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Monument Building, Memory Making and Remembering Slavery in the Contemporary Atlantic World

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Monument Building, Memory Making and Remembering Slavery in the Contemporary Atlantic World Monument Building, Memory Making and Remembering Slavery in the Contemporary Atlantic World Winston Francis Phulgence PhD University of York Archaeology December 2016 Abstract This thesis is a comparative study of the creation of monuments and memorials to commemorate the Transatlantic Slave Trade and slavery in the Circum-Atlantic region. It is based on interviews conducted with people who were directly involved in the processes which created these monuments, to understand their role in the process and to gain insight into the forces and issues which impacted on the process. Since monuments and memorials to the Transatlantic Slave Trade are in public spaces, archival research was done to ascertain the level of public discourse generated by the memorialisation process and how this discourse impacted the process. The case studies were chosen to allow for the comparison of the process of memorialisation in different parts of the region which had different historical relationships with the Transatlantic Slave Trade. This allowed for analysis of memorialisation within different political contexts. The first case study was Ghana an African nation with ports from which for enslaved Africans trafficked across the Atlantic. Saint Lucia is an English speaking, Eastern Caribbean island nation which received enslaved Africans during the period of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Saint Lucia has a majority population that is descended from formerly enslaved Africans. The third case study is of the state of Louisiana in the United States of America which received large numbers of enslaved Africans whose descendants are a minority in the population. The comparison of these case studies illustrates how the memorialisation process is directly impacted by the contemporary socio-political environment and the economics of each state. It also illustrates how the power of various stakeholders involved in the process creates silences and engenders forgetting, as various agenda are pursued. 2 Contents Abstract ................................................................................................................................................... 2 List of Images .......................................................................................................................................... 5 Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................................. 6 Declaration .............................................................................................................................................. 7 Introduction ............................................................................................................................................. 8 Silences vs Emplacement .................................................................................................................. 13 Case Studies ...................................................................................................................................... 17 Methodology ..................................................................................................................................... 19 Conclusion......................................................................................................................................... 23 Chapter Two .......................................................................................................................................... 25 Literature Review: Memory, Identity and Heritage in the Atlantic World ........................................... 25 Memory and Remembering ............................................................................................................... 25 Memory and Identity ......................................................................................................................... 31 Monuments Memory and Heritage ................................................................................................... 37 Slavery Memorialisation in the Caribbean ........................................................................................ 41 Sites of Heritage: Monuments to the Transatlantic Slave Trade in West Africa .............................. 47 Plantation Heritage and Slavery in the United States ........................................................................ 52 Chapter 3 ............................................................................................................................................... 57 Making Sites for Weeping: Transatlantic Slave Trade Memorialisation in Ghana ............................... 57 Memorialisation in Ghana ................................................................................................................. 58 Memory of the Transatlantic Slave Trade: The making of Sites of Weeping ................................... 62 The PANAFEST Festival .............................................................................................................. 65 MEMORIALISING EMANCIPATION IN GHANA .................................................................. 67 The Joseph Project ........................................................................................................................ 70 Nkrumah’s Rivival and State Appropriation of Pan-Africanism .................................................. 72 Memorialisation and Dissonance ...................................................................................................... 76 Chapter Four .......................................................................................................................................... 81 Remembering and Forgetting: Memorialising Slavery in Saint Lucia .................................................. 81 Memorialisation in Saint Lucia ......................................................................................................... 82 Memorialising Slavery and its Legacies ........................................................................................... 89 National Heroes and Heroes Park ................................................................................................. 91 Remembering Resistance .............................................................................................................. 92 Resistance and Identity .................................................................................................................. 93 Leonard Waite, Saint Lucian Nationalism and Identity Creation ..................................................... 94 3 Freedom Monument and Heroes Park ............................................................................................... 96 The Public and Memorialisation ....................................................................................................... 98 The Memorialisation Project ............................................................................................................. 99 The Freedom Monument: Memorialisation and Dissonance .......................................................... 100 Memory Identity and Forgetting Slavery ........................................................................................ 103 Chapter Five ........................................................................................................................................ 107 Whitney Plantation: Slavery, Memory and Trauma ............................................................................ 107 Whitney Plantation a Brief History ................................................................................................. 107 Plantations as Sites of Memory ....................................................................................................... 109 The Tour .......................................................................................................................................... 113 The Wall of Honour ........................................................................................................................ 115 Midlo Hall Memorial Wall .............................................................................................................. 116 Field of Angels ................................................................................................................................ 117 Sources: Making the Museum ......................................................................................................... 120 Memory and Authenticity ............................................................................................................... 121 Making A Site of Memory .............................................................................................................. 123 Slavery and American History ........................................................................................................ 126 Guerrilla Memorialisation and Counter Memory ............................................................................ 127 Chapter 6 ............................................................................................................................................. 130 Slavery, Counter-Memory, Identity in the Circum-Atlantic ............................................................... 130 Slavery, Memory and Counter Memory.......................................................................................... 131 Uses of Memory .............................................................................................................................
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