Confronting The Ghostly Legacies of Slavery The Politics of Black Bodies Embodied Memories and Memorial Landscapes

Atlantic Studies
ISSN: 1478-8810 (Print) 1740-4649 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjas20
Confronting the ghostly legacies of slavery: the

politics of black bodies, embodied memories and
memorial landscapes
Alan Rice & Johanna C. Kardux
To cite this article: Alan Rice & Johanna C. Kardux (2012) Confronting the ghostly legacies of
slavery: the politics of black bodies, embodied memories and memorial landscapes, Atlantic
Studies, 9:3, 245-272, DOI: 10.1080/14788810.2012.702524
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14788810.2012.702524
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Atlantic Studies
Vol. 9, No. 3, September 2012, 245272
Confronting the ghostly legacies of slavery: the politics of black bodies,

embodied memories and memorial landscapes
Alan Rice and Johanna C. Kardux*
This introductory essay discusses the legacies of the transatlantic slave trade
across three continents. It begins by investigating the historical amnesia about the
trade which has only recently and in some geographies been ameliorated, taking
as a point of departure observations by Nobel Prize Winners Derek Walcott and
Toni Morrison, who were in the vanguard of a movement to memorialise it. The
essay moves on to discuss not only traditional memorials, walking trails and
artworks, but also ghostly legacies of the trade, including human body parts.
Taking the small slave port of Lancaster, England, as a key case study, the essay
draws on recent theoretical work on corporeality, spectrality, Holocaust studies,
trauma, dark tourism, the Black Atlantic and memory studies to interrogate the
meanings of these legacies. The way that black agency contributes to new
understandings of the horrors of the slave trade is demonstrated by discussion of
William Wells Browns intervention at the Great Exhibition of 1851. Such
guerrilla memorialisation is shown at work historically and in recent
memorialisations of the trade. Moreover, its urgent need in the wake of
contemporary issues of forced labour from the African continent is discussed.
The final section on memorial landscapes summarises the essays in this volume
and discusses the links between the various locales. France, which is trying to
come to terms with its history through legislation and the creation of memorials,
is discussed as a slave power case study. The new memorial in Nantes is an
important municipal response to the legacy of the trade and by its esplanade
design is linked back to the city trails in Britain discussed earlier in the essay.
Other geographies with slaving pasts such as Wales and Mauritius are introduced,
as well as the African Burial Ground in New York. The essay ends where it
started, on the West Coast of Africa, with a reflection on heritage tourism and the
complex legacies of slavery on the slave castle coast.
Keywords: memorials; slavery; dark tourism; heritage tourism; slave forts; slave
ports; spectrality; memory; trauma
I accept this archipelago of the Americas. I say to the ancestor who sold me, and to the
ancestor who bought me. I have no father, I want no such father, although I can
understand you, black ghost, white ghost, when you both whisper history, for if I
attempt to forgive you both I am falling into your idea of history which justifies and
explains and expiates, and it is not mine to forgive, my memory cannot summon any
filial love, since your features are anonymous and erased and I have no wish and no
power to pardon. You were when you acted your roles, your given, historical roles of
slave seller and slave buyer, men acting as men, and also you father, in the filth-ridden
gut of the slave ship, to you they were also men, acting as men, with the cruelty of men,
your fellowman and tribesman, not moved or hovering with hesitation about your
common race any longer than my other bastard ancestor hovered with his whip, but to
you, inwardly forgiven grandfathers, I, like the more honest of my race, give a strange
thanks, I give the strange and bitter and yet ennobling thanks for the monumental
groaning and soldering of two worlds, like the halves of a fruit seamed by its own bitter
*Emails: arice@uclan.ac.uk; j.c.kardux@hum.leidenuniv.nl

ISSN 1478-8810 print/ISSN 1740-4649 online
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14788810.2012.702524
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246 A. Rice and J.C. Kardux
juice, that exiled from your own Edens you have placed me in the wonder of another,
and that was my inheritance and your gift.
Derek Walcott, The Muse of History (1974)1
[G]hosts are never innocent: the unhallowed dead of the modern project drag in the
pathos of their loss and the violence of the force that made them, their sheets and
chains . . . . Following ghosts is about making a contact that changes you and refashions
the social relations in which you are located. It is about putting life back in where only a
vague memory or a bare trace was visible to those who bothered to look. It is sometimes
about ghost stories, stories that not only repair representational mistakes, but also strive
to understand the conditions under which a memory was reproduced in the first place,
toward a counter-memory of the future.
Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters (1997)2
It is almost a quarter century since Toni Morrison and Derek Walcott commented on
the erasure of the public memory of slavery from the colonial wharves3 of North
American and Caribbean port cities that served as places of disembarkation for
millions of enslaved Africans. In 1989 Morrison observed that visitors to Charleston,
Savannah, New York, or Providence looked in vain for a place to contemplate these
cities dark history and summon the presences or recollect the absences of the
enslaved Africans who helped build them.4 We think of the past/as better forgotten
than fixed with stony regret, Walcott wrote a year later in his epic poem Omeros.
The award of the Nobel Prize in Literature to descendants of slaves in two
consecutive years to Walcott in 1992 and Morrison in 1993 marked not only an
acknowledgement of these authors literary achievements, but also a growing
consciousness throughout the Atlantic world of the need to restore to public
memory the history of their ancestors enslavement. In the 20 years that have passed
since then, slave descendants from Charleston, South Carolina, to New York City,
from Liverpool and Lancaster to Middelburg in the Netherlands and Nantes in
France, have successfully campaigned for local or national memorials in public
recognition of and as atonement for these cities and nations involvement in the slave
trade and colonial slavery. As a result of these efforts, the memorial landscapes of
these port cities with connections to the transatlantic slave trade have been
powerfully altered by the inclusion of monuments, plaques, museums, heritage
trails, and public art works that call attention to and commemorate the trade in
human cargo and the exploitation of forced labour on which their economies were
founded historically to a greater or lesser degree.
During his peregrinations in New York City, the protagonist of Nigerian-
American author Teju Coles critically acclaimed novel Open City (2011), for
example, stumbles upon a grassy plot surrounded by huge office buildings in
Lower Manhattan to which his attention is drawn by a sculpture or architecture,
still under construction, whose inscription identified it as a memorial for the site of
an African burial ground. This accidental discovery of what is now the African
Burial Ground National Monument, which was unveiled in 2007, spurs an extended
meditation on the layered history of the city: discarding the squabble about the
construction of the monument, he writes, What I was steeped in, on that warm
morning, was the echo across centuries, of slavery in New York.5 Such echoes exist
in locations across the circumatlantic world and are at the heart of Lubaina Himids
Atlantic Studies 247
call for memorialising them adequately, a call that she made in a 2003 intervention in
Lancaster, which inspired the 2005 memorial in that city and which is printed for the
first time in this special issue of Atlantic Studies. Other essays in this volume attest to
this transformation of the memorial landscapes not only in the cities in North
America and Europe where, to paraphrase Coles protagonist, slavers ships were
financed, built, outfitted, insured, and launched,6 but also at various sites in West
Africa that supplied their human merchandise and in long-neglected geographies of
the slave trade such as Mauritius, an island some 800 kilometres east of Madagascar,
off the coast of southeast Africa.
Ghostly legacies
But let us first return to the two epigraphs at the beginning of this introduction,
which introduce themes crucial to the memorialisation of the slave trade and its
aftermath that the essays in this special issue interrogate. Firstly, the Nobel Prize-
winning, St. Lucian poet Derek Walcott dwells upon the legacy of a history in which
black and white, African and European bear responsibility (even if not in equal
amounts) for the ravages of a trade that brutalised both themselves and their victims,
but which led to the forging of new rich cultures in the Americas and beyond.
Walcotts ghosts whisper history; Avery Gordons idea is that such whispers should
be seen as increasingly important for the understanding of the development of the
modernity that the slave trade, as we know from Paul Gilroy, Robin Blackburn and
Ian Baucom (amongst many others), helped to usher in.7 This introduction and the
essays will interrogate some of the bare trace(s) located often in ravaged slave
bodies in Africa, Europe and the Americas and what these mean for memorialising
these histories in an amnesiacal world, providing what Gordon calls a counter-
memory of the future. As Hortense Spillers has argued, the corporeal is central in
any discussion of the Black Atlantic:
I would make a distinction in this case between body and flesh and impose that
distinction as the central one between captive and liberated subject positions. In that
sense, before the body there is the flesh that zero degree of social conceptualization
that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse or the reflexes of
iconography . . .. If we think of the flesh as the primary narrative, then we mean its
seared, divided, ripped-apartness riveted to the ships hold, fallen or escaped over-
board.8
And this dismemberment continued beyond the Middle Passage experience in the
lives of enslaved Africans on all its Atlantic shores. It continues into the post-slavery
period as a key element of remembrance for tourists and residents in cityscapes as
well as plantation locations and their hinterlands where slavery created profits
through exploited lives. Jessica Adams describes the resonances of such dark tourist
environments:9
. . . there is a comprehensive social genealogy to be found at tourist sites, in those places

