Bristol and the eruption of memory: Making the slave-trading past visible

Abstract

This article describes the work undertaken by the public authorities of Bristol to construct, for this old slaving port, a collective memory of the trade in Africans. It shows how the use of urban space is necessary to resurrect that past and implies a visual model to inform a new gaze on the city. Through intensive action on the memory of slavery, the author suggests, from the work of Paul Ricoeur, the passage from silence to 'too much memory'. This excess can be viewed as the result of a political instrumentalizatio n linked to the requirements of the British multicutural model. Further, these actions on memory reveal distinctly divergent intentions for the different communities of the city.

Beneath and before: continuums of publicness in public art

“…All these examples concern monuments that actually exist, but some monuments attempt to address erasures, displacements, and silences by destabilizing visibility altogether (Charlesworth 1994;Chivallon 2001). For example, in the German tradition of countermonuments (Young 2000), one work reclaims memories of erased people by superimposing projections of Jewish families at home, at rest, and at work on shop-fronts, apartments, train platforms and sidewalks; i.e.…”

Miniaturisation and the representation of military geographies in recreational wargaming

“…In part, as Koch (2010) demonstrates, miniaturisation invites the viewer to see the world in a gargantuan, panoptic way, sharing and perhaps enrolling themselves into the state's vision of a place with little awareness of alternative possibilities. Models in museums can present particular forms of history, frozen into a particular vignette that appear to define and authenticate a vision of history (Chivallon, 2001;Insley, 2008). Varutti (2011) notes how that miniatures in Chinese museums oversimplify inter-ethnic relations but appear 'real' by virtue of their detail and animation.…”

Front doors to freedom, portal to the past: history at the Ellis Island immigration museum, New York

“…This, Duncan (1991) argues, is enacted through particular 'rituals of citizenship'. Drawing on a case study of several art museums, Duncan argues that 'elite' histories and traditions adopted within museums become equated with 'civilization itself', as part of a larger project concerned with the legitimization of the modern state (see also Chivallon 2001;Kearns and Philo 1993;Mirzoeff 2000). More broadly, Karp and Lavine (1991: 2) '.…”