Uncomfortable Commemorations

A wry commentary entitled ‘Anniversaries’, by Stuart Taggart, featured in ‘London Sugar, and Slavery’ at the Museum of London, Docklands, says it all: in 2007 the UK celebrated the tenth anniversary of Diana’s death, and the sixtieth anniversaries of the partition of India and Pakistan, and of the Queen and Prince Philip’s wedding. But it had waited two hundred years to commemorate the end of the transatlantic slave-trade. It is now one year after the bicentennial anniversary of the abolition of the British slave-trade – a year in which even some of the farthest reaches of the British Isles saw commemorative events, lectures, discussions, and exhibitions addressing slavery and abolition. At this point, some might feel the topic has been pretty well exhausted: what is left to say? Others might ask, with good reason, what now? What remains? What is the legacy or long-lasting impact of a national conversation that received considerable press during 2007? Moreover, what has really changed?

To be sure, public addresses fade, memorial events are forgotten, museum exhibitions close; and many of last year’s events do appear destined for consignment to history. Both the Victoria and Albert exhibition entitled ‘Uncomfortable Truths: the Shadow of Slave Trade on Contemporary Art’ and the National Portrait Gallery’s ‘Portraits, People, and Abolition’, for example, are now gone, the former after touring Salford and Hull. These exhibitions approached the bicentennial anniversary by working largely within existing collections and by highlighting links between held objects

Fig. 1.

Wilberforce banner in Hull. Photo: the author.

Fig. 2.

Akan knife, c. 1800. While the (red) shell comes from the Baule culture (Ivory Coast), the human jawbone to which it is attached seems to come from the Akan people (present-day Ghana). The combination suggest trade and cultural interaction between the Baule and the Akan.

or portraits and themes of enslavement, economic exploitation, or abolition. In the V & A, art work was placed within permanent exhibitions to provide additional commentary on the history of slavery or race in Britain. For example, a life-size sculpture by Yinka Shonibare of a headless archer wearing an eighteenth-century gentleman’s costume fashioned out of African textiles, holding an arrow poised and ready for its target, was ironically positioned in an eighteenth-century salon to bring out the idea that violent appropriation of labour facilitated the pleasures of the drawing-room. In the same museum, a special trail could be followed to mark items in the collection with special meaning in the context of the history of slavery. Meanwhile, the National Portrait Gallery exhibition also used signage to alert visitors to notable persons with connections to the slave-trade and abolition, and it proposed new ways of interpreting well-known portraits: Carlyle, for instance, could be known as much for his racist work entitled ‘Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question’ (1853) as for his other works. Both of these exhibitions depended on visitors keen to seek out the information, and both relied mainly on self-motivated museum-goers who were primed to follow trails or maps. The large size and the labyrinthine layout of the V & A meant that viewing its exhibition was more like being on a treasure hunt; some displays were difficult to locate and view, especially for those unable to walk long distances.

In contrast, no...