Memory, Trauma and ‘Affective Autonomy’: Displaying Emotion and Trauma at the International Slavery Museum

ABSTRACT

This article attempts to answer the question of how museums might communicate the affective experience of enslavement, and the history of emotions and slavery, to their audiences. By using the International Slavery Museum, Liverpool as its case study, it answers this question through examining how the museum uses contemporary art in dialogue with archives of historical and modern slavery to make an affective investment in the lives of enslaved peoples. I name this approach ‘Affective Autonomy’, as it uses affect to underscore the agency of enslaved peoples to have complex emotional engagements with their experience of captivity. The International Slavery Museums uses contemporary art not to fill in the silences of the archive but to articulate them. It does so by using these artworks as entry points into discussions about the experience of modern slavery, which frame the emotional experience of slavery during the Transatlantic Slave Trade. The experience of modern slavery is understood through references to transatlantic slavery. Consequently, this article helps provide insight into how the history of emotions and slavery can be communicated creatively to general audiences in museum settings.

KEYWORDS:

• Museums
• art
• modern slavery
• international slavery museum
• archives
• silences
• public history

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Beth Wilson, Francesco Ventrella, Geoff Quilley, and Celeste Marie-Bernier.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Robin Ostow, ‘The Museum as a Model for a Human Rights-Base Future: The International Slavery Museum, Liverpool, UK’, Journal of Human Rights Practice 12, no. 3 (2020): 622.

2 Ibid., 623.

3 Ibid., 165.

4 Antony Tibbles, ‘Interpreting Transatlantic Slavery: The Role of Museums’, in Transatlantic Slavery: Against Human Dignity, ed. Antony Tibbles (Liverpool: National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside, 2005), 131.

5 David Fleming, ‘The Emotional Museum: The Case of National Museums Liverpool’, in Challenging History in the Museum: International Perspectives, ed. Jenny Kidd, Sam Cairns, Alex Drago, and Amy Ryall (London: Routledge, 2017), 35.

6 Leanne Munroe, ‘Constructing Affective Narratives in Transatlantic Slavery Museums in the UK’, in Heritage Affect and Emotion: Politics, Practices and Infrastructures, ed. Divya P. Tolia-Kelly, Emma Waterton, and Steve Watson (London: Routledge, 2017), 115.

7 See: Divya P. Tolia Kelly, Emma Waterton, and Steve Watson, eds., Heritage, Affect and Emotion: Politics: Politics, Practices and Infrastructures (London; Routledge, 2018).

8 Laurajane Smith, ‘“We are … We are Everything”: The Politics of Recognition and Misrecognition at Immigration Museums’, Museums & Society 15, no. 1 (2017): 69.

9 Helen Rees Leahy, Museum Bodies: The Politics of Visiting and Viewing (London: Ashgate Publishing, 2012), 5.

10 Susan M. Pearce, On Collecting: An Investigation in the European Tradition (London; Routledge, 1995), 181.

11 Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

12 Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).

13 https://elizabethkwant.co.uk/projects/am-i-not-a-woman-and-a-sister.

14 Zoe Norridge, ‘Finding a Home in Hackney? Reimagining Narratives of Slavery Through a Multicultural Community Museum Space’, African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal 2, no. 2 (2009): 167–79.

15 Erin Austin Dwyer, Mastering Emotions: Feelings, Power, and Slavery in the United States (Philadelphia: University of Penn Press, 2021), 3.

16 Ibid., 4.

17 Sasha Turner, ‘The Nameless and the Forgotten: Maternal Grief, Sacred Protection, and the Archive of Slavery’, Abolition & Slavery 38, no. 2 (2017): 232.

18 Ibid., 233.

19 Ibid., 235.

20 Jenny Sharpe, Immaterial Archives: An African Diaspora Poetics of Loss (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2020), 4.

21 Leanne Munroe, ‘Negotiating Memories an Silences: Museum Narratives of Transatlantic Slavery in England’, in Beyond Memory: Silence and the Aesthetics of Remembrance, ed. Alexandre Dessingué and Jay Winter (London: Routledge, 2016), 176.

22 Laurajane Smith, ‘Affect and Registers of Engagement: Navigating Emotional Responses to Dissonant Heritages’, in Representing Enslavement and Abolition in Museums: Ambiguous Engagements, ed. Laurajane Smith, Geoff Cubitt, Kalliopi Fouseki, and Ross Wilson (London: Routledge, 2011), 261.

23 Jan Palmper, The History of Emotions: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 5.

24 William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) 45; Barbara H. Rosenwein, ‘Problems and Methods in the History of Emotions’, Passions in Context 1 (2010): 10.

25 See: Hartman, Scenes of Subjection; Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007); Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives Beautiful Experiments (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2019); See Sharpe, In the Wake on Blackness and Being; Christina Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).

26 International Slavery Museum, ‘Freedom!’, National Museums Liverpool, https://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/freedom-sculpture (accessed February 8, 2021).

27 Christina Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 3.

28 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 54–6.

29 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (London: Penguin Books, 2021: 1952), 93.

30 Stuart Hall, The Fateful Triangle: Race, Ethnicity, Nation (Boston, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 61–2.

31 Ibid., 95.

32 Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, 123.

33 Jessica Moody, The Persistence of Memory: Remembering Slavery in Liverpool, ‘Slaving Capital of the World’ (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020), 174.

34 International Slavery Museum, ‘Harvest; Waitress Wanted’, National Museums Liverpool, https://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/artifact/harvest-waitress-wanted (accessed March 22, 2023).

35 Frank B. Wilderson, Red, White and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Durham: Duke University Press; 2010), 18.

36 Saidiya Hartman, ‘Time of Slavery’, South Atlantic Quarterly 101, no. 4 (2002): 760.

37 Saidiya Hartman, ‘Venus in Two Acts’, Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 13.

38 Hartman, ‘Time of Slavery’, 758.

39 Ibid., 759.

40 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 22.

41 Divya P. Tolia-Kelly, ‘Race and Affect at the Museum: The Museums as a Theatre of Pain’, in Heritage, Affect and Emotion: Politics, Practices and Infrastructures, ed. D. Tolia-Kelly, E. Waterton and S. Watson (London: Routledge, 2018), 34.

42 Ibid., 37.

43 Ibid., 40.

44 Ibid., 43.

45 Sharpe, In the Wake, 14.

46 Ibid., 34. For work on the relationship between slavery and the Holocaust see: Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009); Seymour Drescher, ‘The Atlantic Slave Trade and the Holocaust: A Comparative Analysis’, in Is the Holocaust Unique? Perspectives on Comparative Genocide, ed. Alan S. Rosenbaum (Boulder: Westview, 1996); Ana Lucia Araujo, Shadows of the Slave Past, Memory, Heritage, and Slavery (New York: Routledge, 2014).

47 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 51.

48 Ibid., 54.

49 Ibid., 54.

50 Mike Crang and Divya P. Tolia-Kelly, ‘Nation, Race and Affect: Senses and Sensibilities at National Heritage Sites’, Environment and Planning A, no. 42 (2010): 2316.

51 Kimberly Juanita Brown, The Repeating Body: Slavery’s Visual Resonance in the Contemporary (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 181.

52 Anna Arabindan-Kesson, Black Bodies White Gold: Art, Cotton, and Commerce in the Atlantic World (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021), 6–7.

53 See: Patrice Douglass and Frank B. Wilderson, ‘The Violence of Presence: Metaphysics in a Blackened World’, The Black Scholar 43, no. 4 (2013): 117–23.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Matthew Jones

Mathew Jones is an independent scholar based in the United Kingdom. Email: [email protected]