Between 2001 and 2006 I worked as Curator of Fine Art at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, that complex (in the fullest sense of the term) of extraordinarily significant memorial sites and buildings at the heart of British maritime–imperial identity, which has, at its centre, the oldest surviving component of this extensive heritage site, one of the most iconic monuments to, and manifestations of, the abstract ideals of beauty in the Western classical tradition: the near-perfect geometries and pure white facades of Inigo Jones's Queen's House. With 2007 looming, the museum was acutely conscious of its historical inattention to – indeed, its ideological avoidance and forgetting, or in Joseph Roach's felicitous term, its “surrogation,” of – the centrality of the slave trade to British maritime history. It entered a rapid spin over the most appropriate way to commemorate the bicentenary of the Act of Abolition. I had my own private thoughts on this issue, to which I shall return later, but my initial instinct was that the museum should be provocative, outspoken and risk-taking, rather than simply politically correct, which I sensed (correctly, as it turned out) would be the museum's automatic reflex, and would be perceived at best as lacking impact, and at worst as bland establishment tokenism: the national museum of maritime culture seen to be doing its duty but lacking the courage to put its head above the parapet and engage fully with the powerfully raw, conflictual issues surrounding the place of slavery and the slave trade in the cultural memory of the twenty-first-century British Atlantic world.

It is perhaps indicative of that perceived tokenism that the museum's careful and sensitive display of its Atlantic Worlds gallery – which presented a new permanent historical exhibition on the Atlantic Ocean in which the slave trade was (is) centrally placed – receives barely a glance in Alan Rice's important new book, devoted to (mainly British) memorialization of black Atlantic heritage. However, it is also reflective of the preoccupations of Rice's book, focussed substantially as it is on a local rather than a national politics of memory, as a deliberate move towards a strategy of what he terms “guerilla memorialization.” This seeks actively and politically to challenge and subvert the grand narratives of “official” national and imperial histories with their gaping lacunae, by offering a radical counterhistory rooted in the locally contingent, the unwritten record (oral, musical and visual traditions are to the fore in his discussion), and the conventionally marginalized. So the setting for the book's early chapters is overwhelmingly non-metropolitan, largely the north-west of England, between Liverpool and Lancaster, Rice's own territory (and it is worth noting that it is appropriately and commendably published by Liverpool University Press). It is also a highly personal (though not subjective) account: Rice is very sensitive to his own positionality as a scholar and author and exploits this to effect. One of the most impressive aspects of the book is the rare balance it achieves between the author's personal rage at the subject he confronts and the need for its analytical, intellectual dissection based upon scrupulous historical research. It is itself a testament to the author's own political commitment, and thus again aligns itself with a distinguished tradition of radical British history.

This localized focus then shifts and expands into a transnational, diasporic perspective through discussions of jazz as black Atlantic memorial, the memorialization of black servicemen in World War II, and three contemporary African Atlantic artists’ engagement with the problem of representing the “invisibility” of the slave trade. Even here, however, the anchor in British culture is not lost, since these separate case studies treat, respectively, the formal structures of jazz music as a key influence on the writing of Toni Morrison and the black Scots novelist Jackie Kay, the Memorial Gates erected in London in honour of the black veterans of the two world wars, and the Cape Verdean Irish American artist Ellen Gallagher and her British-based counterparts Godfried Donkor and Lubaina Himid. Although comprising a series of case studies, therefore, which sometimes do not sit easily with each other (the discussion of jazz in particular deviates from the preceding discussions of visual culture and museology), the structure of the book enables connections to be made between the local and the transnational, above all through the linking figure of Lubaina Himid.

