Exhibiting Slavery: The Caribbean Postmodern Novel as Museum

Abstract

Reviewed by: Exhibiting Slavery: The Caribbean Postmodern Novel as Museum Jessica Reeves (bio) Halloran, Vivian Nun. Exhibiting Slavery: The Caribbean Postmodern Novel as Museum. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2009. One of the most relevant studies conducted on this topic, Vivian Nun Halloran's book Exhibiting Slavery: The Caribbean Postmodern Novel as Museum illustrates the many ways in which postmodern Caribbean novels can serve as multi-media museums to exhibit slavery. For scholars interested in the fusion of literature, art, and history depicting slavery, this volume is a useful tool and reference guide. In her critique of fifteen novels including David Dabydeen's A Harlot's Progress (1999), Maryse Condé's Segu (1984), and Caryl Phillips's Cambridge (1993), Halloran explores paintings, dioramas, and engravings, as well as ethnographic, plantation, and mourning museums in her investigation of ways in which readers can recognize the novels as virtual museums through their incorporation of reference to historical documents, artwork, and accurate portrayals of mourning rituals and historical edifices. In engaging, intelligible prose, she argues that readers of postmodern historical novels are now major targeted audiences for museum exhibits depicting slavery. Since neither postmodern narratives nor museum exhibits provide "historical or narrative closure," audiences are encouraged to "investigate the theme further on their own either by returning to the exhibitions at a later time, or by conducting their own supplementary research" (15). In doing this, Halloran proposes that like museums, postmodern novels differ from traditional slave narratives in that instead of creating verisimilitude by constructing a realistic rendition of the past, they leave it to the readers to fill in these gaps through their own further exploration. [End Page 902] Building on this foundation, Halloran divides Exhibiting Slavery into seven sections, beginning with an introduction and followed by six chapters. Each chapter, dedicated to a form of museum, explores multiple Caribbean postmodern historical novels that deal, some more than others, with slavery. While Halloran's attempt to include a large variety of novels is noteworthy, it is at times overly ambitious since some of the analyses, particularly on those novels vaguely displaying slavery as a central theme, are cut short in an effort to squeeze them all in. Nonetheless, Halloran arranges the novels, written in Spanish, French, or English, according to their displaying of "artifacts" pertaining to the exhibition of slavery. Each novel belongs to one or more of the six categories into which this book is divided, but collectively, the novels analyzed in this study assimilate one general criterion: the ability to urge readers to seek more historical information on transatlantic slavery. In her introduction, Halloran demonstrates that she is well versed in recent and past efforts made by France, various Caribbean countries, and the United Nations to commemorate the fight against slavery. She includes relevant information from studies conducted by cultural theorist Mieke Bal and Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz, as well as various Caribbean authors' literary commemoration of the lasting effects of the suffering of the Africans who were forced into slavery. This information on the effects of human bondage in the Caribbean from the perspectives of politics, humanities, and social sciences paves the way for Halloran's inclusion of the overarching question posed by art historian Donald Preziosi: "[I]n a world where virtually anything can serve as a museum… what kind of object, then, is a museum?" (6). Halloran answers this by explaining that the museum's purpose is primarily to construct a new and synthetic arena in which to display featured artifacts. Secondly, the museum affects how visitors see themselves and identify with the contemporary world in which they live. Halloran explains that postmodern novels embody these criteria, and credits expert in African Diaspora Bettina M. Carbonell, editor of the anthology Museum Studies, for citing Joseph Conrad's modernist novel Heart of Darkness as an ethnographic museum novel, for it has influenced Halloran's study of the postmodern works examined in this text. Chapter 1 analyzes the differences between postmodern novels that use what Brian McHale describes in Postmodernist Fiction as "transworld identity," and those that do not (26). In novels using this literary device, characters clearly show a movement between their fictionalized aspects and their historically accurate...