Remembering Iconic, Marginalised and Forgotten Presences: Local, National and Transnational Memorial Sites in the Black Atlantic

Abstract

This essay looks at sites of public and private memory in Britain, the Caribbean and America and discusses the cultural politics of these locations. It starts with a discussion of memorialisation around key public and private sites in America, specifically public buildings in Washington DC and the birthplace of Frederick Douglass at the Wye Plantation in Maryland before moving to a discussion of public and private memorialisation around Sambo’s Grave at Sunderland Point near Lancaster. The literary responses to what Pierre Nora has called “sites of memory” are discussed through the black British poet Dorothea Smartt’s poetic response to Sambo’s Grave and the Bajan poet EK Brathwaite’s prose description of labour and landscape in his description of a woman sweeping her yard. Both are used to show the importance of the local in nuancing Paul Gilroy’s discussion of the black Atlantic. The final section discusses public memorialisation in Europe through the examples of Amsterdam and Lancaster. Both cities have recently raised memorials to victims of the slave trade and the essay discusses the meaning of such willed acts of memorialisation in the context of previously unpublished remarks by the black British artist Lubaina Himid.