Representing Enslavement and Abolition in Museums

Ambiguous Engagements

Laurajane Smith, Geoff Cubitt, Kalliopi Fouseki, Ross Wilson, Laurajane Smith, Geoff Cubitt, Kalliopi Fouseki, Ross Wilson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415885041
• eBook ISBN: 9781136667374
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Études des musées

The year 2007 marked the bicentenary of the Act abolishing British participation in the slave trade. Representing Enslavement and Abolition on Museums - which uniquely draws together contributions from academic commentators, museum professionals, community activists and artists who had an involvement with the bicentenary - reflects on the complexity and difficulty of museums' experiences in presenting and interpreting the histories of slavery and abolition, and places these experiences in the broader context of debates over the bicentenary's significance and the lessons to be learnt from it. The history of Britain's role in transatlantic slavery officially become part of the National Curriculum in the UK in 2009; with the bicentenary of 2007, this marks the start of increasing public engagement with what has largely been a 'hidden' history. The book aims to not only critically review and assess the impact of the bicentenary, but also to identify practical issues that public historians, consultants, museum practitioners, heritage professionals and policy makers can draw upon in developing responses, both to the increasing recognition of Britain's history of African enslavement and controversial and traumatic histories more generally.

1 Introduction

Anxiety and Ambiguity in the Representation of Dissonant History

Geoffrey Cubitt, Laurajane Smith and Ross Wilson

Introduction

The year 2007 marked the two hundredth anniversary of the Act of Parliament that ended British participation in the transatlantic slave trade. Although the occasion was heralded by the then Prime Minister Tony Blair as being ‘everyone’s bicentenary’, it was marked in practice by debates and critical exchanges which had to do both with the content of the commemoration and with the spirit in which it was undertaken. These debates related not just to the question of how a particular passage of British history should be represented, but to larger issues about the relationship between past and present in British society, about whose voices have a right to be heard when this relationship is discussed, and about the implications of all of this for understandings of nation, community and identity in contemporary Britain. Museums as public institutions were influenced by these debates and were caught up in them as active participants, in ways that were in many cases supported by public funding made available through the Heritage Lottery Fund in particular. The bicentenary year saw the launching of a new International Slavery Museum in Liverpool (ISM), the reopening of a redesigned Wilberforce House Museum in Hull, the creation of new permanent galleries dealing with slavery and abolition at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich (NMM) and the Museum of London Docklands in London, and the mounting of an unprecedented number of temporary exhibitions at venues up and down the country. The latter ranged from substantial exhibitions in major conurbations, like the ‘Equiano’ exhibition at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, the ‘Breaking the Chains: The Fight to End Slavery’ exhibition at the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum in Bristol, and the ‘The British Slave Trade: Abolition, Parliament and People’ exhibition at the Palace of Westminster, to smaller displays in local or regional museums, galleries, libraries or archive centres dotted across the country. Although museums’ engagement with the history and legacy of transatlantic slavery was substantial, it was often anxious and ambiguous, reflecting uncertainties both about the social role of museums in contemporary society, and about their relationship to established narratives of national identity.

This book—which uniquely draws together contributions from academic commentators, museum professionals, community activists and artists who had an involvement with the bicentenary—seeks to reflect on the complexity and difficulty of museums’ experiences in presenting and interpreting the histories of slavery and abolition, and to place these experiences in the broader context of debates over the bicentenary’s significance and the lessons to be learnt from it. The book draws on the varied experiences of its authors, and on the work of the 1807 Commemorated project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and undertaken by the editors from 2007 to 2009. This project aimed to review and analyze museum responses to the bicentenary (embracing a detailed examination of over sixty exhibitions, and the gathering of information on roughly two hundred others), and to assist in the development of museum strategies for engaging creatively and effectively with the difficult history of transatlantic slavery and its legacies, and with other traumatic or divisive pasts.¹

The volume combines two different kinds of article. The first offers ethnographic ‘snap shots’ of responses to the bicentenary in the form of reflections by museum professionals and artists on their own experiences of exhibition development, or by community and political activists engaging critically with museum responses. The second offers critical analyses from a more academic angle, of the bicentenary in general and of governmental and museum contributions. These two groups of papers are intended to complement each other: those reflecting on personal and professional experiences provide illustrative insights for those chapters that seek to analyze broad trends and issues.

