Guerilla Memorialisation in the Wake of Slavery’s Legacy: African Atlantic Art in the 1990s

Résumé 0

This paper contrasts American-born, Kara Walker’s dark vision of the history of the American South with Cuban-born Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons translucent installations about migration and the legacies of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and Lubaina Himid’s dynamic works about black women and the ocean. All three created stellar works in the 1990s with related, but completely different, visions of slavery and its consequences. This chapter will mobilise discussion of the abject and memory both redemptive and unredeemable to outline the difficulties of representing the slave past. It will in particular discuss issues of gender, sex and labour in all three artists’ work. It will use a theoretical frame developed through the work of Paul Ricœur, Dominick LaCapra, Saidiya Hartman, Dionne Brand, Hershini Bhana Young, Jean Fisher, Stuart Hall and Toni Morrison to essay the differences of approach in these three artists. In particular it will show how Walker’s ‘suckling from history’ is steeped in a problematic attachment to the abject which is in danger of promoting a conservative ideology in the present and will contrast this with Himid’s more radical vision and Campos-Pons’ imaginative evocation where the very signs of domestic servitude in a confined space are transformed by the operation of memory and diasporic consciousness into a theatre for mobility and transformative redemption that make for a truly radical vision.