Celeste-Marie Bernier - Public Art, Memorials and Atlantic Slavery

Public Art, Memorials and Atlantic Slavery

In this collection distinguished American and European scholars, curators and artists discuss major issues concerning the representation and commemoration of slavery, as brought into sharp focus by the 2007 bicentennial of the abolition of the slave trade. Writers consider nineteenth and twentieth century American and European images of African Americans, art installations, photography, literature, sculpture, exhibitions, performances, painting, film and material culture. This is essential reading for historians, cultural critics, art-historians, educationalists and museologists, in America as in Europe, and an important contribution to the understanding of the African diaspora, race, American and British history, heritage tourism, and transatlantic relations. Contributions include previously unpublished interview material with artists and practitioners, and a comprehensive review of the commemorative exhibitions of 2007. Illustrations include images from Louisiana, Maryland, and Virginia, many previously unpublished, in black and white, which challenge previous understandings of the aesthetics of slave representation.

This book was published as a special issue of Slavery and Abolition.

Celeste-Marie Bernier is a Lecturer in the School of American and Canadian Studies, University of Nottingham, and the author of African American Visual Arts, University of North Carolina Press and Edinburgh University Press, 2008. She is currently writing a monograph for Routledge on Slave Heroism in the Transatlantic Imagination.

Judie Newman is Professor of American Studies at the University of Nottingham. Her most recent book is Fictions of America: Narratives of Global Empire, Routledge, 2007. She is the editor of the first modern edition of Harriet Beecher Stowes Dred: A Tale of The Great Dismal Swamp (Ryburn BAAS American Library, 1992).

Edited by Celeste-Marie Bernier and Judie Newman

First published 2009 by Routledge
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Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2009 Edited by Celeste-Marie Bernier and Judie Newman

All rights reserved.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN10: 0-415-48315-8
ISBN13: 978-0-415-48315-5

Contents

by Celeste-Marie Bernier and Judie Newman

: Atlantic Slavery and Traumatic Representation in Museums: The National Great Blacks in Wax Museum as a Test Case

by Marcus Wood

: Am I Not a Man and a Brother? Phrenology and Anti-slavery

by Cynthia S. Hamilton

: Remembering Slavery in Birmingham: Sculpture, Paintings and Installations

by Andy Green

: Speculation and the Imagination: History, Storytelling and the Body in Godfried Donkors Financial Times (2007)

by Celeste-Marie Bernier

: Doing Good While Doing Well: The Decision to Manufacture Products that Supported the Abolition of the Slave Trade and Slavery in Great Britain

by Martha Katz-Hyman

: Sally Hemings in Visual Culture: A Radical Act of the Imagination?

by Sharon Monteith

: Interspatialism in the Nineteenth-century South: The Natchez of Henry Norman

by John Stauffer

: A Limited Sort of Property: History, Memory and the Slave Ship Zong

by Anita Rupprecht

: Other Peoples History: Slavery, Refuge and Irish Citizenship in Dnal O Kellys The Cambria

by Fionnghuala Sweeney

: Facing Slaverys Past: The Bicentenary of the Abolition of the British Slave Trade

by Anthony Tibbles

Celeste-Marie Bernier is a Lecturer in American Literature in the School of American and Canadian Studies, University of Nottingham. Her recent book, African American Visual Arts, is due for publication in September 2008 with the University of North Carolina Press and Edinburgh University Press. She is currently writing a monograph for Routledge on Slave Heroism in the Transatlantic Imagination, as well as additional articles in the history and literature of slavery, African American Studies and Visual Culture.

Andy Green is currently Research Fellow on the AHRC-funded Birmingham Stories project. Previous positions include Research and Learning Officer for the Connecting Histories project, and Lecturer in American Literature at University of Nottingham. His research interests are public history, transatlantic studies and cultural diversity.

Cynthia S. Hamilton is currently an Associate Fellow of the Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford. She teaches American Literature and Culture at the Manchester Metropolitan University, Cheshire. Her current research focuses on the discourses that gave the reform literature of the antebellum period its emotional potency.

Martha Katz-Hyman, a former associate curator at Colonial Williamsburg, was part of the team that furnished the Carters Grove Slave Quarter. She is now an independent curator whose areas of study include slave material culture of eighteenth-century Tidewater Virginia and the commercialisation of the movement to abolish the slave trade.

Sharon Monteith is Professor of American Studies at the University of Nottingham. She is author of monographs and articles and editor of collections predominantly on the culture, literature and film of the American South. She is currently completing a book on the Civil Rights era in the melodramatic imagination.

Judie Newman is based at the School of American and Canadian Studies at the University of Nottingham. Her most recent book is Fictions of America: Narratives of Global Empire (Routledge, 2007). She is the editor of the first modern edition of Harriet Beecher Stowes Dred: A Tale of The Great Dismal Swamp (Ryburn BAAS American Library, 1992).

Anita Rupprecht lectures in the School of Historical and Critical Studies, University of Brighton. She has published articles on postcolonial theory, the politics of cultural memory and colonial autobiography. Her current research project concerns the representation of transatlantic slavery in relation to discourses of moral sentiment and political economy in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Atlantic world.

John Stauffer is Chair of the History of American Civilization and Professor of English and African American Studies at Harvard University. His areas of expertise include slavery and abolition, social protest and photography. He is the author of numerous books including The Black Hearts of Men, and has just completed a book on Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln.

Fionnghuala Sweeney is Lecturer in Comparative American Studies at the University of Liverpool. Her research focuses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Irish, American and Caribbean literature. She is particularly interested in Atlantic exchanges and postcolonial theory, and is the author of Frederick Douglass and the Atlantic World (2007).

Anthony Tibbles is Director of Merseyside Maritime Museum, National Museums Liverpool. He was the project leader for the Transatlantic Slavery Gallery at the museum and led the content team for the new International Slavery Museum. He has written and lectured on the interpretation of transatlantic slavery, and has acted as an adviser to slavery-related projects in the United Kingdom, Senegal and the United States.