where the dead are prominent. The body exists as a means of remembrance, a location
of cultural memory. But it also gets dismembered, both literally and figuratively, and its
pieces circulate through postslavery tourist economies.10
To illustrate this circulation and the meaning the dismembered black body makes in
the Black Atlantic, we present an extended anecdote and the first dismembered
body/ghostly presence in this introduction. In the mid-1990s our colleague and the
writer of the definitive history of the Lancaster slave trade, Melinda Elder,11 was
approached with a strange request. What should be done with a historical remnant
from an old Lancaster slaving family? This was no ordinary memento from the trade,
a manilla or cowrie shell that had been used as currency for buying enslaved Africans
or a shackle or branding iron used to control them. This was something much more
personal and in its way gruesome. It was a mummified black hand, perfectly
preserved and meant for display. It had been a central feature of the domestic scene
in a white British family home as late as the 1940s and thereafter was passed down as
a legacy. As Eliza Dear explains in her autobiographical pamphlet:
My story starts in the 1940s, in the Gloucestershire countryside where my parents had
settled after coming South from Lancashire. The three of us lived in a rambling
Elizabethan house, its walls covered with antlers, heads of animals and pictures of
horses. In between these in prize position over the fireplace, was a black hand. It was
dried, the bones were cut neatly and I was told it had belonged to someones favourite
slave. My mother was very proud of this hand. I used to play with it and, as I was often
lonely, I used to wish the owner of the hand was there with me.12
This narrative is particularly intriguing in a British context precisely because of the

openness of the display. By the mid-twentieth century, any traces linking slaving
families or institutions to their dark pasts were usually obliterated as shameful
indices of pasts that were hopefully long forgotten. In this family it seems to exist
almost as a trophy placed amidst hunting ephemera and like these indices of wealth
and power, exhibiting the heft of the old merchant family. The incidental details from
Dears recollection are chilling. The hand had belonged to someones favourite
slave, the implication being that it was perfectly within the rights of the owner to
continue their custodianship of the body after its death. Her mothers pride in this
frankly grotesque family heirloom is chilling, but not as disturbing as her young only
daughter being allowed to use it as a plaything. Dears mother was very proud of
the hand and her pride and that of her ancestors, which made them believe they had
the right to cut off the hand and retain it as a memento, can be understood best in
light of Dionne Brands astute observation of the way slave-owners inhabit the
bodies of their slaves:
[They are] the captors who enter the captives body. Already inhabiting them as
extensions of themselves with a curious dissociation which gave them the ability to harm
them as well. Slaves became extensions of the slave owners their arms, legs, the parts of
them they wished to harness and use with none of the usual care of their own
bodies . . . projections of the sensibilities, consciousness, needs, desires and fears of the
captors.13
For Eliza Dears mother, then, the hand is not treasured because it remembers a
family slave/servant she never knew, but because it represents nostalgia for a lifestyle
and power the family once had and exercised through their ownership of human
beings. The hand had almost certainly belonged to Frances Elizabeth Johnson
(Fanny) born in St. Kitts in the West Indies in 1751 and brought to Lancaster by her
owner John Satterthwaite in 1778. He had married Mary (Polly) Rawlins from the
Rawlins plantation on St. Kitts in 1777 and this marriage had combined two
significant Lancaster-connected families who made their money in the slave and West
Indian trades and abroad. They had considerable investments in plantations as many
other families did in the period when the city was the fourth largest slave port in
Britain. Fanny Johnson was a privileged house slave, probably Mary Rawlins
personal maid and hence crucial to her comfort on the journey and once abroad in a
new home in England. The Satterthwaite family were originally Quakers, but this
had not inhibited their slavery activities and, by the time John entered his father
Benjamins ignoble trade, they had turned Anglican, maybe a direct reaction to the
Quakers opposition to the trade. Johns letter book discusses the business with the
commercial objectivity and indifference to human suffering scholars of slavery have
become used to. In September 1781 he writes to Michael Hethering:
I am concerned in a small guineaman the Sally, Captain Harrison, who [sic] may be
expected at St. Kitts pretty soon after this letter may reach you, that if it is agreeable for
you to take her up, will you be so obliging on receipt here of to drop Mr Robinson a line
acquainting him what you think a small cargo from about 100 to 150 slaves might fetch
at your island.14
Such a discourse, common throughout the literature of the business of slavery,

enables the black presence to be marginalised and made foreign to the home port of
Lancaster. It is a business whose profits returned, but whose bodies, broken and
mutilated, remained elsewhere. What the returned public appearance of the hand
does is to interrupt such convenient elision and introduce the black flesh on which
such profits were made and of course the traumatic histories it carries with it. Cathy
Caruth reminds us that history, like trauma, is never simply ones own, that history
is precisely the way we are implicated in each others traumas.15 Timothy Brown
talks of the power of artefacts that recall such trauma, describing how they
powerfully invoke the ghosts of the past:
. . . the artefact is an analogue for traumatic repetition, it is symbolic for traumas literal
return, which engenders and forestalls the materialization or dissolution of symbolic
and political power. It is the symbolic nexus of societys wounds and celebrations.16
The freight carried by the hand is the traumatic history of the local slave traders
themselves and its link to a global history of abuse. Saidiya Hartman describes how
the body of memory that is the dominated, social collectivity of enslaved Africans
and the brutal operation of power on these captive bodies17 is always elided in the
master narratives of the powerful like the letter above with its bland detailing of
commercial operation. However, the severed hand haunts those who promote such
wilful amnesia.
The agency of black people in opposition to such elision is documented in slave
narratives and through practices such as slave song, dance and religious praxis.
However, there was little of communal black culture available for the slaves/house
servants in Lancaster and unsurprisingly the documentary trace of blacks in the late
eighteenth century is almost nonexistent. There was no nascent community as there
was in London or Liverpool at this time amongst whom Fanny Johnson could have
gained succour, though there were African descendants in the city. A black man
named Thomas Brunson, a sailor from Sunderland Point, can be located, for
example, who in 1781 signed his own marriage bond to a Mary Tomlinson, showing
that some free blacks had access to rudimentary education.18 His black writing hand
is a rare one. The Day-Book of Henry Tindall19 begun in 1759, recently discovered in
Lancashire, refers to payments to a black man called Oxford running tasks for the
slave trade merchant in the city and probably, because of the money paid to him, a
free black; but in the middle of the eighteenth century he and Fanny would have
stood out in the town where there were at most only a few dozen blacks. These
nebulous records of black presence in a city whose major Georgian buildings and
commercial success in the eighteenth century was built on the slave and West Indian
trades exemplify the importance of looking between the lines of the written record
and indeed of going beyond it to gain an understanding of the ghostly shadow
underpinning the city (Figure 1).
Thousands of miles from her home and family, Fannys nebulous position as
slave-servant meant the only family within reach were her master and mistress and
their family. The only words we have describing her life come from her baptismal
record dated April 1778 at the Lancaster Priory church. Frances Elizabeth Johnson,
a black woman servt. to Mr John Satterthwaite, an adult aged 27y. The mummified
Figure 1. 20 Castle Hill, Lancaster (1720), home to the Satterthwaite family and their slave/
servant Frances Elizabeth Johnson from 1778-? Photograph with the kind permission of Amy
Rice (5/6/2012).
hand is left to speak for her presence beyond the parish register. We can conjecture
that her hand had been kept in a sentimental act of appropriation by the
Satterthwaite family to remember a cherished slave/servant; in effect their
ownership of her body was not even interrupted by her death. In 1997 a few years
after Eliza Dear had approached Melinda Elder with her strange legacy, Fannys
mummified hand was buried in a special ceremony at the Priory church where she
was baptised. Dear had worried about what to do with the hand, how to
appropriately dispose of it. Travels to the Caribbean led her to realise that taking
it back to St. Kitts would not necessarily enable a homecoming as most of Fannys
adult life was probably spent in Lancaster. She did procure some soil from the
Rawlins plantation on the island and it was buried along with the hand in a casket, a
memento of her home island. The hand is buried in the Garden of Remembrance
alongside the Priory Church with an inscription F.E.J. 2 April 1778. This date
her baptismal date is the only marker we have, apart from the hand, of Fannys life.
Nevertheless, it still seems a strange date to choose as defining her life, being her
entrance into and the only record of her in written English history (Figure 2).
Figure 2. Memorial tablet for Frances Elizabeth Johnson placed in Garden of Remembrance
at Lancaster Priory Church, 1997. Photograph with the kind permission of Amy Rice (5/6/
2012).
Despite such ambiguities, the hand and the biography enable us to begin to
reconstruct and transcend the limited space allowed to it within white Lancastrian
discourse. It stands as a material spectre to remember other such black lives that
made little or no mark on the written record and whose presence we need to save
from the obliquity of sentimentalist or other inadequate appropriations. Sadiya
Hartman articulates this persuasive idea when she thinks of the lives ravaged by
slavery:
[T]hese traces of memory function in a manner akin to a phantom limb, in that what is
felt is no longer there . . .. The recognition of loss is a crucial element in redressing the
breach introduced by slavery. This recognition entails a remembering of the pained
body, not by way of a stimulated wholeness but precisely through the recognition of the
amputated body in its amputatedness . . . in other words it is the ravished [ghostly] body
that holds out the possibility of restitution, not the invocation of an illusory
wholeness.20
The mummified black hand is literally a phantom limb, a powerful symbol of such
amputated bodies which refuse over-easy closure. Here we can see the body acting, as
Hershini Bhana Young contends, as a form of memory . . . non-linear, heteroge-
neous, resistant and, above all, lived.21 Hartman and Youngs compelling arguments
cut across glib redemptory readings of the lived history of slavery and abolition that
either glory in the triumph of Emancipation and gloss over the horrors that went
before or wallow in sentiment, showing how slave bodies, anonymised and broken,
can intervene as spectres to perform their narrative work of radical revisionism, to
complicate shallow, self-serving readings, to show how, as Simon Gikandi reminds
us, slavery functioned as the great unconscious in the infrastructure of modern
identity.22
Guerrilla memorialisation
But how does this radical revisionism work and go beyond the pages of academic
treatises, however important they are? A partial answer might be found in
community actions that begin to reclaim the cityscapes that have traditionally
been designed to articulate the heroic stories of merchant adventurers and to make
amends and finally tell the underside, ghostly narratives of those on whose backs the
profits were made. As Lubaina Himid tells us of Lancaster, which is of course true of
many others living under the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade:
Behind doors in attics and underground are the hidden histories of a few almost
invisible African people who were owned by families engaged in a legitimate, but
immoral strategy to make a lot of money fast.23
Making these individual diasporan African stories live and breathe is a political
action that Alan Rice has called elsewhere a guerrilla memorialisation,24 a signal
intervention into a landscape that has traditionally elided their presence. In
Lancaster, this was done most effectively by a Slave Trade Town Trail which was
unveiled in 2006. Funded by Global Link, a locally based development education
charity, the Trail was made by primary school children in Lancaster under the
direction of artist Sue Flowers and historian Melinda Elder. All the texts and
drawings were, however, composed by the children themselves. It was the first
comprehensive trail on the subject for the city and is now sold cost price to tourists at
many venues throughout the city as well as being available as a free download from
the website.25 Its composition by the schoolchildren is vital to its success as, unlike
other trails usually written by local historians and drawn by professionals, it has the
unmistakable stamp of citizen engagement. Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace has
discussed the efficacy of Slave Trails for the rewriting of histories in slave ports
with especial reference to Bristol. Her discussion of the importance of such
embodied practices for understanding history26 as present day walkers evoke