Indeed, the book might almost have been a monograph on Himid's work, as it features substantially in five out of the seven chapters. Not that that would be a bad thing: Himid's important and challenging art, in confronting the ideologies and politics of representation and, as it were, the representation of (non-)representation, deserves much greater recognition. Yet, in dealing with memorialization and the African Atlantic in contemporary visual culture, Rice's spotlighting of Himid also draws attention to some surprising absences in his discussion: where, for example, are Yinka Shonibare, Chris Ofili or Keith Piper, whose work deals explicitly with these and related issues? Arguably, such artists have already received considerable critical attention, while others, whose work is of equal merit, have been sidelined and need scholarly study to give a fuller, more accurate sense of the scope of contemporary British art; or else the book's focus on the “politics of memory in the black Atlantic” makes any comparisons or consideration of the wider ambit of African Atlantic art secondary to its overriding concerns. All of which is understandable, yet it would have been useful to compare Himid's engagement with the African Atlantic and the erasure of memory with that of, say, Shonibare, not least because their work was shown together (along with that of Piper's and others’) at the 2007 Uncomfortable Truths exhibition at the V.&A. commemorating the bicentenary of the Act of Abolition, which is discussed briefly in the final pages of the book. As Rice observes, Himid's deeply challenging and almost overwhelming installation Naming the Money, consisting of a hundred life-size cut-out figures of vivid, dancing Africans/slave-servants, was shown in the V.&A. display in such diluted form that the figures perversely and unintentionally recalled the role of black servants in an eighteenth-century conversation-piece: marginal and tamed. The same was true of the other works in the display, perhaps with the exception of Shonibare's: intended to be a provocative intervention and destabilization of the cultural and ideological assumptions embedded in the museum's traditional layout and modes of display, their commentaries were instead submerged by the mass of objects around them and, unless the visitor was actively looking for them, could all too easily be misunderstood or missed and overlooked completely. With horrible irony, despite the best curatorial intentions, the way they were finally included in the vast spaces of the museum allowed these works of African Atlantic art dealing with black Atlantic memory to be effectively “invisibilized.” Here, then, was a stark politics of memory at work, which raised difficult questions about institutional politics and the ownership of memory. The work still needs to be done to expand the parameters of British contemporary culture and its institutionalization, to include fully artists such as Himid and the others discussed in Rice's book, alongside Ofili, Shonibare and the other “big” names, to register the extraordinary richness and complexity of black Atlantic heritage for modern visual culture.

There are other important academic dimensions to this as well. While Rice's book importantly goes a long way towards identifying and opening up these issues, his methodological emphasis on “guerilla memorialization,” important as this is in advocating an actively political, interventionist scholarship that seeks to subvert establishment doctrine, perhaps inhibits other perspectives that could valuably add to his discussion. What would it mean, for example, to consider Himid's work not only alongside that of a broad range of African Atlantic artists, but also as implicitly critiquing both the bland, comfortable sensationalism of the YBAs and all they represent, and the orthodoxies of modernism and the visual tradition? Damien Hirst's infamous bisected shark would look very different from a black Atlantic perspective, while Himid's painterly abstraction has vastly divergent connotations from, say, Jackson Pollock's. As Rice notes, in a fine and illuminating reading of Himid's Cotton.com, the abstract patterning in the series of paintings comprising this work in fact turns the principles of formal abstraction on their head, by filling the emptied semiotic spaces of gestural abstract expressionism with historical, dialogic meaning, in that the paintings become representational surrogates for the patterned fabrics and warp and weft of cotton cloth produced by the exploited labour of workers in nineteenth-century Carolina and Manchester. Again, the art-historical work has still properly to be done to think through the ways in which contemporary African Atlantic culture is a critique of modernism and its historiographies: establishment art history continues to sideline black Atlantic history and its enormous implications for the discipline.

One of these is once more a fascinating aspect of Himid's practice, which Rice touches on obliquely and which recurs below the surface in his book: the question of slave labour versus artistic labour. This emerges, for example, in the discussion of Morrison's writing as analogous to the improvisatory foundation of jazz performance, which prioritizes a need to “make the creative act look effortless, as though no sweat went into its creation, [as] an important legacy of the jazz tradition” (121). (As it happens, a similar aesthetic emphasis, known as sprezzatura, was also a feature of Western artistic practice from the late Italian Renaissance onwards: the intent to make the artist's role appear spontaneous and labour-free.) The dialectics of labour here are significant, since artistic labour, romantically construed both as the quintessential epitomization of the wholly free, unconstrained, unalienated labour of the total individual, and also as the result of individual genius (and thus implicitly arising out of effortless inspiration, rather than perspiration), may be seen as the diametrical opposite, or counter-side, of the anonymized, collective, back-breaking, wholly alienated labour of the slave plantation. This dialectic is one that Himid plays upon consistently in her art, both explicitly as being central to its dominant subject matter and concerns, for example in Cotton.com or Naming the Money, and also by implication as a reflexive concern with the significance and value of her own labour in producing the “work” of art. It calls into question the identity that is “built” out of her practice as an artist producing the kind of work she does, and how she as an artist sees her own work in relation to that of the slave labourers that in various ways forms its subject matter. As Rice observes, the paintings in Cotton.com all share “repetitions of the core motifs in the mode of patterned cloth” (85): they all represent the fabric of patterned cloth produced out of the Atlantic cotton trade, but are not the cloth itself (except, significantly, insofar as they are on, presumably, cotton canvas). What, then, is the relation of the labour that produced the paintings to the labour that produced the original cloth? This is not an issue that Rice is concerned to explore explicitly, but could offer rich potential for thinking further about the creation of identity through memorial in the black Atlantic. As Himid herself states about Naming the Money in an interview with the author, “It's not so much that I am not an artist, it's that this [Naming the Money] maybe is not art, which is a slightly different thing. I'm undoubtedly an artist – if not then we are in a dangerous place” (211).

