Steven Blevins’s exciting high-quality contribution to Black British cultural studies explores a diverse range of engagements with the archives of colonialism and slavery found across the creative arts. Living Cargo considers the literary fiction of David Dabydeen, Fred D’Aguiar, Bernardine Evaristo, and Dorothea Smartt, the films of Inge Blackman and Isaac Julien, the high-end fashions of Ozwald Boateng, and the art of Yinka Shonibare, and concludes with an exploration of the British city of Bristol’s recent attempts both to acknowledge and tidy away its seminal place in the history of the slave trade via the vexed activities of gentrification and public remembrance. This range of primary materials, at once productively wide-angled and quirkily selective, is situated in relation to Blevins’s key concern: the ways in which Black British culture fetches forth a consciousness of the dismal denotation of certain humans as “bio-cargo”—those, such as slaves, whose very survival is decided by the market—hitherto housed in archival obscurity, in order to offer a very public challenge to the commercializing logics and legacies of colonial and neoliberal endeavor. As such, Blevins makes a highly convincing case for the intellectual, moral, and political weight of Black British culture, its capacity to demand historical repair beyond convenient or conventional frames such as juridical redress or economic reparation, each of which runs the risk of holding in place the very franchises that helped sustain the notion of bio-cargo to begin with.

One of the most inspiring elements of this bold, imaginative study is its conceptual and cultural eclecticism. Blevins is unafraid to pursue a firmly materialist critique without the constraints of deferential Marxism, drawing creatively on the insights of Derridean deconstruction, historicism, queer theory, and more too, as part of his self-confessed and refreshing “critical promiscuity.” The book’s conceptual ambition and Olympian aims—Blevins seeks to read the pursuit of justice in Black British culture as nothing less than mounting a new “critical redressive historiography” —make for much sophisticated critical thinking across contexts, materials, and indeed centuries. In the first section, “History and Human Cargo,” there are sustained, thoughtful readings of Phillips’s Cambridge (1991) and D’Aguiar’s Feeding the Ghosts (1997) —the latter a particular treat—which collectively make a convincing case for the radical consequences of these writers’ highly skilled engagement with archival sources for the purposes of transformative contemporary redress. The second section, “Assembling Human Bio-Cargo,” brings together a superb analysis of Dabydeen’s A Harlot’s Progress (1998) with shorter discussions of Evaristo’s Lara (1997), Smartt’s Samboo’s Grave—Bilal’s Grave (2008), Blackman’s Legacy (2006), and Julien’s Looking for Langston (1989) and The Attendant (1993). These latter texts are framed by a valuable critique of the figurative use of blood during modernity and empire, one that has been developing in transcultural adoption studies (Blevins seems unaware of this) but requires an urgent level of attention in postcolonial scholarship. Inevitably, these more concise readings can feel just a little too succinct at times, given the prolonged analyses of Phillips and others, yet Blevins certainly underscores their critical rendition of gender, sexuality, and eroticism, as in Julien’s work, as central to their attempts to unhouse the archive. The final section, “Exorbitant Life in an Age of Austerity,” contrasts the comfortable neoliberalism of Boateng’s poseur “Africapitalism” with the unruly art of Shonibare, with particular reference to his Hogarthian series Diary of a Victorian Dandy (1998). Blevins ends in the domain of urban cultural studies as he challenges the palimpsestic, biopolitical gentrification of Bristol by engaging with the street-level as well as artistic refusal to forget both Bristol’s slave past and its history of popular revolt.

The intellectual richness of Living Cargo rewards a patient read, and critics from across a range of Black British and indeed postcolonial cultural concerns will find here much to contemplate. One notes, too, the elegance, verve, and stylishness of Blevins’s writing, a rare gift; although he can sometimes be a little too keen to build a key point through ornate rhetoric: “beautiful remnants, brutal remains,” “what gets dressed and what can be materially or ethically redressed,” “from the tailored runways of the Global North to a threadbare high street in the Global South,” and so forth. Living Cargo is a tour de force nonetheless, required reading for anyone concerned with the ways in which postcolonial cultures can repossess the colonial archive for transformative, critically creative effects.