrificed to the voracious needs of British, and European, imperial expansion in the Caribbean and the Americas. Another thing that this act could not, and never can, do is wash the traumatic inheritance of slavery from our collective national memory. A national moral failing of such incalculable proportions cannot disappear with the passing of an act, and so it will continue to burrow away into the cultural fat of our collective repression, and to reappear in various metamorphosed forms, some attractive, some terribly ugly.

Repression and narrative disguise surrounded the memory of slavery from the moment Britain decided it had attained the moral high ground, with the stroke of a pen in 1807. The propagandas generated by the abolition campaign, and the visual propagandas in particular, had an agenda that tended to keep the slave at a discreet and abstracted distance, and to personalize, sanctify and celebrate the white male leaders of abolition. The myth of the abolition moment is motivated by the desire to erase and re-inscribe. Within this dynamic there...