She is an artist who is clearly conscious that, in the type of challenging, interventionist, interactive engagement she wants her work to provoke, her art – which “maybe is not art” – differs from and contrasts with prevailing artistic practice and the expectations of it: “You bring your history, your story to the work and then we move amongst each other with it. I don't think that is what contemporary art is meant to do” (211). What, then, is her position as a contemporary artist? She is “undoubtedly an artist,” but does not do “what contemporary art is meant to do”: she is both inside and outside, participating but also providing a detached critique through the work she makes of the culture of contemporary art and the visual traditions from which it derives. This is one of the most fascinating, compelling and elusive features of Himid's work. The dialectics surrounding the issue of artistic labour might offer one route to analysing these issues further.

I have said that Rice's book is not directly concerned with this relation of artistic work to the creation of cultural identity. Yet in another sense this is perhaps its overriding theme. For what emerges passionately and forcefully throughout its pages is the insistence on the positive creation of Atlantic cultural identities out of the trauma of the slave trade and its heritage; an eschewal of memorializing slavery in terms of victimhood in favour of a vibrant, vital memorialization through visual art, music and literature that actively connects the past with the present and the future, much in the way that Himid's vivid, energetic, dancing, music-making figures in Naming the Money emerge out of the combination of their identities as African and slave-servant. This comes through most strongly in the lengthy central chapter on jazz, as a performative memorial to African Atlantic heritage. It would be interesting to speculate on how far contemporary jazz might still be taken as such a memorial, given its sprawling diversity of form, style and performer, or whether other musical forms, such as rap, might be more logically seen as the successors to jazz's transgressive, countercultural, African Atlantic foundations; but Rice's argument is keenly felt and strongly made, and rightly stands at the heart of the book.

A key issue here and throughout the text is ownership of memory (it might also be asked, what is the difference between memory and memorialization?): who performs, builds or otherwise lays claim to the memorial has a key bearing on its signification. If there is a politics of memory – and Rice demonstrates clearly that there is – then it also assumes proprietorial connotations: whose memory is at stake? Which brings me back finally to the Queen's House and the National Maritime Museum's quandary over how to commemorate the 2007 bicentenary. My own idea was that the pure rectilinear whiteness of the landmark of the Queen's House should be painted black for the occasion. However, realizing that such a proposal would never get through the initial stage of the Exhibitions Committee, never mind the Board of Directors, English Heritage, or the Trustees (with Prince Philip as the museum's patron), I confided it, half-jokingly, only to a few trusted colleagues (mindful of my future museum career), who treated it as just that – a joke. Whether or not it was a good or appropriate idea (it certainly would have been provocative), it was beyond thinking that such a thing could be carried out. There is a form of institutional racism at play here, in which I was a participant, whereby the social, political and organizational structures of an institution such as the Maritime Museum disable and disappropriate certain modes of thinking and certain forms of memory and memorialization, such as the idea of a black Queen's House. A more realistic proposal was to install Lubaina Himid's Naming the Money in its complete form in the Queen's House, and it remains a great disappointment that I was unable to persuade the museum's executive to agree to this: it would have looked splendid (and still would) in its expansive classical spaces. However, despite the acknowledged merits of the work, the proposed idea was turned down essentially on the basis that Himid was an insufficiently well-known artist. I need not go into the absurd irony of such reasoning, but it raises a very serious point: that such institutional ownership of the physical and ideological spaces of memory perpetuates the marginalization of the black Atlantic and its cultural heritage. And, despite its necessity and importance, Rice's methodology of “guerilla memorialization” inevitably entails a similar risk of academic and institutional marginalization, even ghettoization, by the establishment it passionately and rightly challenges. This is a finely crafted, carefully argued and important book: I hope it is read and its messages heeded by the people that need to do so.

