Remembering Slavery, Again

Abstract

IN 2015, A YEAR OF DEBATE OVER THE CONFEDERATE FLAG and intense meditation on the meaning of race in America, it would be a shame to miss the equally public memories of race-slavery in Britain. Britain's Forgotten Slave Owners, a twopart BBC documentary,1 publicised the Legacies of British Slave-ownership (LBS), a University College of London database of all the slave owners in Britain who were awarded compensation when slavery was abolished on 1 August 1834. A Broadway musical, Grace, dramatised the story of the British slave-ship captain, John Newton, who wrote the hymn that would become associated with African-American culture and civil rights struggles - and which President Obama sang at the eulogy for Pastor Clementa Pinckney, killed in June 2015 by a white supremacist who shot six other members of the AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. In the literary sphere, British novelist Caryl Phillips published The Lost Child, partly a prequel to Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, in which he draws on the long critical speculation that Heathcliff, brought from the slave port of Liverpool to the Yorkshire moors, is black.2 It appears that both the US and the UK are witnessing one of those moments when we confront what Toni Morrison says of Beloved (1987),3 something that the characters don't want to remember, I don't want to remember, black people don't want to remember, white people don't want to remember. I mean, it's national amnesia.4Aside from the fact that these are actually two cases of national amnesia, what is striking is how much people keep remembering, and, more, how often it is the same icon remembered repeatedly as though with all the power of the first time. The hymn Amazing Grace plays as the signature music in both the BBC's Britain's Forgotten Slave Owners and an earlier documentary, the 2009 independent film A Regular Black: The Hidden History of Wuthering Heights,5 which speculates on Heathcliff's racial identity in the context of Yorkshire's historical connections with slavery, and Amazing Grace is the title of both the aforementioned musical about the moral awakening of Captain (later Reverend) John Newton, and a 2006 film about William Wilberforce, who led the successful fight in Parliament in 1807 to abolish the slave trade throughout the British Empire (but not slavery itself, which happened much later, in 1833). Yet, despite the circulation of these four productions across the Atlantic, it is safe to say that most Americans would not recognise the British roots of this black spiritual - and that few readers anywhere would recognise a 'black' Wuthering Heights. Looking at 2015, a year of transatlantic memories of the New World racial past and its legacy in the present, may therefore give us insight into national amnesias, plural - how two nations continue to grapple differently with their intertwined histories, the global institution of nineteenth-century slavery.The history of slavery is of course neither new nor unknown, yet its afterlives seem to be repeatedly rediscovered at particular moments in time. Some of these coincide with obvious anniversaries, such as the 2007 bicentenary of the British abolition of the transatlantic slave trade (when the only feature film to emerge from the commemoration was, symptomatically, the Wilberforce biopic Grace). And vice versa, as the voluminous work in the field of memory studies shows, the legacy of slavery is subject to periodic erasure of different kinds in public space and public memory as well as in popular literary and academic discourse.6 In the US, seeking roots can be tantamount to rejecting them: Henry Louis Gates Jr, host and executive producer of the PBS series Finding Your Roots, has been embroiled in controversy over its capitulation to actor Ben Affleck's request that the programme not reveal his ancestor's slave-holding history in a 2014 episode. (PBS put the series on hold after determining that the episode violated its editorial standards. …