absent historical players27 are particularly pertinent here. She writes:
Indeed through their dialogue with the ghosts of the past, walkers can also be seen as
performers . . .. As walkers traverse modern city streets, they participate in the making of
another historical reality . . . then walkers move toward an alternative political reality,
one in which they both recognise the need for redress and become aware of the need for
social action.28
The use by Kowaleski-Wallace of performance theory to explicate the way Slave

Trails have the potential to educate and politicise their audience is an exemplary
intervention that shows that the performing of guerrilla memorialisation is made
possible by a civic engagement that might involve merely the walking of a city with
new information that provides radical new perspectives that transform the cityscape.
The conclusion made about the effect on the story of Bristol can be transposed to
Lancaster in particular in relation to the idea of respectability or gentility, which
had been the traditional narrative enabled by beautiful Georgian houses, relics of
thriving merchant warehouses and memorial stones to ex-mayors and city
dignitaries. The Trails in both cities teach that such respectability
is now understood to cover a range of behaviours, attitudes, and positions which must
be scrutinized beneath their surface appearance. Trade itself is now understood to
connect and adjoin both place to place and people to people, facilitating fortuitous gain
for some and tragic loss for others.29
The performative act of walking the city, trail guide in hand, enables new
understanding and complicates and indeed undermines boosterist narratives that
traditionally have been promoted by official trails. The Lancaster Slave Trail
describes the Priory Church where Fanny Johnson was baptised as containing
the memorial inscriptions to the Lindow family (outside the church) and Hinde
Family (inside the church), who both made money through the Slave Trade.30 Both
are now commemorated in a more shameful way by the Trail itself and by the
Lancaster Captured Africans memorial by Kevin Dalton Johnson unveiled in 2005
that names each of them.31 Also named there is Dodshon Foster who, we are told in
the trail,
was a very wealthy man. He owned two small ships, which during five voyages carried
650 people. Many of them died on the ships. Maybe he built his house next to his
warehouse so he could see what was going on on the Quay. Dodshon Foster was a
Quaker. Some Quakers would later argue and say that slavery was not allowed, but he
thought differently.32
Sue Flowers, who had worked with the children conceiving the trail, remembered
Foster when she made her installation One Tenth, produced for the Lancashire
Museum Services Lancaster-based project Abolished? in 2007.33 Flowers work
comments acerbically on the building in which it is housed. An oil portrait of
Dodshon Foster (173092) replete with iconography that glories in his status as
merchant in tropical goods had always been centrally displayed in the old Custom
House, now the Maritime Museum. Built in 1765, this building is key to the slave
trade as it was where ship owners paid their taxes for the goods they were trading.
Flowers, though, in the wake of the Memorial and the Trails revisions of history,
wanted to highlight not Dodshons bourgeois respectability as a Lancaster merchant
whose house and warehouse adjoined the building, but his criminal involvement in
the slave trade through his ship the Barlboroughs voyages in the 1750s. Her
installation dialogises the portrait (which is retained in its usual place in the room) by
making images of Foster as a criminal and having them put behind bars in the
windows. Flowers writes:
The installation attempts to subvert our daily understanding of Lancaster and its
history. Here the wealthy merchant is transformed into a man of our times and becomes
trapped into the very fabric of the building. Here one man is criminalised reframed
inside a building which represented his wealth and power. A new representation of the
man is created in a new portrait and a series of images have become trapped behind the
protective bars of the window frames.34
The new representation of Foster reflects contemporary interpretations of his

respectable trade. There are three views of him from the front and from both sides
as if posing for a modern police headshot with the designation Dodshon Foster/
White European and the headline text:
Crime ID Reference No: 550 The Barlborough
Domicile: Lancaster, United Kingdom
Crime: Enslavement of African People35
The juxtaposition of the iconography of contemporary criminality with the historical

veneration of the portrait is meant to bring the viewer up short and present a new
and radically altered interpretation of Fosters transatlantic trading. Flowers
installation also contains images of sugar and sugar cane to emphasise the goods
which were exchanged for the slaves. The way in which enslaved Africans were made
abstract by the Middle Passage is represented at its most extreme in the 550
numbered sugar cubes that are featured in another section of the installation. Here,
the black numbers on the white cubes are dramatic, clean-cut evocations of the
economics at the centre of the slave trade that deny humanity. Flowers, though, goes
further, modelling Fosters head in fibre-glass that resembles sugar, dramatising the
way his criminal pursuit of wealth has dehumanised him, turned him into the very
commodity he selfishly pursued. As Flowers writes, the work acts as a memorial for
the dead as much as an indictment of the criminal36 and this is its strength: a site-
specific work of art that speaks to the ghosts of Lancasters slave past in the very
building where much of that trade was recorded. It is a supremely effective guerrilla
memorialisation that dramatically intervenes in the narrative of the city and attempts
to rewrite the story from the inside, right from the belly of the beast, in the Custom
House which was built to feed the insatiable desire in Lancaster and its hinterland for
the slave-produced goods and the profits they engendered. Although only a
temporary installation, the guerrilla work done by the piece was so effective that
the portrait of a criminalised Foster has been retained. Now his portrait designed to
enable us to revel in his bourgeois respectability is haunted by its criminal shadow.
What these examples of a developing consciousness of the haunting ghost of

