Creating Memorials, Building Identities The Politics of Memory in the Black Atlantic

This incisive book investigates memorials to slavery throughout the African diaspora, with an emphasis on Europe. It analyzes not only the increasing number of physical monuments but also the practice of rememberingand forgettingin museums and plantation houses as well as in contemporary cultural forms like the visual arts, literature, music, and film. A series of case studies ranging from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries, from Senegal and Montserrat to Manchester and Paris, explores issues such as the Lancashire cotton famine, black soldiers in World War II, and the 2007 commemoration of abolition in regional museums.

Alan Rice is Professor of English and American Studies, University of Central Lancashire. He is author of Radical Narratives of the Black Atlantic (Continuum, 2003), and co-editor with Martin Crawford of Liberating Sojourn: Frederick Douglas and Transatlantic Reform (University of Georgia Press, 1999).