Black remembrance in the arts by the subjects of the Black Atlantic (1993) as configured by Paul Gilroy grew out of an absence. In an epoch when blacks played their most conspicuous role in the prosperity of Old and New Worlds, the national narratives of both seemed, ironically, to elide the contributions of blacks. When whites imagined blacks in their paintings and novels, black figures served to enhance the humanity of whites and circumscribe that of blacks. An unintended consequence of this turned out to be a dual contradictory one: not only were blacks made to feel sidelined by these configurations, but their partial presences in these white constructs also served to politicize them about the true extent of the neglect of their role in recent history. In Playing in the Dark (1993), Toni Morrison aptly named this phenomenon the “absent presence” of black people in such white-imagined worlds. Morrison's critique excoriates the white American literary landscape in that her articulation of this condition exposes an illiteracy of the white imagination when faced with conjuring a fully realized American world; that is, one with all peoples under one watchful God (another presence in the American psyche not quite excised from public life).

Slave narratives written by contemporary black and white writers took up the public role of commemorating black lives. These fictions made intuitive journeys back in time in order to recover the lost stories of ancestors. As the novels spoke the lost gained a presence articulated out of their absence in what amounted to marvelous, inclusive acts of the imagination, acts of conjuring, a summoning of likely events intuited from the slightest of instances, such as an anecdote, a bill of sale, a grave for an African without a name. Readers found that these fictions included an additional moral imperative to the usual contract between text, reader, author and the world. The morality resided in a kind of pressure exerted by the text on the reader to reconstruct the story in terms of a felt intelligence, a kind of intuitive remaking of the history that lacked a black perspective.

But for all its quality as a living thing, a book is not a public monument. We know one when we see one. You can stop and stare at them and walk around some of them, and touch others, and frequently they are open to the seasons in prized public spaces. They mean something in this time and in this space to the living, though they speak from the past on behalf of the dead and aspire towards making concrete links with the present. Toni Morrison, the doyen of feeling thinkers about the black historical body, defined the abject absence of a black experience in America's public commemorations of its history in these terms:

Her riff cuts to a psychic need that reveals the American present for what it is: a compact with amnesia. The nation, as a result of this neglect, once again resembles a plantation, and looks twice removed from its creed. Telling the stories about slaves from the viewpoint of the enslaved helped to clarify the need. The monuments stage of this nation narrative may be seen as the final chapter (assuming Queen Mother Moore's slavery reparations movement won't find traction) of full participation by blacks in the grand nation-making narratives.

Alan Rice took years of careful thought to chart his particular course through this rough and bruising terrain of what the existing monuments mean and for whom, and where to locate the ones that are nowhere to be seen. His tone is celebratory for those who embody this metaphoric ideal (artists Lubaina Himid, Ellen Gallagher and Godfried Donkor) and scathing for those who avowedly do not (African American tourists of forts on the African Gold Coast, and American tourism of southern plantations). Rice says about the Wye plantation, a great house near Baltimore on Maryland's eastern shore, that

In fact, Rice provides one reason why a group with a partial view might visit these places. For the blacks who go there other motives abound, including a view of these great houses as contemplative sites, as repositories of presences elided in the popular narratives about them since blacks visualize the labor which underscores the grandeur of these places. In other words, historical sites have ambivalent resonances and function in contradictory ways for the various groups that comprise the nation.

Rice usefully names cities around the US, such as Baltimore, in Maryland, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where a monument to its slave past would be the decent thing to do. But in the contest between groups for the grandest birth-of-the-nation narrative there is little decency. For the most part competing narratives swirl around in the academy and in the legislative wings of local and central government in search of a constituency. A moral imperative powers a black aesthetic invested in correcting the collective American illusion that America owes its grand past to white ingenuity and black servitude. But the dollar and political opportunism drive the initiatives. In a black story that is more than a back story, slave labor earns its rightful place as part and parcel of constructs about American glory.

Even so, the resistance to enshrining a black slave past as a permanent fixture on an American landscape cannot be characterized in neat binary terms – that is, black desire for such monuments meets white indifference; some of it originates, somewhat surprisingly, from some blacks. The argument runs something like this: blacks do not wish to be portrayed in demeaning ways in a past they had no control over. Rather than confront them with permanent fixtures of their shame, the resources should go into finding positive images from the past and present of black achievement, as well as being invested in areas where blacks need it, in the inner cities and in education, in alleviating the march of poor black men from youth detention centers to adult incarceration, in health care, and the list goes on.

