My paper will seek to interrogate the question: how can we move the history of slavery from text to public space and inscribe collective memory, as represented by archival data, on to public monuments? The evidence will come from a project started by the Jamaica National Heritage Trust as a way of providing Jamaicans with a space to memorialize the slavery experience. The paper explores the rationale behind the monument, samples and critiques the data on which the monument rest, as well as delves into the public criticisms that the idea has already attracted. For example, there are concerns about rekindling the debate about crime and agency within the context of a society where racialized class war is manifested in ghetto revolts and, arguably, a violent vanguard, members of which at times explain their cause in terms of restorative social justice. The challenge then is how to separate violence as a fact of historical importance from the study of present socio-political reality? By emphasizing in the study of slavery the role of violence in maintaining and destroying the slave system, those seeing the legacies of slavery may insist that the same strategy is needed in the face of a political system that appears not to have learnt the valuable lessons of history. Do the proposed monuments then, belong to the present time or to the heady 60's and 70's when historians and Caribbean publics alike would have been energized by the social and political ferment of decolonization, black identity, political enfranchisement, democracy and freedom?
By way of theoretical context, I would say that m y project could be located within what David Scott calls the “Foucauldian exercise of writing histories of the present” – an exercise that involves engaging with “the hegemonic persistence into the postcolonial present of aspects of colonialist discourse and practice.”
David Scott, “The Government of Freedom”, in Meeks and Lindahl, p. 429
|
|
|
