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

这个项目是继我广受好评的处女作专著《黑大西洋的激进叙事》（Continuum: 2003）之后进行的。这本书似乎提供了非常需要的多维文本例子，以帮助修饰散居黑人文化的当代后民族解释。然而，我的第一本书只触及了各种有趣的跨国案例研究的表面，我认为这些案例研究将成为一项原创的后续研究。在我的第一篇专著中，我特别提到了两个领域，但对于纪念馆和纪念活动的更广泛的报道/想法以及散居海外的当代视觉艺术的有趣群体来说，这两个领域已经成熟。这些将在这项新的研究中得到重视。自从Toni Morrison在1989年观察到几乎完全缺乏对非裔美国人历史的纪念，特别是对美国及其他地区的奴隶贸易的纪念以来，欧洲、美洲和非洲的纪念和纪念项目已经有了明显的改善。我的新研究将通过一系列案例研究来调查其中的几个项目，这些案例研究将跟随莫里森，广泛地解释纪念碑的意义。因此，博物馆展览，音乐，视觉和文学文本有关的中间通道及其后果将与更传统的纪念一起讨论。皮埃尔·诺拉（Pierre Nora）关于记忆的概念将被用来展示文本和地点如何成为纪念的重要空间，而保罗·里科尔（Paul Ricoeur）的权威研究《记忆、历史和遗忘》（Memory, History and Forgetting）将提供一系列哲学问题和论点，以对抗各种纪念文本的脉络。非洲大西洋评论家如Dionne Brand， Caryl Phillips, Lubaina Himid, James Baldwin， Wole soinka和Toni Morrison的动态干预，他们讨论了记忆历史和纪念馆的相互关系，将被用来扩大英美学术界通常以欧洲为中心的纪念讨论。在当代视觉艺术方面，我将展示中间通道的气味及其对各种艺术家的影响，这些艺术家的政治议程是在文化背景下记住这段创伤的过去，而文化背景往往忽略了这一点。我将展示来自欧洲，美洲和非洲的艺术家如何在一系列作品中展示跨大西洋，跨国的象征主义和意识形态联系，并讨论种族，阶级，性和民族剥削的历史，并用这些历史来讨论当代对这些问题的讨论。随着各个学科的学者对全球化、后民族主义和后现代碎片化的身份认同做出回应，通过这些棱镜研究非洲-大西洋文化及其历史不仅是及时的，而且是至关重要的。本研究将在其完整的历史和跨文化背景下询问非洲大西洋文化。通过一系列的案例研究，记忆和纪念的想法将被用来讨论当代艺术、文学和音乐对奴隶制及其后果的反应，在美国、欧洲和较小程度上的加勒比和非洲。在斯图尔特·霍尔、哈尔·罗奇、伊曼纽尔·沃勒斯坦和爱德华·格里桑特等理论家的工作之后，保罗·吉尔罗伊建立了黑大西洋的理论背景，将各种文本彻底地语境化，并将其置于黑大西洋的理论背景中，将我们带入一种跨文化和跨国的方法来研究散居文化。这本书将使用在案例研究中使用的艺术家的一系列采访，以提供整个研究的连续性。被问及的问题将包括纪念的有效性，纪念无形存在的困难，阶级，性别和种族的交集以及纪念的政治。虽然案例研究是多种多样的，但重点将始终放在纪念问题上。

This project follows on from my critically acclaimed debut monograph Radical Narratives of the Black Atlantic (Continuum: 2003). The book seems to have provided much needed multi-dimensional textual examples to help embellish a contemporary post-national interpretation of black cultures in the diaspora. My first book, however, only scratched the surface of a variety of interesting transnational case studies that I believe would make an original follow-up study. Two areas in particular were touched on in my first monograph but are ripe for more extensive coverage / ideas of memorials and memorialisation and an interesting group of contemporary visual arts across the diaspora. These would be foregrounded in this new study. Since Toni Morrison's 1989 observation that there was an almost complete lack of memorialisation of African American history and particularly of the slave trade in America and beyond, there has been a marked improvement with memorials and memorial projects being initiated in Europe, the Americas and Africa. My new study will investigate several of these projects through a series of case studies which will, following Morrison, interpret widely what a memorial can mean. So that museum exhibitions, musical, visual and literary texts relating to the middle passage and its aftermath will be discussed alongside more traditional memorials. Pierre Nora's concept of lieux de memoire will be utilised to show how texts and sites become important spaces for memorialisation, whilst Paul Ricoeur's magisterial study Memory, History and Forgetting will provide a series of philosophical questions and arguments to rub against the grain of the various memorial texts. The dynamic interventions of African Atlantic critics such as Dionne Brand, Caryl Phillips, Lubaina Himid, James Baldwin, Wole Soyinka and Toni Morrison who have talked about the inter-relationship of memory history and memorials will be used to widen out what has often been a Eurocentric discussion of memorialisation in Anglo-American academia. On contemporary visual arts I will show the redolence of the middle passage and its consequences for a variety of artists whose political agenda is to remember this traumatic past in a cultural context which all too often elides it. I will show how artists from Europe, the Americas and Africa exhibit Transatlantic, Trans-national linkages in symbolism and ideology across a range of work and talk back to histories of race, class, sex and ethnic exploitation and use that history to talk to contemporary discussions of these issues. As academics across a range of disciplines respond to globalisation, postnationalism and postmodern fragmented identity, a study that deals with African Atlantic cultures and their history through these prisms is not only timely but vital. This study will interrogate African Atlantic cultures in their full historical and cross-cultural contexts. Through a series of case studies ideas of memory and memorialisation will be used to discuss contemporary artistic literary and musical responses to slavery and its aftermath in America, Europe and to a lesser extent the Caribbean and Africa. The various texts will be thoroughly contextualised and placed in a theoretical context of the black Atlantic established by Paul Gilroy in the wake of the work of such theorists as Stuart Hall, Hal Roach, Immanuel Wallerstein and Edouard Glissant that moves us to an intercultural and transnational approach to diasporan cultures. The book will use a series of interviews with artists used in the case studies to provide continuity throughout the study. Questions asked will include the efficacy of memorials, the difficulties of memorialising invisibilised presences, the intersection of class, gender and race and the politics of memorialisation. Though the case studies are diverse, the focus will remain on the issue of memorialisation throughout.