The British Slave Trade and Public Memory

Elizabeth Wallace

Published by Columbia University Press 2006

The British Slave Trade and Public Memory

Elizabeth Wallace

https://doi.org/10.7312/kowa13714

Overview
Contents

About this book

How does a contemporary society restore to its public memory a momentous event like its own participation in transatlantic slavery? What are the stakes of once more restoring the slave trade to public memory? What can be learned from this history? Elizabeth Kowaleski Wallace explores these questions in her study of depictions and remembrances of British involvement in the slave trade. Skillfully incorporating a range of material, Wallace discusses and analyzes how museum exhibits, novels, television shows, movies, and a play created and produced in Britain from 1990 to 2000 grappled with the subject of slavery.

Topics discussed include a walking tour in the former slave-trading port of Bristol; novels by Caryl Phillips and Barry Unsworth; a television adaptation of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park; and a revival of Aphra Behn's Oroonoko for the Royal Shakespeare Company. In each case, Wallace reveals how these works and performances illuminate and obscure the history of the slave trade and its legacy. While Wallace focuses on Britain, her work also speaks to questions of how the United States and other nations remember inglorious chapters from their past.

Author / Editor information

Elizabeth Kowaleski Wallace is associate professor of English at Boston College. She is the author of Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping, and Business in the Eighteenth Century and Their Fathers' Daughters: Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth, and Patriarchal Complicity.

Reviews

Joyce Green MacDonald:
A useful survey of the British consciousness of slavery.

Deidre Lynch:
Through this creative melding of museum, literary, and performance studies Wallace considers the responsibilities historical pedagogy entails.

James Walvin:
The British Slave Trade and Public Memory, is a welcome and thought-provoking study.

This new perspective enhances the vision of a tolerant, diverse, multiethnic society. Recommended.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
List of Illustrations Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	vii
Preface Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	ix
Introduction. Millennial Reckonings Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. Commemorating the Transatlantic Slave Trade in Liverpool and Bristol Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	25
2. Fictionalizing Slavery in the United Kingdom, 1990–2000 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	67
3. Seeing Slavery and the Slave Trade Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	125
4. Transnationalism and Performance in ‘Biyi Bandele’s Oroonoko Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	179
Conclusion Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	207
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	213
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	243

Language: English
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 224
Illustrations
- Images: 9
- Other: 9 b/w half-tones

eBook

Published: January 11, 2006
ISBN: 9780231510318