Books: Representing Enslavement and Abolition in Museums: Ambiguous Engagements

What the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade has taught humanity is a difficult question, with many contradictory answers. Representing Enslavement and Abolition in Museums is aptly subtitled Ambiguous Engagements.

This book, collecting the diverse perspectives of curators, consultants, artists, museum visitors, and political and community activists, seeks to reflect the role of museums and galleries dealing with traumatic encounters and “atrocities as attractions”.

It questions what the UK heritage sector gained and failed to achieve in the 2007 commemoration of the Act of Parliament to abolish the transatlantic slave trade.
 
Several themes run throughout this volume: sustainable projects, community engagement, and a desire to innovate on different levels and create meaningful programmes.

Some chapters discussing external and internal relationships are very analytical, some very personal. All of them, however, allow readers to slowly digest different aspects of complex strands of heritage.

The book’s editors have carefully chosen contributors and projects as a means of discussing topical threads. Different approaches worked or didn’t work because of particular factors in specific institutions.

For example, an institution such as the British Museum, with its history and collections intertwined with the rise of the British empire, was not really in a position to have an exhibition based solely on its vast holdings of African collections (some of which were acquired through colonial oppression) without arousing resentment from the very communities it was trying to gain as new audiences.

Some institutions took the approach of inviting guest curators, who selected new material from outside. For instance, Temi Odumosu curated Exhibiting Difference at the Royal College of Surgeons.

Other institutions decided to create a permanent exhibition or permanently establish a different research focus, allowing additional interpretations of the collections they already had.

The Museum of London Dockland’s gallery, London, Sugar and Slavery, asks its visitors to examine how the transatlantic slave trade created the wealth of London’s economy.

Some chapters have an international outlook, examining monuments and attractions in the United States and Jamaica. These are included to point the way to possible future directions for the UK when it comes to remembering collective trauma.

The 2007 anniversary, as defined by the British government, was extremely controversial and offensive to some. There were voices of dissent about the idea of ‘’celebrating 1807’’ at all, from African-Caribbean communities and groups such as Ligali and Rendezvous of Victory. 

One of the strengths of this book is that in addition to audience surveys and academic appraisals, it contains an interview with campaigner Toyin Agbetu, who protested at Westminster Abbey demanding a formal apology on behalf of pan-African groups from the Queen and Tony Blair for Britain’s role in the transatlantic slave trade during the 200 years prior to the 1807 Slave Trade Act.

As a whole, Representing Enslavement and Abolition nicely encapsulates first-hand experience for readers working in and with museums. This book repeatedly stresses that the most innovative heritage projects to came out of the anniversary were not from the usual suspects normally associated with abolitionist figures or with traumatic history.

Success came from attempts to reveal hidden histories and connect collections with wider world narratives – one narrative in the 18th century being interpreted, the other in the 21st century that was simultaneously unfolding and being shaped.

Rose Roberto is the subject librarian for fine arts and museum studies at the University of Leeds. She was responsible for collecting and cataloguing websites for the Internet Archive’s British Slave Trade Legacies project, 2007-2008