The most energetic objectors to this particular interpretation of metaphors from the past in the present consistently paint a dehistoricized picture of blackness in America as a way to circumvent the pitfalls of victim narratives. A feisty attitude coupled with present-tense narratives about money, gender, youth and race abound in music, murals and popular fiction. It is not simply a case of young minds resisting history lessons but of different imaginative approaches to a demanding American landscape that is, simultaneously, ruled by a history of black oppression, and founded on principles of economic opportunity for all.

Among his many telling examples of historical memory meets artistic imagination, Alan Rice examines the 2008 City of London memorial to slavery, The Gilt of Cain, by the Scottish sculptor Michael Visocchi, and the black British poet Lemn Sissay. The installation-cum-sculpture features seventeen totem poles of varying heights situated in front of a big concrete block with three stone steps leading to a raised platform. The totems resemble bamboo. The block and steps suggest a pulpit or stage set for a sermon or auction, I suppose, and the artist is quoted by Rice this way, “the idea was that I could somehow use these sugar cane shapes so that they could be read as figures, anthropomorphic forms” (18). As Rice points out, the number seventeen denotes the number of years abolitionists took to convince the British Parliament to abolish the trade. There is a populated look to the exhibit because of those granite columns but the gray color and hard texture make the whole scene austere and severe.

Lemn Sissay's poem faces the audience of seventeen. Inscribed on the diamond-shaped block, his poem makes a version of the spoken word addressed to the seventeen on their behalf (since “they” embody silence) and equally intended for a presumed viewing public in a gallery of open space that surrounds the open-air exhibit. Having seen the site, I am interested in this collaboration between a poet and a sculptor (the dialogue between them, if you will), around a single idea informed by history, for several reasons. First, it demands a historical awareness of both artistic imaginations. Second, it is the result of a coalition of two mediums, one plastic and the other scribal. Third, this exhibit and others like it form the premise for Alan Rice's book, which makes us wonder about the adequacy of representations of slavery's history as objects for public consumption. Fourth, the exhibit promotes the notion of public art as proper redress for a sizable group's protracted neglect. Therefore it is worth saying something about the poem.

As a speech act, Sissay's poem is public address; as installation it asks that the viewer, doubled as reader, contemplate its manifold meanings. The poem's rhetoric aims to vilify, illuminate, instruct and provoke in a limited field where implication and insinuation govern articulacy in a restricted space. The poem's four octaves in neat rhyming couplets and rough iambic pentameter thrust package thought much like the commodification of Africans as slaves and their production of sugar that are the poem's twin subjects:

The rampant assonance and alliteration throttle poetry's usual open field delicately scored by non-intrusive thought subordinated to the greater mission of an emotional impact. In the quote commerce is equated with the cruelty of the treatment of slaves at sea. Here the “exchange” is the sea and that sea figures in Turner's famous painting, among other resonances. The word-sounds resemble blows or a willful, repetitive wounding. Money-making and savagery belie the decorous pretence of civility of those who prosper from slave labor. The lines work by declaring their fracture into two or three independent clauses that are interchangeable, especially when pressed in concrete and liable to be read in part, in passing, and out of sequence. As sounds the lines wish to lend themselves to easy memorizing as much as they seek to memorialize. Their high-volume rendition reminds us of their identification with orature so that they wish to break free of their stone confines and take to the air in reenactments of liberty.

The book contains many pleasing color reproductions of works discussed in satisfying depth by Rice. His experience as a curator adds authenticity to his story of just how much hard work goes into shepherding a memorial project from idea to committee to spatial fact. Not all of it is without reward or humor. He recounts the famous story of Henry “Box” Brown, a Virginia slave who posted himself in a cramped box from Richmond to Philadelphia in 1849. His journey of 350 miles took twenty-seven hours and he emerged a free man with his story serving as a ready-made metaphor for chattel slavery's long and arduous road (not without its need for ingenuity) towards liberation.

Alan Rice's latest book builds on strands of thinking and scholarship that characterized his 2003 book Radical Narratives of the Black Atlantic. The earlier work drew on personal stories. In Radical Narratives the coincidence of Rice's grandfather working on the same estate where an Edwardian African, Pompey, had been employed but forgotten became a starting point for exploring the importance of remembering traces of the black Atlantic. In Creating Memorials the relationship between personal and broader public histories is also strong. Rice features in the narrative not only, of course, as the author of the work but as a protagonist in developing public memorials including “Captured Africans” in Lancaster and the Trade and Empire: Remembering Slavery exhibition in Manchester. This multifaceted approach to history, including the written word of the academic and the public protagonist in the memorial landscape, underpins the book.