The volume is organized into four parts: Part I considers the ways in which the bicentenary year was organized and perceived, with papers offering analysis of governmental and institutional polices and responses to the bicentenary. These papers provide an important context to Parts II and III, both of which provide chapters analyzing and reflecting on the process of museum exhibitions that dealt with the history of transatlantic slavery that opened in 2007. This leads to Part IV, which critically explores the ways in which museums and their audiences engaged with issues of trauma and dissonance. As context for a more detailed exposition of the contents of these different parts of the book, the next section of this introduction will offer a general overview of museums’ exhibition development in the bicentenary year and will place this in a broader context of public debate.

Representing Enslavement and Abolition: An Overview of Museum Responses in Britain to the Bicentenary of 1807

Defining the ‘Abolitionist Myth’

Judged by any standard, the system of transatlantic slavery, as it developed between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries, was a humanitarian atrocity of massive proportions. The violent removal of millions of Africans from their families and homelands across that period; their transportation across the Atlantic in appallingly cramped and insanitary conditions; the deaths of many of them during that voyage; the harsh conditions of enforced labour on Caribbean or American plantations that lay in store for most of those who survived that voyage; the brutal punishments and vicious exploitation inflicted on them; the systematic violation of bonds of family and breaking down of cultural identity—all of these things were part of a sustained history of organized violence against individuals and communities that has left an indelible mark not just on the enslaved and their descendants, but also on the societies of Africa, of the Americas and of Europe. British society was deeply involved in this assault over a prolonged period, and social relationships within Britain today are still profoundly influenced by its legacy. While an extensive British scholarship exists on this history (Walvin 1986, 1992, 1997, 2000; Dresser 2001), there is no developed tradition of public marking and remembering connected with it (Tyrrell and Walvin 2004; Dresser 2007; Oldfield 2007). Indeed, much of this history has been met nationally with ‘humiliated silence’ (Connerton 2008), which has worked as a form of collective forgetting. The bicentenary, therefore, represented a significant challenge to museums seeking to broaden and deepen public knowledge and understanding of Britain’s role in transatlantic slavery, as well as for British society more generally—a transitional post-imperial society learning, uncertainly, to become a multicultural society. Such a society requires an active engagement with the past, as people within it need to understand the historical forces that have brought them together. That engagement needs, however, to be fluid and open-minded, receptive to different traditions and perspectives. The essentialist myths of stable and homogeneous historical nationhood that may have been instrumental in shaping earlier phases of national development need to be recognized, but must also be transcended and arguably discarded (Hobsbawm 1983). In such circumstances, the ways in which people and institutions in Britain construct and relate to the historical experience of transatlantic slavery become extremely important.

Constructions of this history have long been dominated, at least in public, by what may be called the ‘abolitionist myth’ (Wood 2000; Kowaleski Wallace 2006; Oldfield 2007). The history of enslavement has been viewed backwards, through the history of its abolition, and that history in turn has been read not as a complex story involving slave resistance and economic causation (see Williams 1994), but as a story of the heroic moral efforts of a mainly white, mainly male and mainly British abolitionist movement, represented most notably by leaders like William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson. Concern with transatlantic slavery itself has tended, in this vision, to focus less on understanding how it came about and how it functioned than on celebrating the process of its ending (Oldfield 2007). This way of organizing the public memory of slavery and abolition remained influential in 2007, notably among the political elite and in the media, but also among substantial sections of the European-British population.

