Creating memorials, building identities: the politics of memory in the Black Atlantic, by Alan Rice, Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2010, 244 pp., £65.00 (hardback), ISBN 9781846314711
Through a set of broad, diverse and provocative investigations Alan Rice seeks to ‘dialogise’ the history of Atlantic slavery with other forms of remembrance and accounting, especially biography, folklore, memorials and artistic representations. Rice is clearly opposed to the essentialising of the experiences of Atlantic slavery for the purpose of producing narrowly nationalistic narratives, whether that implies the triumphal remembering of British abolitionism or the commodification of the middle passage by African American entrepreneurs. Instead, Rice is keen to recover the circum-Atlantic weave of these experiences and, through this, to promote an alter-remembering of Atlantic slavery in the various public spheres of the circum-Atlantic world. This ‘guerilla memorialisation’ works to rewrite the stories of slavery from the bottom up, to reflect a more accurate and human face of the enslaved, and above all to rescue the experiences of slavery from their antiquarian documentation so as to testify to the way the legacies of slavery resonate affectively and effectively in the contemporary world.
Rice embarks upon a dazzling set of engagements with various forms of guerrilla memorialisation. In Lancaster, where civic memorials focus on the merchant class of the slaving era, Rice draws attention to the various prose and poetries that reanimate Sambo, the unknown slave who occupies a lone grave in the town. Seeking to commemorate the enslaved rather than the merchants, Rice documents the activities of the Slave Trade Arts Memorial Project. Rice then explores the subversion of permanent collections in various museums and galleries of the north-west of the UK. He investigates the work of various artists who recontextualise the official representations of the past by inserting links between the objects of curators and the Atlantic world of slavery. Deepening this focus on the north-west and its connected history to New World slavery, Rice examines artworks that weave together cotton and cloth to expose the relatively linked fortunes of freed (European) and coerced (African) labour. Often documented in opposition to each other, Rice shows how artwork can retrieve the radical past of Manchester labourers regarding their support for abolition and Lincoln's North during the US civil war.
Rice then moves to other locales and, in a key chapter, focuses upon the circum-Atlantic resonance of jazz as both trope and subject. Engaging primarily with Toni Morrison, Rice explicates the jazz aesthetic as a form of guerrilla memorialisation to the extent that the practice of improvisation constantly renews the dialogue of the slave past with the post-emancipation present. By exploring the work of Jackie Kay, Rice also reveals how jazz acts kinetically to connect the experiences of the African diaspora in less examined locales such as Scotland. However, Rice injects a note of caution with regard to the dangers of African-American voices overriding the experiences of others in the diaspora, and I shall return to this point presently. Subsequently, Rice turns to the contribution of African diaspora troops to the Allied struggle in World War II and charges the official memorialisation with separating this struggle from those against segregationist policies of the Allied powers. Rice mobilises contemporaneous poetry and contemporary novels to retrieve the struggle against Jim Crow segregation of African-American troops in the UK so as to expose the way in which black troops effectively fought a ‘double war’ for democracy at home and abroad. Finally, Rice turns to artistic explorations of the African diaspora that, by situating their representations within the water of the Atlantic itself, refuse to be either nationally bound or categorically separated from African shores.
On this note, I would like to push Rice to explore further the importance of African shores for guerrilla memorialisation. Even though he is aware of the dangers in doing so, Rice focuses primarily upon the African-American experience and the way in which it resonates through the Atlantic world. By doing so, he possibly over-represents the African diasporic experience through the tropes common to cultural studies of African-American modernity and dominant in the US-centred Western academy. Consistently, Rice primarily evokes images of hybridity and flux. It is not that these evocations do not capture some fundamentals of the African diasporic experience – they do. Yet there are others. What if Rice had incorporated a chapter that focused solely upon Caribbean tropes, especially those arising not from jazz but from reggae and in particular the Rastafarian imaginary? For in this trope the emphasis slides more towards African roots than it does towards American hybridity. Must the guerrilla memorialisation of Atlantic slavery necessarily affirm the tropes of Western modernity, or can it also affirm something perhaps more radically subversive of the Western public sphere: un-modern tropes that grasp African roots for the redemption of humanity?
Nevertheless, Rice's book is of immense value, both in terms of its content and method. In fact, Rice's argument can be read as an implicit critique of political economy. As historians of Atlantic slavery have increasingly argued, the representation of those made invisible and silent in official records requires not so much a categorical turn away from, but a creative complementing of empirics with other ‘sources’, be they oral histories, folklore, art forms, spiritual expressions, or poetry and prose. And while much has been written and contested regarding the economic significance of New World slavery to European industrialisation, it remains the case that the ledgers of slave traders and insurance companies do not directly reveal the fundamental experiences and actions of the enslaved, nor the way in which the resonances of these experiences effectively triangulate the beating heart of the modern world market. Rice's book focuses upon the UK and, in the main, the USA; but it invites an in-depth engagement by scholars of African political economy with the method and substance of ‘guerrilla memorialisation’.