History, as Rice realizes, is not about a past that is finished, settled or gone but a process by which the past is brought into the present. This book is a work that recognizes and values the materials existing outside the archive. It is also a work that realizes that the past is never settled and that the public historian has a role in intervening to ensure that forgotten voices are heard. While some have chosen to see public history as simply the presentation of “the” past to “the” public, this is not Rice's argument. By recognizing the nature of memory and different forms of presentation, a distinctive historical practice can be developed. Significantly, as Rice demonstrates in his own practice and analysis, the engagement in different ways with people other than professional historians – including artists, teachers and activists as creators of meaning – will influence significantly the type of history being developed.

Rice skilfully analyses the ways in which the work of artists such as Lubaina Himid or the black-heritage campaigner Ken Martindale has been key in creating awareness of the impact of the slave trade on British capitalism. Rice analyses at some length the imaginative memorial at Fen Court in the City of London, The Gilt of Cain. The work by Lemn Sissay and Michael Visocchi is both creative and thought-provoking. As he notes, it was the first memorial for the victims of the slave trade erected by the City of London Corporation. As Madge Dresser has argued, the way in which slavers were formerly memorialized “contributed to a culture of silence around the City's collusion with slavery in all its cruelty.”Footnote ³ Yet the memorial that juxtaposes the language of city traders with both figurative sugar cane and the platform used at a slave auction – or possibly a pulpit in which abolition was preached – is not in the Guildhall or outside a financial institution. While it is erected in the former graveyard of the church now joined to the parish in which John Newton, former slaver and then abolitionist, worked for many years, and this specific positioning is drawn out on the accompanying plaque, nevertheless, as Rice argues, it is “paradoxical.” The memorial is site-specific and “shows the paradox of trying to express” both London's “tortured involvement in slavery and the triumph of the abolitionists” in “slippery verbal and visual languages whose ambivalences never enable the viewer/reader to come to a ‘closed position’” (23). Thus this is a different project from the satirical commentary of Himid in the form of an imaginary guidebook described by Rice as summoning “the ghosts of black presence that guidebooks elide, bearing witness to how London and other cities might look, if only we paid attention to these forgotten figures” (17). For Rice, such works are characterized as “guerrilla memorialisation” (74), opening up debate instead of closing it “by seemingly authoritative and all-encompassing interpretations” (69). Of particular interest is his discussion of his curatorial work. Here he describes the debates that took place around the attempt to challenge the “morbidity of heritage” (45) by creating an exhibition that explicitly included the very debate the curators had had about the objects they should display. The discussion of this process was particularly illuminating over the inclusion of four doll-like models of slaves created by the Samuel family to apparently mark the freeing of their slaves. While the figures were individualized and dressed imaginatively they were also crude caricatured images. There was discussion whether the cost of conserving such models was even justified and it was realized that “the very unveiling of such troubling objects could prove problematic for many visitors” (69). Eventually the objects were displayed alongside labels showing the discussion amongst the co-curators which revealed that even they did not agree on a reading of the dolls. In addition, visitors were invited to add their comments, which, as the book shows, criticized the curators’ critical stance by arguing that they were not intended to be racist (69). Such an exchange is rare in museum displays when curators are fearful of being seen to permit potentially racist comments. However, this example demonstrates very well the value of engaging with ideas rather than closing down debate.

In similar vein Rice analyses the way in which a slaving past is brought explicitly into a landscape of remembrance in Lancaster, the fourth-largest slave port in Britain. Rice describes the work of STAMP (Slave Trade Arts Memorial Project), which involved community activists, creative workers, councillors and academics. The project obtained funding to engage with schools and community groups and to create a memorial “that would adequately represent generations to come as well as the past and the present: a memorial that conserves memory without being conservative” (43). The result was “Captured Africans” by Kevin Dalton-Johnson, erected on Lancaster's quay. While noting the local opposition – as well as support – Rice explains the committee's wish to create a “different engagement with the past than would normally happen in the cityscape” (48).

