Slavery in the Age of Memory: Engaging the Past by Ana Lucia Araujo

Author:Ana Lucia Araujo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury

FIGURE 4.6 Permanent exhibition, International Slavery Museum, Liverpool, England. Photograph by Adam Jones, 2016, cc-by-sa-2.0.

The third and last “Legacy” room surveys the long-standing impacts of slavery on populations of African descent around the globe. A mosaic panel with text, images, and video features a chronology marked by the rise of the abolitionist movement starting in the late eighteenth century until the present. It highlights emancipation in various parts of the world, including the French colonies, the United States, and Brazil. The path to the emancipation in the United States is underscored with a panel honoring Harriet Tubman and visitors are invited to join the underground railroad: “Do you want to catch the Underground Railroad to escape from slavery? Look out for and listen to the coded messages. These will guide you to Freedom. You are a slave. You hear stories about a Freedom Train … and someone called ‘Moses.’” Additional sections on this same panel also explore other events that took place in the second half of the nineteenth century, including the rise of Ku Klux Klan in Tennessee, the Berlin Conference that divided the African continent among European powers, the Pan-African Congress in London, the rise of the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power in the United States, and the 2001 World Conference against Racism held in Durban, South Africa. The next section “Racism and Discrimination” addresses the evolution of racism in the British colonies, the United States, and South Africa, and concludes by exploring the case of Liverpool. In this segment, one display showcases a Ku Klux Klan outfit donated by “an American citizen living in the United Kingdom who wished to remain anonymous.”46 Close to this display is the gallery’s central and concluding section “Wall of Black Achievers,” a large panel presenting pictures of W. E. B. Dubois (1868–1963), Frederick Douglass (1818–1895), Pelé, Oprah Winfrey, Frantz Fanon (1925–1961), Stokely Carmichael (1941–1998), and many others. One of the concluding panels of the “Legacy” gallery focuses on the contemporary demands of reparations. Highlighting a citation by Frantz Fanon stating that the “wealth of the imperial countries is our wealth too,” the panel explains that reparations are a “call for compensation to be paid to descendants of enslaved Africans by the United States and European governments.” Despite delimiting the movement demanding reparations mainly to the United States, the International Slavery Museum is the only institution to give this debate a prominent place in its exhibits.

The museum’s innovative approach in treating the problem of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade continues to evolve. Over the last few years, the International Slavery Museum added a new dimension that was not contemplated in its original mission through the organization of several temporary exhibitions featuring the works of contemporary visual artists dealing with issues of slavery, memory, and reparations. Among these artists are Laura Facey, Rachel Wilberforce, and François Piquet (whose work is discussed in Chapter 6). Beyond the traditional, historical approach combining text, images, and artifacts, the museum’s director and curators understood that

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