slavery in Lancaster are designed to demonstrate is the importance of harnessing a
community to have investment in such guerrilla memorialisation in order for
consciousness to be altered. Hence, the story of Fannys hand can be interpreted in
the context of new understandings of the deeply embedded nature of slavery in the
citys history. More than this, though, Lancasters Trail is not content with history in
the immediate context but includes on its reverse side information on the horrors of
modern slavery, indicating how the ghosts of a historical slavery can be the spur to
political action against this contemporary scourge. As Hershini Bhana Young
contends, it is only by engaging with traumatic history that we can ever hope to come
to terms with it. Reparations and reconciliation are achieved not by pressing the
ghost back into its grave, but rather by multiple historical re-engagements with the
spectres that haunt (national) bodies in ways that resist closure.37
It is this learning and engagement in and from the past that Paul Gilroy identifies
as key to contemporary agendas that promote human rights in the here and now:
As well as fixing the mechanisms whereby a common indivisible humanity might be

recognised, the struggle against racial slavery tested the idea of rights, opposed the racial
boundaries placed upon citizenship and identified limits to capitalisms moral economy.
In turn, those battles generated a huge conflict with the idea of racial hierarchy . . . a
conflict that continues around us.38
Taking up positions against reactionary ideas and racially distorted histories with an
informed pro-human rights agenda is, as Gilroy asserts, not merely a contemporary
phenomenon and the City Trails outlined above continue a polemical and
performative tradition developed by a range of abolitionist activists in the nineteenth
century throughout the circumatlantic world. For instance, Frederick Douglass
promenading through British towns on the arms of white women to outrage the
racists on his British tour 184547,39 or Henry Box Brown reprising his outlandish
escape from slavery in a box (in Leeds most famously in 1851) are only the most
infamous of actions designed to highlight oppression and encourage opposition to
the ravages of slavery and its racial hierarchies during their liberating sojourns.40
Such activist interventions in Europe were an important aid to the overthrowing of
the system of slavery in the United States.
One particularly interesting example which seems to us an exemplary act of
historical, politically motivated, guerrilla memorialisation has been recently dis-
cussed by Lisa Merrill. In 1851, Merrill contends,
the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace presented a unique performance opportunity
to stage encounters in the public sphere that dramatized both the plight of enslaved
persons and the vicissitudes of interracial social acceptance in the United States and
Britain. William Wells Brown, noting this dramatic potential, described the Great
Exhibition as one great theatre, with thousands of performers, each playing his own
part.41
William Wells Brown determined that he would use this theatre for a performance
that would dramatise the evils of slavery. At the centre of the American contribution
to the exhibition was the alabaster white statue of a Greek Slave by the American
sculptor Hiram Powers. This depiction of a white woman failed dismally to articulate
the plight of the millions of black women still enslaved in the Americas. Brown,
astonished at the partiality of this narrative, used a recent caricature published in the
satirical magazine Punch, The Virginian Slave: Intended as a Comparison to
Powers [sic] Greek Slave, as a prop to lambast the inaccuracy of Powers lily-white
depiction. This caricature, as Merrill contends, both allegorized and visually
mocked the United States for its hypocrisy.42 Brown placed a copy of the caricature
in the enclosure by Powers statue as a provocation as its most fitting companion
to disrupt the statues elision of American racial realities. He announced, As an
American fugitive slave, I place this Virginian slave by the side of the Greek Slave as
its most fitting companion.43 Browns guerrilla intervention works against the
silencing of the existence of slavery on American soil and uses the performative
public space of the Great Exhibition in Britain to make his point as dramatically as
possible by exposing the hypocrisy of his homeland at the heart of its national rival.
He uses his own performing black body to symbolically undermine the hierarchies of
race coloration promoted by the white statue.
Such political acts of guerrilla memorialisation sought to highlight the human
rights abuses of slavery but as we have sought to show, they are still necessary today
in order to protect the historical record from amnesia, special pleading or
falsification in all locations where slaverys legacies survive. As Paul Ricoeur reminds
us,
[T]here is a privilege that cannot be refused to history; it consists not only in expanding
collective memory beyond any actual memory but in correcting, criticizing, even
refuting the memory of a determined community, when it folds back upon itself and
encloses itself within its own sufferings to the point of rendering itself blind and deaf to
the suffering of other communities. It is along the path of critical history that memory
encounters the sense of justice. What would a happy memory be that was not also an
equitable memory?44
It is the critical history undertaken by contemporary enlightened memory workers,

artists and curators that work to summon the ghosts of the Black Atlantic so that
they are not forgotten, marginalised or rendered mere victims of history so that
justice can be done to their historical agency and memory. Ricoeurs generalised idea
of a determined community using its own suffering past to quell the knowledge of
the suffering of others has some resonances for our case study of the Black Atlantic.
However, the special circumstances of its horrific history engender a reckoning of a
different order, as Kobena Mercer articulates:
Descendants of enslavers and enslaved alike share in a predicament arising from the
unrepresentability of the past. While the former may be unreconciled with a history that
has been wiped out of collective memory, the latter, it may be said, are haunted by too
much memory; ghosted by the floating bodies of lost and unnamed ancestors buried
beneath the sea.45
Mercers ambivalent and troubling idea that the enslaved descendants are haunted
by too much memory in a context where at the same time specific aspects of their
history have been obliterated from the historical record is redolent for many of the
case studies in this introduction and in the volume as a whole. But if there is an excess
of Middle Passage memory, in the last two decades there has also been the return of
actual African bodies crammed onto ships, trafficked and then washed up on
Mediterranean shores the ghostly memories become emblems of a new and horrific
by-product of globalisation. Nineteenth-century slave narratives now have their
twenty-first century equivalents in refugee narratives that summon Middle Passage
ghosts. Eritrean Feven Abreha Tekle writes of a journey from Libya to Italy in her
book Libera (2005):
After the guards selected us and ordered us to follow them, the camp was almost
emptied . . . . I looked around: we were a silent crowd like timorous and dreamy, nightly
ghosts, all immersed in their own thoughts . . . . I was reminded of having read
somewhere that the slave ships of two centuries earlier that were used to transport
African slaves to America were impregnated with a characteristic smell that was
impossible to erase and which was felt at a distance of many miles. On that fishing boat
it was the same thing.46
These recapitulations of sea-crossings with crowded, unsanitary conditions and high

death rates, happening beyond the consciousness of many in the rich North, mean
that contemporary attempts to resurface the hidden histories of slavery through
guerrilla memorialisation have an added urgency to engender political consequences
that will alert contemporary citizens to the horrors on Europes doorstep. Hershini
Bhana Young links oppression across the centuries:
Furthermore, contextualising slavery situates it within the exploitative networks of

global industrial capitalism, showing it, not as an anomaly but as part of other forms of
involuntary labor. Slavery thus is not as an aberration of modernity, as liberal humanists
claim, but rather essential to its paradigm.47
It is to the credit of many who have been involved in the latest memory work around
slavery that they have used their interventions to remould the meanings extant in the
archive as a political move to highlight such contemporary malpractice and horrors.
For instance, the new International Slavery Museum opened in Liverpool in 2007
refuses to be limited to portraying the evils of historical slavery but highlights
contemporary human rights abuses (including modern slavery) in a dedicated and
prominent section at the conclusion of the display in the museum.48
So there is little redemption in the past and the uncannily similar abuses of the
present seem to mock us with their nightmarish simulacra. Saidiya Hartman in her
meditations on the Middle Passage sums up the despair at a history with little hope
of redemption:
History is a battle royal, a contest between the powerful and the powerless in what
happened as well as in the stories we tell about what happened a fight to the death
over the meaning of the past. The narrative of the defeated never triumphs; like them, it
ekes out an existence in the shadow of the victors. But must the story of the defeated
always be a story of defeat? Is it too late to imagine that their lives might be redeemed or
to fashion an antidote to oblivion? Is it too late to believe their struggles cast a shadow
into the future which they might finally win?49
Hartmans interrogations are central to this volumes concerns and yet, like all of the
best questions, they remain only partially answered. Amongst other redemptory
gestures, effective guerrilla memorialisation means that the story of the defeated is
not always a story of defeat sometimes there is contemporaneous or retrospective

element of justice for the victim, as we have tried to outline in this introduction. To
an extent, redemption itself might be a prize not worth the having. What we mean by
this is that those millions of victims of slavery and its aftermath might be best left at
least partially unredeemed, lest their full redemption undermines the memory of their
suffering by essaying an over-easy closure. As James Young asserts, in discussing
Holocaust victims and their memorialisation:
[T]he memorial uncanny might be regarded as that which is necessarily antiredemptive.

