Memory, Trauma and ‘Affective Autonomy’: Displaying Emotion and Trauma at the International Slavery Museum

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article attempts to answer the question of how museums might communicate the affective experience of enslavement, and the history of emotions and slavery, to their audiences. By using the International Slavery Museum, Liverpool as its case study, it answers this question through examining how the museum uses contemporary art in dialogue with archives of historical and modern slavery to make an affective investment in the lives of enslaved peoples. I name this approach ‘Affective Autonomy’, as it uses affect to underscore the agency of enslaved peoples to have complex emotional engagements with their experience of captivity. The International Slavery Museums uses contemporary art not to fill in the silences of the archive but to articulate them. It does so by using these artworks as entry points into discussions about the experience of modern slavery, which frame the emotional experience of slavery during the Transatlantic Slave Trade. The experience of modern slavery is understood through references to transatlantic slavery. Consequently, this article helps provide insight into how the history of emotions and slavery can be communicated creatively to general audiences in museum settings.