Post Scriptum: Monuments of the Black Atlantic, 2002–2011

Abstract

POST SCRIPTUM Monuments of the Black Atlantic, JOHANNA C. KARDUX There is no place you or I can go, to think about, or not think about, to summon the presences of, or recollect the absences of slaves. . . . There is no suitable memorial or plaque or wreath or wall or park or skyscraper lobby. There’s no 300‐ foot tower. There’s no small bench by the road. There is not a tree scored, an initial I can visit, or you can visit in Charleston, Savannah, New York, Providence, or better still on the banks of the Mississippi. And because such a place doesn’t exist . . . the book [Beloved] had to. —Toni Morrison, “A Bench by the Road” (1989) When I started researching the memorialization of slavery and the slave trade in the Atlantic World in 1999, ten years after Toni Morrison lamented the absence of slavery in American public memory, the call for slavery monuments was only just beginning to be heard and heeded. Much has changed since then and since the publication in 2004 of my article “Monuments of the Black Atlantic.” On Sullivan’s Island in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina, there is now finally a commemorative “bench by the road” where visitors can contemplate on the history and significance of what was once the place of disembarkation for almost half the enslaved Africans transported to British North America by British, Dutch, and American slave trading companies. 1 In Lower Manhattan, the African Burial Ground National Monument, dedicated in 2007, serves as a compelling reminder that slavery was not only the South’s peculiar institution, but a foundational part of North America’s colonial history. In 1626, barely a year after the establishment of New Amsterdam, the Dutch West India Company, soon to be a major player in the transatlantic slave trade,