It is that memory of historical events which never domesticates such events, never makes
us at home with them, never brings them into the reassuring house of redemptory
meaning. It is to leave such events unredeemable, yet still memorable, unjustifiable yet
still graspable in their causes and effects.50
Such a call for the value of irresolvability, unhomeliness and incompleteness might
seem a damp squib of a clarion call. The historiography of slavery is, however, replete
with examples of its victims being used for the political aggrandisement and/or the
redemption of others. Maybe what is needed is a modesty of aims in the face of
slaverys tremendous horrors whilst remembering that these narratives must be told,
remembered and judiciously fashioned because they are vital. Hershini Bhana Young
reminds us of the
. . . centrality of diasporic Africans to the building of modernity. Black bodies were the
indispensable coerced mechanisms of labor, the Other against whom the whiteness of the
imperial subject was formed. Diaspora Africans are both inside and constitutive of
modernity and outside and negated by modernity: both haunted and haunting.51
This liminal positionality is not comfortable, but it is replete with possibilities that
African diasporan writers and artists have used to mould future-directed texts,
artworks and artefacts (memorial spaces) that haunt the transatlantic imaginary with
their power and beauty: it is amidst and in answer to these various memorial spaces
that this special issue hopes to weigh anchor and be haunted by ghostly presences
that can interrupt an all-too-facile closure.
Memorial landscapes
In May 2001 France was the first European nation to officially acknowledge
responsibility for its slavery past by adopting the Taubira Act, which recognised the
slave trade and slavery as crimes against humanity and thereby lent strong moral
support to grassroots movements that were mobilising around the creation of slavery
memorials elsewhere in Europe.52 However, it took three years before the bill, which
was introduced into the French National Assembly in 1998 by Christiane Taubira, a
black representative from French Guiana, who in May 2012 was appointed as
Minister of Justice by newly elected President Francois Hollande, became a law. This
delay, partly caused by redraftings of the bill to avoid reparation claims, indicates
that public recognition of the nations involvement in the transatlantic slave trade
and colonial slavery did not come easily, but elicited contestation and strife. In his
essay on the memorialisation of slavery in France, Charles Forsdick sees an empty
plinth in the Pantheon in Paris, left vacant when plans to place the remains of
Toussaint Louverture there failed, as emblematic for what he argues is the continued
silencing of slavery and the absence of the enslaved in French national memorial
practices. Since the late 1940s French memorialisation practices include celebration
of the 1848 abolition of slavery, casting white oppressors in the self-congratulatory
role of emancipators. Moreover, by representing the enslaved as passive recipients of
the French gift of liberty, this national narrative elides the history of black resistance
and revolutionary agency that marked the first abolition, in the early years of the
Haitian Revolution. Ironically, this emphasis on abolition is perpetuated in the
traditional broken chain symbolism of the national slavery monument Le Cri,
LEcrit, which was unveiled by President Jacques Chirac in 2007 but whose impact is
greatly diminished by its location amongst a host of other, unrelated statues.
Forsdick points out, however, that the ambiguity of these memorial practices in
France, which tend to forget whilst they remember, paradoxically enables alternative
monumental practices that allow the inscription of contesting memories into the
public space whether it be in the form of vandalism of imperial statues or artistic
interventions such as Lubaina Himids guidebook collage on Paris, which imagines
how the French capital would appear different if the historical presence of peoples of
African descent had been included in its memorial cityscape.53 Moreover, Forsdick
notes the increasingly important role that museums play as sites of remembrance
and recognition. Although there is no French equivalent of the International
Slavery Museum (ISM) in Liverpool or the National Institute for the Study of Dutch
Slavery and its Legacy (NiNsee) in Amsterdam, the city museums of the trading
ports Nantes and Bordeaux began to call attention to the cities slave trading
histories in the early 1990s and have now successfully integrated this history in
various prominent exhibits on the two cities history. The most distinctive memorial
project, however, is the Memorial to the Abolition of Slavery in Nantes, which was
opened in March 2012, after the completion of Forsdicks essay. The product of
fruitful collaboration between community activists and the city council, this
memorial museum dramatically intervenes into the memorial landscape. Conceived
of as an urban, political and art project and designed by the artist Krzysztof
Wodiczko and architect Julian Bonder, it consists of two layers: a pedestrian
esplanade at the very spot on the citys waterfront where slave ships used to dock as
well as an underground walkway beneath it (see Forsdick Figures 4 and 5, 2923).
Visitors are invited to contemplate the nearly 2000 small commemorative plaques
embedded in the pavement of the street-level esplanade, displaying the names and
dates of all French slave ship expeditions as well as the numbers of slaves transported
and slaves who died during the voyage, and to reflect on the abolitionist texts that
flank the underground passage, whose low ceilings and exposed supporting beams
are meant to evoke the atmosphere and soundscape of the holds of the slave ships.
Although the memorial is dedicated to abolition, the performative act of walking
along the passage, like the slavery trails in Lancaster, challenges visitors to come to
an embodied sense of understanding the history and experience of slavery that
radically undermines the reductionist narratives of abolition that long dominated
memorial practices in France.
The turn to museums as civic spaces of commemoration and remembrance and
the promotion of the new memorial in Nantes by the local tourist board54 signal a
new phase in the memorialisation of slavery and its legacies that is also evident in
other locales. As Marian Gwyn shows in her essay, in the approach to the 2007
commemoration of the bicentenary of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade,

museums and heritage organisations throughout the United Kingdom considered,
often for the first time and not without intense debate and mixed results,55 how to
interpret their nations role in the historical trauma of the slave trade and seek
recognition for hitherto unexplored regional and local links to this shameful history
of enslavement. Focusing on heritage sites in Wales, a country that in a post-
industrial age has come to rely heavily on heritage tourism, Gwyn explores how the
bicentenary enabled a revisioning of Wales past. While Wales heritage industry is
traditionally centred around its romantic, castle-dotted historical landscapes as well
as its industrial past and radical labour history, both governmental and non-
governmental heritage organisations and local museums faced two challenges: firstly,
educating visitors as to the full extent of Welsh involvement in Atlantic slavery, from
which not only the Welsh landed elite had profited but also, albeit indirectly, its
artisan, merchant and labouring classes, and secondly, attracting non-traditional
visitor groups to their exhibitions. One of Gwyns three case studies, the travelling
exhibition Everywhere in Chains . . . Wales and Slavery developed by the govern-
ment-funded CyMAL, Wales Museums, Archives and Libraries service, expressly
and successfully sought diverse community engagement in developing the project.
Gathering advice on which stories to tell and how to tell them, the project was able to
engage young black groups as well as members of various minority groups, including
asylum seekers and refugees groups that in the past were often excluded from and
hence alienated by Welsh heritage presentations. An important contribution they
made to the project was that, at their behest, the commemorative project was
expanded to include human rights and fair trade, as well as contemporary forms of
enslavement and human trafficking.
Gwyns second case study, the National Trusts contribution to the 2007
bicentenary commemoration, produced mixed results. Gwyn discusses one castle
owned and managed by the National Trust that organised a successful exhibition on
Sugar and Slavery, addressing not only the former owners connections with the
West Indies but also establishing a link with the familys history of poor labour
relations with the slate quarrymen on their Welsh estate. Other properties within the
National Trust, however, either remained silent or made only half-hearted or
misplaced efforts to display connections with slave-based economies in the West
Indies, evincing the same kind of ambivalence that often vex attempts to include
slavery in the interpretations of plantation museums in the US South. Gwyns third
case study, however, Gateway Gardens Trusts Bittersweet project is an example of
more politically engaged memorialisation. Established in order to broaden access to
Wales historic grounds and gardens, the Trust brought multicultural, disabled, and
socially excluded groups to its heritage gardens in the bicentenary year, trying to
engage them with the history of slavery by showing how the globalisation of trade
connected with the transatlantic slave trade is also reflected in the plant variety found
in the gardens. Like the quays of Nantes and Bordeaux and the marshlands of
Lancaster, the romantic Welsh countryside too is a memorial landscape.
Anne Eichmanns essay takes us to a part of the world that has been largely
neglected by scholars working on the memorialisation of slavery: Mauritius, a small
island in the Indian Ocean, some 800 kilometres east of Madagascar. The islands
current multiethnic population reflects a history of colonisation by one European
nation after another, all of whom imported enslaved Africans, as well as, after
abolition, indentured servants from India, imported by the British to replace the
slaves. Government initiatives in the mid-1980s to break the silence surrounding
Mauritius history of slavery had little effect, but the slave heritage sector was
revitalised in the later 1990s with the unveiling of a monument to the Unknown Slave
in the capital Port Louis and a reconceptualised exhibition in the National History
Museum in Mahebourg. Shortly thereafter, in 1999, Le Morne Mountain in the
southwest of the island became a focal point in the heritage landscape owing to its
historical association with the Maroons, who used it as a hideout. Comparing the
monument and the exhibition from the late 1990s with the memorialisation of Le
Morne, which was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2008, Eichmann
identifies an important paradigm shift that also is reflected in the ways the memory
of slavery is narrativised elsewhere. Whereas the 1990s monument and exhibition
represent the enslaved as passive victims, the Le Morne project, taking its cue from
the Maroons successful resistance against slavery, has produced a narrative that
stresses their agency, resilience, and liberation.
Eichmann links the heritage paradigm of victimage with local public debates in
the 1990s about the malaise creole, a theory reminiscent of (controversial) socio-
logical theories about the black family and black poverty in the United States in the
1960s,56 which perceived high unemployment rates, poverty, and low education levels
amongst the contemporary Creole population of the island as a legacy of slavery. The
agency and resistance model of slavery heritage, on the other hand, emerged after a
violent uprising in Mauritius in response to the death of a popular Creole singer,
allegedly due to police brutality, in 1999. In the wake of the uprising it was
increasingly argued by intellectuals and others that the social pathology and
victimisation discourse actually contributed to Creole marginalisation rather than
helping to explain it and that a more positive Creole identity was needed to break out
of this vicious circle. Representations of the Maroons of Le Morne as freedom
fighters would allow Creoles to take pride in their slave heritage, potentially leading
to self-empowerment and emancipation. Thus Eichmann shows that the shifting
constructions of slave heritage in public debates as well as in memorial figurations
and museum interpretations can be, and are being, mobilised for both liberal and
conservative purposes. On the one hand, Le Morne as a local symbol of slave
resistance and agency serves as source of racial pride and black self-empowerment,
but on the other hand it also serves a national political interest in that it provides an
opportunity to deflect attention from the more divisive aspects of slavery heritage:
social inequality and exclusion. Eichmanns astute observations about the racial and
national politics of the construction of slavery heritage can also be applied
productively to other (trans)national contexts. At the same time, Eichmann argues
that the older slavery monument in Port Louis, depicting the enslaved as a
depersonalised mass of victims, allows for a more liberal political reading as well.
By inviting visitors to walk around it, the circular monument, like the trails in
Lancaster or the recently opened memorial of Nantes, can produce an embodied
response to the history it commemorates that challenges the depersonalisation of the
enslaved.
The narrative construction of memories of slavery and collective African
diasporic (and local African) identities is also the subject of the last two
contributions to this special issue, which both focus on Ghana, West Africa. In
contrast with Europe and the United States, in Ghana heritage tourism was a
primary motive for the memorialisation of the transatlantic slave trade. In

