Working to transform historical “mourning” into artistic “revenge”, Himid’s Memorial to Zong testifies to the tragedies generated by one legal case in particular: the Zong slave ship. As she explains, her works in the exhibition operate as monuments to the incident in 1781 when Luke Collingwood threw 133 sick, enslaved Africans overboard to claim the insurance rather than risk the “cargo’s” devaluation when sold in Jamaica. This paper examines the 2020 exhibition held in Lancaster, the first showing of these paintings together in a slave port nearly 30 years since their only other showing in Rochdale in 1991 as part of the Revenge exhibition. As the curator for this new exhibition by the first black woman winner of the prestigious Turner prize, my paper will contextualise the Lancaster setting for the exhibition including new research on historical black presence in the city that has only been unearthed since 2018 and discuss the methodology used in the curating of these paintings in the historic space of the 1764 Customs House a key building in the development of the slave and West Indies trade in Lancaster. It will also frame these works in terms of historical black British identity using the work of Stuart Hall, Gretchen Gerzina, Marcus Rediker and Paul Gilroy and in the light of work on memory and trauma by thinkers such as Paul Ricoeur, Edouard Glissant, Saidiya Hartman, Dionne Brand, Giorgio Agamben, Ian Baucom and Michael Rothberg. It will examine Lubaina’s seminal series in terms of transgenerational trauma, multi-directional memory and witnessing in the wake of historical blindness and silence.
Alan Rice is Professor in English and American Studies at the University of Central Lancashire, Preston, co-director of the Institute for Black Atlantic Research (IBAR) and director of the UCLan Lancashire Research Centre in Migration, Diaspora and Exile (MIDEX). He has worked on the interdisciplinary study of the Black Atlantic publishing Radical Narratives of the Black Atlantic (2003) & Creating Memorials, Building Identities: The Politics of Memory in the Black Atlantic (2010). He was a founder member of the Slave Trade Arts Memorial Project in Lancaster which was responsible for unveiling a memorial commemorating victims of the slave trade in 2001, co-curated Trade and Empire: Remembering Slavery at the Whitworth Gallery Manchester in 2007 and has been consultant and talking head on a variety of documentaries with the BBC and other broadcasters. He has given keynote presentations in Britain, Germany, Switzerland, Greece, the United States, Italy, Denmark, Spain, Poland, the Netherlands and France. His articles have appeared in a wide range of journals including, Slavery and Abolition, Atlantic Studies, Patterns of Prejudice, Journal of American Studies Zeitschrift fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik and Research in African Literatures. His latest co-written work, Inside the Invisible: Memorialising Slavery and Freedom in the Life and Works of Lubaina Himid (2019) is the first academic monograph on the 2017Turner Prize Winner. In 2020 he is curating the exhibition Lubaina Himid: Memorial to Zong for the Lancaster Maritime Museum and working on projects with Preston Black History Group, Fashion Revolution Week and Lancaster Jazz Festival.
Responsables du séminaire : Maroua Mannai & Judith Misrahi-Barak