Public Art, Memorials and Atlantic Slavery

In this collection distinguished American and European scholars, curators and artists discuss major issues concerning the representation and commemoration of slavery, as brought into sharp focus by the 2007 bicentennial of the abolition of the slave trade. Writers consider nineteenth and twentieth century American and European images of African Americans, art installations, photography, literature, sculpture, exhibitions, performances, painting, film and material culture. This is essential reading for historians, cultural critics, art-historians, educationalists and museologists, in America as in Europe, and an important contribution to the understanding of the African diaspora, race, American and British history, heritage tourism, and transatlantic relations. Contributions include previously unpublished interview material with artists and practitioners, and a comprehensive review of the commemorative exhibitions of 2007. Illustrations include images from Louisiana, Maryland, and Virginia, many previously unpublished, in black and white, which challenge previous understandings of the aesthetics of slave representation.This book was published as a special issue of Slavery and Abolition.

Celeste-Marie Bernier is a Lecturer in the School of American and Canadian Studies, University of Nottingham, and the author of African American Visual Arts, University of North Carolina Press and Edinburgh University Press, 2008.  She is currently writing a monograph for Routledge on Slave Heroism in the Transatlantic Imagination.Judie Newman is Professor of American Studies at the University of Nottingham. Her most recent book is Fictions of America: Narratives of Global Empire, Routledge, 2007.