developing the slave fortresses Elmina and Cape Coast Castle as tourist sites in
the 1990s, as anthropologist Edward Bruner pointed out in 1996, most Ghanaians
were not particularly concerned with slavery but primarily saw these historic
buildings as a resource for economic development; any historic value these 500-
year-old constructions might have had to them extended beyond the 250-year period
in which they were the main nexus in the trade between European and African slave
traders. For the African American tourists they hoped to draw to these sites,
however, the castles were sacred ground and their return to Africa a home-
coming.57 It is precisely this heritage dissonance58 between Ghanaian entrepre-
neurs and African American heritage tourists that was central to the Homeward
Bound middle passage of Afro-Atlantic writer Caryl Phillips The Atlantic Sound
(2000). Both Bruner and Phillips argue that, from a Ghanaian perspective, African
Americans become, in Bruners words, almost too emotional when they visit the
castles and dungeons where their ancestors were held before being stowed onto
slave ships bound for places like Sullivans Island near Charleston, South Carolina,
where Phillips began the journey he recounts in his book.59 However, the at times
satirical detachment with which Phillips describes the proceedings at the Panafest at
Elmina and the local populations seeming indifference to the emotional history and
heritage that brought the tourists for whom this annual cultural festival was
organised may both be read as at once symptoms of and self-protective responses to
the historical trauma of slavery. The underlying cause of both the collective amnesia
Bruner describes and Phillipss satirical distance may well be that, to quote Mercer
again, as descendants of slaves and (in the case of many members of the Ghanaian
elite) slave traders they are haunted by too much memory.60
This reading is corroborated in the essay by Senam Okudzeto and interview with
Caryl Phillips with which this special issue of Atlantic Studies concludes. More than a
dozen years after the publication of Bruners article and The Atlantic Sound,
Okudzeto, a young Ghanaian artist and scholar who herself is a descendant of both
slaves and slave traders, observes a notable change in the ways that Ghanaians
approach and have begun to work through their fraught history of both victimage
and complicity in the slave trade as well as their complex and often conflicted
relationships with Africans in the diaspora. Restoration work on the slave castles and
the creation of monuments in remembrance of the slave trade, such as the one at the
former trading port Atorkor that Okudzeto discusses in some detail, may have been
economically motivated, aiming to attract tourism. However, together with the
revenues generated by tourism, they have also gradually fostered a newly emergent
recognition of the historical trauma of the slave trade and have begun to shape
Ghanaian communities understanding of themselves in relation to the trade.
Okudzetos own family memories and stories are amongst the new narratives of
the Black Atlantic that have begun to break what Toni Morrison once called a
silence within the race,61 a silence that was deepened by the stigma on slave descent
in Ghanaian culture, which has long complicated West Africans relationship with
the diaspora. Though these new narratives are often conflicting or ambiguous, they
are grounded in a new awareness of complicity and a culture of remorse that seeks
reconciliation with diasporic Africans.
In an interview with Alan Rice, conducted on the riverside of Battery Park, only
a few blocks away from the African Burial Ground in Lower Manhattan (Figure 3)
Figure 3. The African Burial Ground National Monument has become a site of pilgrimage for
many African Americans. Here a group of freshmen from Howard University learn about the
burial grounds history and the African symbols on the circular wall of the lower level of
the monument, which can be entered through a narrow opening in the monument visible in the
background. Photograph by Johanna Kardux (October 2010).
on September 28, 2011, Caryl Phillips reflects back on the ideas and feelings that
went into writing The Atlantic Sound, providing us with new insights into this
extended travel meditation. When asked about the detachment with which he wrote
about his experiences at the Panafest in Ghana, he initially says that most of his
emotional investment had already gone into the historical novels about slavery he
had written previously and that in his travel narrative he had been mainly interested
in exposing the business side of the memorialisation of the Middle Passage. However,
in response to Rices probing questions he concedes that imagining the dungeons and
manacles in his fiction before actually encountering them in Elmina may have been a
way to protect himself. In this light, his satirical detachment towards both the
entrepreneurial Ghanaians and over-emotional African Americans may indeed have
been a coping mechanism to prevent himself from being overwhelmed by emotion,
like some of the African American tourists he describes when they are confronted
with the dungeons of Elmina. Because he had imagined them before seeing them in
person, the slave castles to him were a strangely familiar, that is, uncanny, ghostly
place. Although in The Atlantic Sound he satirises African Americans desire to
return home to Africa, his conscious or unconscious reference to the German
word unheimlich which, as Freud explains in his 1919 essay The Uncanny,
means feeling at once not at home, yet strangely familiar or at home62 shows his
own complex feelings about West Africa in general and the slave castles in particular.
Talking first in the third person about the desperation that exists in the diaspora to
somehow exorcise the ghosts and the haunting memories of the past and arrest the
haemorrhaging tide of memory, Phillips then turns to the first person as he talks
about the need to stand in the actual place [of violence and rupture] and say Im no
longer afraid, . . . I can take possession of . . . the ugliest, the most difficult part of my
past. Rather than taking distance from a too emotional engagement with the
trauma of the Middle Passage, he agrees with Rice that the past can only be
exorcise[d] . . . through possession. This is precisely the memory work that not only
Phillips novels and essays, but also all the memorial projects that are discussed in
this special issue and the volume as a whole engage in: to exorcise the ghostly
legacy of slavery by taking possession of it.
At the same time, there are also important elements of reparation and restitution
that go into this memory work. Talking about the historical misrepresentations of
the history of slavery, Phillips expresses his sense of social and political
responsibility . . . to repair that narrative. The ghosts of the slavery past will return
to haunt us if we dont enter, to borrow Phillips phrase, the difficult territory
where they dwell and confront them, with the will to make reparations. At the
beginning of her essay, Okudzeto mentions one such act of reparation: in 2009 the
Dutch government returned the preserved head of Badu Bonsu II, chief of Ahanta, a
region west of Elmina, to his descendants in Ghana. The severed head, a sinister
counterpart to Fanny Johnsons ghostly hand, was discovered by Dutch author
Arthur Japin during his research for a historical novel on two young Ashanti
princes who were brought to the Netherlands in 1837 as part of an illegal slave
trading deal between the Dutch government and the Chief of the Ashanti, the father
of one of the boys.63 In the Elmina records in the National Archives in The Hague,
one of the repositories of slaverys ghostly legacies, Japin came across the story of
Badu Bonsu II who was killed by the Dutch during a punitive expedition in 1838.
Two emissaries from the Dutch garrison at Elmina Castle had been killed by the
Ahante and news had reached the Castle that their heads were hung as trophies on
Bonsus throne. In retaliation, the Dutch hanged Bonsu and then decapitated him.
His head, which was preserved in formaldehyde, was shipped to the Netherlands in
1838 according to the records, in the interest of science.64 It ended up in the