Such a view has also, however, come to be vigorously criticized, notably by African-Caribbean British activists and community leaders, but also by a range of academic historians and commentators (Walvin 2009). Two strands of criticism can be identified, which were often combined in a single alternative understanding, but which could in practice lead in somewhat different directions. First, it is argued, by focusing everything on the celebration of abolitionism and presenting the key moments of abolitionist success as achievements in which Britons are encouraged to take patriotic pride, the abolitionist myth distracts attention from Britain’s long and shameful previous record as a slaving power, and from the extent to which the nation’s economic strength and consequent great power status were built on the foundation of slavery. Second, it is suggested, the myth’s tendency to play down the contribution which enslaved Africans made to their own liberation works to deny enslaved Africans and their descendants a sense of agency in their own history, and thus helps to perpetuate inequality and racism within today’s society. These criticisms partly reflect, of course, the particular but complex emotional relationship that many individuals of African heritage within British society have to the history that is being considered (see Agbetu, this volume). For many, the history of slavery is unavoidably part of African diasporan identity, its symbolic centrality reinforced by subsequent experiences of racism and social exclusion. But there is also an ambivalence here: while people of African heritage feel a powerful need for the experience of slavery to be given its full weight in public understandings of British history, they are frequently wary of a tendency to define their own social identity purely in terms of that experience, by casting Africans historically simply as victims or survivors, and not as creative agents. Many museums found that when they consulted members of African and African-Caribbean communities about the exhibitions they were planning for 2007, the pressure from those communities was not for presentations focused narrowly on the horrors of slavery, but for exhibitions which would highlight the richness and vitality of African cultural traditions, the strength of African resistance to enslavement, and the positive African and African-Caribbean contribution to modern British society.

Conflicting Responses: Affirmation or Revision

The commemoration of 1807 brought these various tensions into focus. This was partly because 1807 itself was a date about which people had conflicting feelings. It is important to remember that the Act of 1807 did not abolish slavery; it ended only British participation in the slave trade. Those who were already enslaved remained so until the further legislation of the 1830s. However, in the heroic vision of abolitionism, 1807 was still a date to celebrate (Hochschild 2006), first because it marked the first great legislative breakthrough in Britain on the road to ending slavery, and second because it signalled the moment of Britain’s moral conversion, from being the market leader in slavery to being the foremost abolitionist power. However, for critics of this ‘abolitionist vision’, 1807 was remarkable less for what it gave than for what it withheld. Indeed, it stood as an example of the kind of grudging and partial concession that would eventually allow many of the injustices and inequalities of slavery to be carried over into post-slavery societies. Many African and African-Caribbean members of British society were therefore deeply suspicious of a commemoration which they regarded as a ‘Wilberfest’—a government sponsored official commemoration, focused on William Wilberforce and his associates, in which little heed would be paid to the needs or feelings of their own communities.

Museums in 2007 found themselves negotiating for a position between these different perspectives. They struggled to appeal to two audiences simultaneously: to a predominantly white and middle-class museum-going audience, whose expectations continued to be significantly conditioned by the habit of abolitionist celebration, and to another audience, mostly drawn from African- and African-Caribbean British communities. The latter communities’ members required to be convinced, not just that the long neglected history of British involvement in slavery was now being recognized, and the issues of social justice associated with slavery’s legacy adequately addressed within British society, but also that museums were now places in which their voices might be heard, their histories acknowledged and their place in the mainstream of British history properly registered. In seizing the opportunity that 2007 offered, museums and other institutions had the sincere intention of contributing, in some way and on some level, to improving public awareness of, and engagement with, Britain’s past connections to transatlantic slavery (Prior 2007). Many institutions hoped that doing this would help establish a better understanding between the groups in British society that were currently divided by their different relationships to this history. Presenting this history in a museum context was, however, a task bedevilled by sensitivities. These sensitivities had to do not simply with the contentiousness of the overall messages and interpretations that might be offered, but with the very instruments—words, objects and images—that museums might use in articulating these messages and interpretations.

