Catastrophe and Trauma: a Response to Anita Rupprecht

Abstract

Anita Rupprecht's paper in this number, the first detailed discussion of the role of the Zong massacre in abolitionist writings to be published, raises a number of interesting questions. Perhaps the boldest suggestion is that the Zong served, in its above-decks visibility, as a stand-in for the below-decks invisibility of an experience of which there are almost no eyewitness accounts left by those who experienced it: the Middle Passage itself. In Rupprecht's account it circulates in the writings of Thomas Clarkson and others, both as an emblem of the horrors of slavery and, in descriptions of the court case, of the cold-blooded equation of persons and property. The conclusion of the paper is also arresting in its shift in focus from the traumatic memory of slavery to the legal and political actions involved in recent campaigns for ‘reparations’ and the discovery of documents related to the legacy of slavery. I want, in this response – which is offered from the perspective of cultural history, though it touches on the legal issues at points – to explore these two aspects of her discussion.