depots of the Anatomical Museum of Leiden Universitys Medical Centre, where as a
result of the publicity around Japins novel it was brought to light after gathering
dust there for 171 years. The restitution of Bonsus head and the public acknowl-
edgement by the Dutch government in the presence of Ghanaian representatives that
Our common past also includes the infamous slave trade, which our traders
engaged in and sustained seem to have been genuine, if belated and flawed, attempts
to offer symbolic reparation.65
A similar gesture towards reparation and reconciliation was a visit in 1995 by a
delegation of chiefs from Ghana to the African Burial Ground in New York. This
eighteenth-century burial place for enslaved and free Africans and African
Americans was discovered accidentally during excavations for the construction of
a new federal office building in Lower Manhattan in the early fall of 1991, which
unearthed, quite literally, what historian George Frederickson in a different context
has called the skeleton in the American closet.66
Figure 4. This wall in the African Burial Grounds new Visitors Centre displays photos of all
419 archaeological digs where human remains were found. Some artifacts found with the
remains suggest cultural connections with Africa, such as a string of waist beads and cowrie
shells that were found in one burial. A heart-shaped design made out of tacks on a coffin lid is
associated with the Ghanaian sankofa symbol, which is used as the ABGs logo as it signifies
the need to go backward in order to move forward; however, the coffin designs African origin
has been contested. Photograph by Johanna Kardux (October 2010).
A total of 419 human remains were eventually disinterred (Figure 4), a mere
fraction of the 10,00020,000 people of African origin that are believed to have been
buried at the site, which originally extended to about six acres, much of it still under
some of Manhattans most valuable real estate.67 The skeletal remains were
transported to Howard University, a traditionally black university in Washington
DC, for scientific research. The historic find sparked intense and often divisive public
debates about the preservation, scientific investigation, and proper memorialisation
of the historic black cemetery. The African American Burial Ground remained a site
of contestation and negotiation for more than 15 years; most of this time the site was
an empty space amid the surrounding high rises as a spectral reminder of the erasure
of slavery from the citys public memory.68 In 2003 the remains were finally brought
back to New York and ceremonially reinterred at the site. In 2007 the African Burial
Ground National Monument was officially dedicated and three years later a new
visitors centre adjacent to the monument, with an entrance at 290 Broadway, was
opened (Figure 5).
It was in the early stages of this highly contentious memorialisation process that
the Ghanaian delegation visited both the African Burial Ground in New York and
the human remains at Howard University in 1995. At the burial site, they performed
Figure 5. The final exhibit as one exits the ABG Visitors Centre links the past to the present by
paying tribute to the descendant community, whose civic activism was crucial to the
development of the memorial site. Competing voices and narratives are incorporated into
the exhibit through recordings of short interviews, allowing visitors literally to hear the
heritage dissonance amongst the sites various stakeholders. Photograph by Johanna
Kardux (October 2010).
libations and ceremonially asked forgiveness for what was done that caused us to be
scattered all over the world.69 The fact that the visit was part of a trade mission and
occurred at the time that Ghana was beginning to develop its heritage tourism does
not necessarily make it less meaningful as a gesture of reconciliation. Visiting
memorials like the African Burial Ground can be both a pilgrimage and an
opportunity for critical historical reflection and reparation.
Erika Doss even sees it as a source of redemption. She argues that redemption
does not have to be solely bound to national narratives of domination and denial, as
many scholars working on trauma and memorialisation and wary of too facile
closure have suggested. Redemption may also, according to Doss, be a critically and
affectively engaged narrative that acknowledges failure, defeat, and damage as it
simultaneously aims to bear witness, right wrongs, and imagine a better future.70
Adding historical depth to the memorial landscapes and cityscapes in which they are
placed, memorials such as the African Burial Ground challenge visitors, like the
protagonist of Teju Coles novel Open City, to reflect on the tragic history of slavery
and its local and global legacies and contemporary relevance to continuing human
rights violations and human trafficking. Located in the oldest part of New York, in
close vicinity to Wall Street and Ground Zero as well as the Statue of Liberty and
Ellis Island, the African Burial Ground National Monument speaks critically to the
narratives of US exceptionalism that these more famous heritage and memorial sites
tend to reproduce. Exposing the fact that slavery was not an institution peculiar and
confined to the US South, this historic resting place of black colonial New Yorkers
invites visitors to recognise and engage with a difficult history that, as the essays in
this special issue show, is an intrinsic part of a transnational heritage. It is only when
we confront this history that we can begin, in Dominick LaCapras words, to
distance ourselves from its haunting revenants and lay its ghosts to rest.71
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Eliza Dear for sharing her reminiscences with Alan Rice and
Melinda Elder for first bringing his attention to this difficult history. We would also like to
thank Elizabeth Burns for editorial help, Lisa Merrill for discussions about the Great
Exhibition, and Dorothea Fischer-Hornung for her meticulous care, trust and infinite patience
during the writing of this introduction and indeed the production of the whole volume.
Notes on contributors
Alan Rice (PhD Keele) is Professor in English and American Studies at the University of
Central Lancashire. He has worked on the interdisciplinary study of the Black Atlantic for the
past two decades, which resulted in his first monograph, Radical Narratives of the Black
Atlantic (Continuum, 2003). He has been involved as a public academic on the Slave Trade
Arts Memorial Project in Lancaster, as editor in chief of Manchesters Revealing Histories
Website and as a co-curator for the Whitworth Art Gallery Manchesters 20078 exhibition
Trade and Empire: Remembering Slavery. His latest book Creating Memorials, Building
Identities: The Politics of Memory in the Black Atlantic, published in November 2010
(paperback 2012) by Liverpool University Press, was written with the help of an AHRC
research grant. He has also continued the work on black abolitionists in Britain started in his
co-edited Liberating Sojourn: Frederick Douglass and Transatlantic Reform (1999) by editing a
special issue of Slavery and Abolition on transatlantic abolitionism with Fionnghuala Sweeney
(May 2012). He has given public lectures and keynote presentations in Britain, Germany, the
United States and France and contributed to documentaries for the BBC, Border Television
and public broadcasting in America. His articles have appeared in a wide range of journals
including, Slavery and Abolition, Atlantic Studies, Patterns of Prejudice, Journal of American
Studies and Research in African Literatures. His latest publication is a catalogue essay for
Manchesters We Face Forward 2012 exhibition on West African Art.
Johanna C. Kardux (PhD Cornell) teaches American Studies at Leiden University in the
Netherlands. With Eduard van de Bilt, she has written Newcomers in an Old City: The
American Pilgrims in Leiden, 16091620 (3rd ed. 2007) and a short book (in Dutch) on Barack
Obama and U.S. racial history (2009). She is co-editor (with Rosemarijn Hoefte) of
Connecting Cultures: The Netherlands in Five Centuries of Transatlantic Exchange (1994);
(with Doris Einsiedel) of Moving Migration: Narrative Transformations in Asian American
Literature, LIT Verlag, 2010); and (with Roco G. Davis and Dorothea Fischer-Hornung) of
Aesthetic Practices and Politics in Art, Media, and Music: Performing Migration (Routledge
2011). In recent years her research has focused on public memory and slavery in a
transnational perspective.
Notes
1. Walcott, The Muse of History, 64.
2. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 22.
3. Walcott, Omeros, 192.
4. Morrison, A Bench By the Road, 4. On the occasion of Morrison 75th birthday, the
Toni Morrison Society launched the Bench by the Road Project in 2006 with the aim of
creating an outdoor museum that will mark important locations in African American
history both in the United States and abroad. Besides Sullivans Island, commemorative
benches have been placed in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, Oberlin, Ohio, Paris, France, and
elsewhere. See Bench by the Road Project.
5. Cole, Open City, 2201.
6. Walking on the quays of Battery Park, a busy mercantile part of the city in the nineteenth
century, Coles protagonist remembers the historical connections of modern corporations
like the City Bank of New York with the slave trade and plantation slavery, which their
antebellum predecessor companies had both facilitated and profiteered from. Ibid., 163.
7. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic, and Blackburn, The Making
of New World Slavery.
8. Spillers, Mamas Baby, Papas Maybe, 207.
9. Dark Tourism is a relatively new disciplinary area which undertakes the study of sites of
death and disaster and touristic visits to such environs. Pioneering work in the field is
brought together in Sharpley and Stone, eds., The Darker Side of Travel. A new institute
for Dark Tourism Research (iDTR) was opened in 2012 at the University of Central
Lancashire. See: http://www.dark-tourism.org.uk/
10. Adams, Wounds of Returning, 87.
11. Elder, The Slave Trade and the Economic Development of Lancaster.
12. Dear, In Celebration of the Human Spirit, 3.
13. Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return, 301.
14. Quoted in Dear, In Celebration of the Human Spirit, 9.
15. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 24.
16. Quoted in Williams, Memorial Museums, 50.
17. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 75.
18. This document was displayed in the Sailors, Surgeons, Settlers - Four Hundred Years of
Black and Asian History in Lancashire exhibition organised by the Lancashire Record
Office at the Lancaster Maritime Museum, 2010.
19. Day-Book of Henry Tindall, n.p.
20. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 734.
21. Young, Haunting Capital, 5.
22. Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture of Taste, 109.
23. Flowers and Himid, Abolished?, n.p.
24. Rice, Creating Memorials, 136.