Words

The language used in exhibitions is one important area of sensitivity. It is obvious, of course, that curators wishing to make use of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century documents relating to slavery have to be careful to distance themselves from the overtly racist and derogatory terminology that these documents employ. However, the issues and sensitivities involved in this process extend further. Terms like ‘slave’ and ‘slave trade’, which until recently were used in a largely unquestioned and uncontroversial manner even in scholarly literature, and which still form part an unreflective public discourse on this history, are now exposed to criticism. Such terms, it is argued, have a tendency to replicate the assumptions about enslaved people that were a feature of transatlantic slavery itself. These assumptions made it possible, for example, to list ‘slaves’ alongside animals in the stock inventories of Caribbean plantations. In recent discussions, then, there has been pressure to replace the term ‘slave’ with ‘enslaved African’, and to substitute ‘transatlantic slavery’ for ‘slave trade’. Some museums have embraced this very actively: thus, a panel in the Museum of London Docklands’ ‘London, Sugar and Slavery’ gallery explicitly draws the question of terminology to the visitor’s attention. ‘The names and terminology used to describe and categorise people played a vital role in the whole edifice of slavery’, it says. ‘Certain words became the tools of racism and, regrettably, are still in use today’. And a little later: ‘[W]e have tried to avoid using terms that strip individuals of their humanity, since this was a tactic central to the imposition of slavery’ (see Spence, this volume). Not all museums, however, have felt so confident in negotiating the linguistic minefield.

Objects

Sensitivities also arise over the display of certain categories of object. Objects drawn from African societies are an example of this. Curators and institutions felt under pressure to include sections that would show the wealth and sophistication of African societies before the slave traders’ arrival. Many of the objects that could be used to do this, however, were ones whose presence in British museum collections resulted from the plundering of African societies by European powers. This had taken place either in connection with the slave trade itself, or in the wake of later imperialist operations that had antislavery as their pretext—the famous Benin bronzes in the British Museum being only the most obvious example. Although some museums—the Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery in its Human Cargo exhibition, for example—chose deliberately to highlight this issue of provenance as part of their engagement with British society’s slaving and colonialist connections, others were understandably reticent and apprehensive about how their use of these objects might be viewed.

Images

A further set of sensitivities arose with a different category of objects—abolitionist images and artefacts. The most famous of these was the image of the kneeling slave, soliciting his freedom with the caption ‘Am I not a man and a brother?’, designed as a medallion by the abolitionist manufacturer Josiah Wedgwood, and then reproduced on a wide range of other products—teapots, snuff-boxes, buttons, pieces of embroidery, among others. The image (which also existed in a female version, captioned ‘Am I not a woman and a sister?’) became more or less the logo of the British abolitionist movement and a vital element in the visual and material culture through which abolitionist ideas and commitments were disseminated (Oldfield 1995; Webster 2009). It is difficult for museums to tell the story of abolitionism as a political movement without talking about this image. Museum curators were also drawn to it in 2007 by the fact that it was easy to reproduce, and that objects incorporating it were easy to obtain; manacles or objects produced on plantations might be difficult for hard-pressed curators to acquire, but most could get hold of a teacup or a medallion with this image. However, the image attracts criticism as it exemplifies the persistent tendency of abolitionist imagery to cast the enslaved African as a passive victim—a submissive figure, imploring a freedom he or she can only receive through the benevolence of others.

In presenting this image, museums ran the risk of simply reinforcing the racial stereotypes that have helped to give the ‘abolitionist myth’ its underpinning. In practice, museums in 2007 handled the image in various ways. Some presented it in a manner that identified it clearly as an object that was important in abolitionist campaigning, but offered no comment on the ideological work that it per...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Routledge Research in Museum Studies
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• 1 Introduction Anxiety and Ambiguity in the Representation of Dissonant History
• Part I Organizing the Bicentenary Politics and Policy
• Part II Representing the Bicentenary Communities, Consultants and Curators
• Part III Marking the Bicentenary Exhibitions, Art and Personal Reflections
• Part IV Encountering the Bicentenary Trauma and Engagement
• List of Contributors
• Index