The British slave trade and public memory / Elizabeth Kowaleski Wallace.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

How does a contemporary society restore to its public memory a momentous event like its own participation in transatlantic slavery? What are the stakes of once more restoring the slave trade to public memory? What can be learned from this history? Elizabeth Kowaleski Wallace explores these questions in her study of depictions and remembrances of British involvement in the slave trade. Skillfully incorporating a range of material, Wallace discusses and analyzes how museum exhibits, novels, television shows, movies, and a play created and produced in Britain from 1990 to 2000 grappled with the subject of slavery.

Topics discussed include a walking tour in the former slave-trading port of Bristol; novels by Caryl Phillips and Barry Unsworth; a television adaptation of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park ; and a revival of Aphra Behn's Oroonoko for the Royal Shakespeare Company. In each case, Wallace reveals how these works and performances illuminate and obscure the history of the slave trade and its legacy. While Wallace focuses on Britain, her work also speaks to questions of how the United States and other nations remember inglorious chapters from their past.

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CHOICE Review

Claiming that "the eighteenth-century transatlantic slave trade is an event that is driving British society forward in the twenty-first century," Wallace (English, Boston College) examines various artistic and commemorative attempts (novels, museums, theater, media) to restore to public consciousness a memory of Great Britain's involvement in the slave trade, connecting works and performances to a vision of contemporary Britain. The author moves from century to century, from continent to continent, from art form to art form. Her belief that retelling forgotten stories of the past reshapes attitudes toward present and future is powerfully illustrated but, alas, never questioned. Is knowledge of the British slave trade the positive catalyst Wallace thinks it is? Perhaps restored historical events do reshape contemporary culture, but one could also argue that contemporary culture reshapes the historical record. The author examines very specific instances--e.g., a museum exhibit in Liverpool, the Bristol Slave Trade Trail--rather than scrutinizing philosophical assumptions. Nevertheless, her account of the many signs that a revival of knowledge about the slave trade has taken place in Great Britain is interesting, and this new perspective enhances the vision of a tolerant, diverse, multiethnic society. ^BSumming Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. R. D. Sears Berea College