25. Lancaster Slave Trade Town Trail. More information and the download can be found at
http://www.globallink.org.uk/slavery/
26. Kowaleski-Wallace, The British Slave Trade, 55.
27. Ibid., 59.
28. Ibid., 55.
29. Ibid., 59.
30. Lancaster Slave Trade Town Trail.
31. Alan Rice discusses this memorial and its ramifications for memorialisation in Lancaster
and beyond at length in his Creating Memorials, Building Identities. Most important for
our discussion here is the way that Captured Africans by its naming of the perpetrators
performs a guerrilla memorialisation that works against traditional historiography. Such
guerrilla memorialisation confronts Lancasters citizens with their past in ways that work
against a traditional memorial praxis which has tended toward unifying viewers
principally around sympathy with the victims, 50. The memorial is pictured in this
volume to illustrate Lubaina Himids Monument Talk, which was delivered at the
inaugural public meeting of the Lancaster Slave Trade Arts Memorial Project (STAMP)
who were later to commission it.
32. Lancaster Slave Trade Town Trail.
33. Sue Flowers, One Tenth.
35. Sue Flowers, One Tenth.
38. Gilroy, Off-shore Humanism, 23.
39. Rice and Crawford, Liberating Sojourns, 112.
40. Rice, Creating Memorials, 624.
41. Merrill, Exhibiting Race, 322.
42. Merrill, Exhibiting Race, 330.
43. Quoted in Merrill, Exhibiting Race, 330.
44. Ricoeur, Memory, History, and Forgetting, 500.
45. Mercer quoted in Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic, 328.
46. Quoted in Lombardi-Diop, Ghosts of Memories, 1667.
48. Benjamin, Museums and Sensitive Histories.
49. Hartman, Lose Your Mother, 192.
50. Young, After Images of the Holocaust, 155.
52. On September 2, 2001, during a speech at the first World Conference Against Racism in
Durban, South Africa, Dutch Minister of Integration and Urban Affairs, Rogier van
Boxtel, publicly expressed the Dutch governments deep remorse for the Netherlands
role in the transatlantic slave trade. He repeated these words a week later in the former
Dutch colony Surinam and again on July 1, 2002, during the unveiling of the National
Monument for the Remembrance of the Netherlands Slavery Past and Legacy. See
Kardux, Monuments of the Black Atlantic, 105, n. 42. Tony Blair likewise expressed
deep sorrow for Britains role in the slave trade; see Blair Sorrow Over Slave Trade.
Earlier, during a visit to Africa in April in 1998, US President Bill Clinton said that
Going back to the time before we were even a nation, European-Americans received the
fruits of the slave trade and we were wrong in that. Bennett, Clinton in Africa. All
three government leaders and officials came under attack for falling short of issuing a full
apology, much less full responsibility in the sense of reparations.
53. For a discussion of Himids 2009 satirical performance piece What Are Monuments For?
Possible Landmarks on the Urban Map, see Rice, Creating Memorials, 146, 238, and
Rice, Tracing Slavery, 2548.
54. Nantes.Tourisme: The Abolition of Slavery Memorial Museum.
55. As Gwyn mentions in her essay, the main criticism of the official commemorations of the
2007 bicentenary in Britain was that, like the anniversaries in France that Forsdick
discusses, they tended to focus on and celebrate white abolitionists as the givers of
freedom. On the abolitionist myth and the 2007 bicentenary, see Cubitt, Smith and
Wilson, Introduction, 119; see also Wood, The Horrible Gift of Freedom.
56. The influential 1965 Moynihan Report, titled The Negro Family: The Case for National
Action, controversially, made a very similar diagnosis in the US, attributing black poverty
and single-parent households to the legacy of slavery. Moynihan, The Negro Family.
57. Bruner, Tourism in Ghana, 2913.
58. Heritage dissonance (or dissonant heritage) is an influential concept in (dark)
tourism studies coined by Tunbridge and Ashworth in their Dissonant Heritage. See also
Eichmanns essay later in this special issue of Atlantic Studies, 328.
59. Bruner, Tourism in Ghana, 293; Phillips, Atlantic Sound, 1728.
60. Quoted in Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic, 328.
61. Angeles Carabi, Conversation with Toni Morrison, 38.
62. As Freud points out, the German word heimlich (meaning homely, but also secretive) is
paradoxically identical with its opposite unheimlich (unhomely, or uncanny), both being
derived from the German word for home. Freud, The Uncanny, 345.
63. The story is told in Japins novel, which was translated into English as The Two Hearts of
Kwasi Boachi (2001).
64. Kessel, Zwarte Hollanders, 78.
65. Corder, Dutch Return Severed Head.
66. Frederickson, The Skeleton in the Closet, para.1.
67. Draft Management Recommendations for the African Burial Ground. Ch. 2: Historic
Background of the African Burial Ground, 13.
68. For a discussion of these debates, see Kardux, Slavery, Memory, and Citizenship.
69. Quoted in Goodnight, Messrs. Dinkins, Rangel, and Savage on the African Burial
Ground, 5212.
70. Doss, Memorial Mania, 308.
71. LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, 90.
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ISSN: 1478-8810 (Print) 1740-4649 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjas20

Confronting the ghostly legacies of slavery: the

Alan Rice & Johanna C. Kardux

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Confronting the ghostly legacies of slavery: the politics of black bodies,

*Emails: arice@uclan.ac.uk; j.c.kardux@hum.leidenuniv.nl

Derek Walcott, The Muse of History (1974)1

Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters (1997)2

. . . there is a comprehensive social genealogy to be found at tourist sites, in those places

This narrative is particularly intriguing in a British context precisely because of the

Such a discourse, common throughout the literature of the business of slavery,

embodied practices for understanding history26 as present day walkers evoke

The use by Kowaleski-Wallace of performance theory to explicate the way Slave

The new representation of Foster reflects contemporary interpretations of his

Crime ID Reference No: 550 The Barlborough

Domicile: Lancaster, United Kingdom

Crime: Enslavement of African People35

The juxtaposition of the iconography of contemporary criminality with the historical

What these examples of a developing consciousness of the haunting ghost of

As well as fixing the mechanisms whereby a common indivisible humanity might be

It is the critical history undertaken by contemporary enlightened memory workers,

These recapitulations of sea-crossings with crowded, unsanitary conditions and high

Furthermore, contextualising slavery situates it within the exploitative networks of

not always a story of defeat sometimes there is contemporaneous or retrospective

[T]he memorial uncanny might be regarded as that which is necessarily antiredemptive.

commemoration of the bicentenary of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade,

primary motive for the memorialisation of the transatlantic slave trade. In

1838 according to the records, in the interest of science.64 It ended up in the

24. Rice, Creating Memorials, 136.

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