Rice tells us that he became the project's academic adviser (44) but we are certainly not being presented with a project in which “the experts” told “the people” the facts of a moment of history and corrected any perceived misunderstandings. Rather, STAMP was an exemplary public history project in which, as Michael Frisch has described it, there was “a broadly distributed authority for making new sense of the past in the present.”Footnote ⁴ The project achieved new ways of thinking about the past and bringing it into the present not by the scholarship of an individual academic but by all those involved in the project “reaching in to discover the humanity they share.”Footnote ⁵

Rice's role within the project inevitably drew on his scholarship but this cannot be separated from his political commitment to facilitating broad understandings of the past, and his belief that there are many pasts that should be remembered. The radical representation of the past in the present challenges the “limitations of the historical record or the visual archive” (189). As Rice illustrates, particular African Atlantic artists “work with and against the grain of written and other archival records to create new work that challenges our visual map of slavery and its consequences” (189).

Yet this book does not end in a celebratory tone. “Guerrilla memorialisation” has its limitations. Although the Victoria and Albert Museum commissioned an exhibition, Uncomfortable Truths, by Himid during 2007 the figures created on accounting paper that commented on “the tainted nature of some objects displayed there” were deemed unsuitable for the gallery space. Rice comments,

The chapters on music and literature, interesting though they were, were less engaging, at least for this reader, than those that emphasized praxis. The book is well produced, with stunning illustrations and published by Liverpool University Press, which is, in some ways, a pity. Clearly the book will thus receive the sort of status needed in these difficult times for those working in higher education. It is, however, well written in an accessible style on an important topic that deserves wider readership than an academic audience.

If I had constructed ideal readers for my book, they would have been an activist/academic, a curator/academic and a writer/academic. In Hilda Kean, past GLC member and doyen of public history at Ruskin College, Oxford; Geoff Quilley, past curator at the National Maritime Museum and fine-arts academic at Sussex; and Fred D'Aguiar, Guyanan-born poet and novelist now based as an academic and writer in Virginia, I was lucky enough to get a full house. When visualizing a place for the book, I determined that it should not be consigned to academic shelves and I am pleased that these reviewers agree that it has resonances beyond dry academic debate.

Thinking about this, I hope we can all agree that academics should get out more. We cannot know the consequences of our public lectures and interventions, but in these days of the dread importance of Impact in the Research Excellence Framework (in Britain at least) we are increasingly urged to calculate it in ways that can be assessed. D'Aguiar ends his review with the story of Henry Box Brown and his posting of himself to freedom, which he sees as a “ready-made metaphor for the long and arduous road … towards liberation” – however, this story has an afterlife that is important to how we assess the usefulness of our research. I recounted Brown's story in public lectures I gave and in the Trade and Empire: Remembering Slavery exhibition at the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester in 2007–8 because of the resonances that D'Aguiar points out, and also because of new evidence unearthed about his life in Britain that proved that his sojourn in Britain was longer and more deeply affecting than had previously been thought, including his marriage to a Cornish woman and their having three British-born children. A young black British artist, Simeon Barclay, was at one of the lectures as he visited the exhibition and was determined to revisit this past through an act of public art. In October 2009, he reconstructed Brown's re-enactment of this posting from Bradford to Leeds in 1851 (having to do it by Ford Transit Van as Northern Rail refused on health and safety grounds to transport him). He attracted a large crowd as he emerged from his box to give extracts from the very speech Brown had given. His act of guerrilla memorialization mimed Brown, but this time the event appeared on television and is now available on YouTube.Footnote ⁶ Barclay's kinetic performance is only the latest artistic response to Brown's ingenious escape method; however, this time it was not an African American artist speaking to Brown's original escape as Glen Ligon famously did in his 1993 exhibition To Disembark, but a young black artist responding to Brown's British sojourn. The journey to liberation is a black Atlantic one and the full story cannot be told through a wholly American lens, and that is one of the key elements of my book that all the reviewers graciously comment on. Simeon Barclay's reenactment is undoubtedly the most effective response to the call of my book's narratives. His activism might not tick the boxes for an impact assessment. However, it awakens an important event in black history which had been almost completely forgotten in Leeds. As Hilda Kean reminds us, history is a “process” where “the past is never settled” and our role is “to ensure that forgotten voices are heard”; it is exciting that the book's genesis helped amnesia to be so effectively overcome in this local instance at least.

Throughout the commemorations of the bicentenary of the abolition of slavery in Britain and its colonies in 2007, and in its aftermath, the best intentions of curators and institutions were thwarted by Anglo-American history's dead weight. Geoff Quilley's discussion of the National Maritime Museum's “bland establishment tokenism” and his and Hilda Kean's evaluation of the Victoria and Albert Museum's “invisibilizing” of African Atlantic artists illustrate the daily struggles for cultural workers wanting to engage fully with “history from below.” The Victoria and Albert Museum, to their credit, were attempting to illustrate Uncomfortable Truths; the problem was that their whole institutional praxis circumscribed their ability to do this. Immediately following the opening I returned to look at the exhibition in the cold light of day, carrying the map/catalogue with me. Within minutes I was leading through the galleries an impromptu tour of regular visitors to the museum who were unable to find the different parts of the exhibition in its vast halls with no signage. My Pied Piper-like promenade attracted the interest of security, who challenged my lack of accreditation and bemoaned my failure to alert them of my educational visit. As Quilley says, the “ownership of memory” was at stake at the Victoria and Albert Museum during the exhibition and although many of the black artists brilliantly challenged the univocal version of history presented by the behemoth institution, their voices became whispers in the echoing halls let down by an institution which failed to provide the means to access their commentary.

It is interesting to note Quilley's critique of my book for not including a larger number of these (hardly) “whispering” artists (in particular to contextualize the work of Lubaina Himid, who appears in five of the chapters). The criticism is a moot one and early plans for the book included sections on African Atlantic artists Isaac Julien, Keith Piper, Yinka Shonibare, Carrie Mae Weems, Howardena Pindell, Betye Saar and Kara Walker. The problem was that whenever I tried to include the larger roster of artists the key ideas got lost in a miasma of describing works that in the end did no credit to my argument or to the marvellous works themselves. I thus made a conscious decision that the book should be driven by thematic concerns that allowed the space to discuss fewer works and not comprehensiveness, which I felt would lead to a dilution of the arguments amidst a box-ticking (artist-citing) exercise. The perils of this are shown by the erection of the wonderful Shonibare installation Nelson's Ship in a Bottle, which was placed on a plinth in Trafalgar Square in May 2010. This large installation piece with beautiful African textile sails could have dialogized wonderfully with Himid's guerrilla work on tourist London which I describe in detail in the book. However, it arrived after the proofs were submitted so I had to be content with writing about it in a subsequent piece. In this Atlantic Studies piece I talk about “the triumph of Shonibare's work that it dialogises the imperial history through its depiction of the Victory to illuminate its full multicultural ramifications for then and for now.”Footnote ⁷ It is a multifaceted piece, truly a “crucible for political mediation and historical memory” and one which “complicates the traditional history of Nelson and Trafalgar and figures new narratives and images that refuse to be hidebound by the dead hand of imperial closure.”Footnote ⁸ Shonibare fitted so well into the argument about London and slavery but his work that did that best failed to arrive in time.

If I regret, at least in part, failing to include more African Atlantic artists, Quilley's other major critique that I did not dialogize Himid's work with the Young British Artists (YBA) is not one that I will be losing sleep over. Quilley talks of the “bland, comfortable sensationalism of the YBAs and all they represent,” and that about sums them up. My book is not a visual-arts survey book so I do not feel the need to contextualize Himid's work amidst “Cool Brittania's” cherry-picked champions: far better to use my limited space to do a proper historical contextualization and place it next to works and narratives that illuminate it in a black Atlantic vein. On the other hand, I very much take note of Quilley's great idea about Damien Hirst's bisected shark and the black Atlantic which very much inspires me more seriously to consider a stunning idea for a book that would see “contemporary African Atlantic culture as a critique of modernism and its historiographies” in a world in which the master narratives continue to sideline it.

Thanks to these three great readers of my book who have teased out my arguments better than I have myself by at times being pithy where I have been long-winded. I love Fred D'Aguiar's phrase that the American present is a “compact with amnesia” and I am pleased that my book can provoke such an aphoristic truth. I am also glad that Geoff Quilley's review allows him to respond personally to his time as an excellent curator at the National Maritime Museum, for his anecdotes about the problematics of such national institutions illustrate how as Anglo-Americans we are still governed by thinking that whatever its good intentions it still marginalizes “the black Atlantic and its cultural heritage.” Hopefully, there are enough radical curators still in these institutions who know as Hilda Kean so aptly expresses it “the value of engaging with ideas rather than closing down the debate.” I hope my book contributes to this for a range of audiences academic and beyond.