• 1 Available online : https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1993/morrison/lecture/ [last acces (...)

3said the writer in her Nobel prize acceptance speech at Stockholm in 1993.1 Her analysis of what is at stake in language gives it an emancipatory function; it is a means of expression that is both political and poetic. This ‘ineffable’ becomes the heart of artistic and literary creations that are committed to unveiling what, between silences, emptinesses and fragments, resists time, violence and dispersion. Although it is a dramatic consequence of the Atlantic slave trade, it will be altered by contemporary arts into forms that federate memories, that reveal narratives, that summon forgotten or hidden events. From a recollection of each of the stages of its dispersion, artists will produce visual, textual, sound and spatial narratives that will become essential pieces for the writing and understanding of history. In recounting the genesis of Beloved, Toni Morrison evoked her need to read the established story from a different perspective:

• 2 Huey Copeland’s writing consists mainly of remarkable research on a social and cultural history of (...)

4In the introduction to his masterful study Bound to Appear. Art, Slavery, and the Site of Blackness in Multicultural America, Huey Copeland also emphasizes the importance of Beloved in his rewriting of the history of art in relation to slavery:2

• 3 Toni Morrison’s article is also quoted by Huey Copeland in his introduction (Copeland 2013: 3).

5As Copeland reminds us, Toni Morrison’s composition of the character of Sethe was inspired by the figure of Margaret Garner, an enslaved woman who, in an attempted escape in 1856, preferred to kill her youngest daughter rather than let her experience the immense suffering of servitude. This event, recorded as an anecdotal news item, is unearthed by the writer and, by bringing back the spirit of the dead girl in her story, produces the necessary disjunction between faith and hope, between reality and fiction. The question of ghosts is omnipresent in contemporary artistic and literary productions since millions of African men and women died during the crossing and millions of women, men and children perished on the plantations during the centuries in which the ferocious institution ravaged human lives. But the ghost is not only an immaterial being produced by spiritual, ritual or religious beliefs. The ghost is the figure that comes to haunt places and to underline with even greater intensity the need to revisit history and its empty spaces. For Toni Morrison, writing Beloved was the creation of a memorial landmark since there is no place of recollection dedicated to the memory of ‘those who made the journey and those who did not’3 (Morrison 1989: 4). A practice such as that which David Hammons (b. 1943) developed with his body prints in the early 1970s or with his use of nappy hair as sculptural material, participates in the creation of this ghostly absence that becomes presence through the force of evocation. Similarly, in his 1992 installation Black Star Line, Hammons evokes the shipping company created by Marcus Garvey in the 1920s, with its utopia of a return to the original continent. This ‘matter of absence’, which Patrick Chamoiseau (b. 1953) chose as the title of his philosophical work, is also described as the constant re-creation produced by a trans-generational memory of slavery. Quoting Alex Haley’s Roots (1977) or Aimé Césaire and Marcus Garvey, Patrick Chamoiseau questions this ‘lost and fantasised Africa’. He writes: ‘This loss would constitute the meaning of their gaze, the flow of their dreams, and the immobilisation of their lives in America’s Creole lands.’ For him, ‘when memory only serves to immobilise itself, forgetting ceases to structure the present, to feed the breath of what is possible. The healthiest memory sees only the future, and opens only to becoming.’ (Chamoiseau 2016: 154; we translate).

• 4 See the reproduction of this work by Charles White on the website of the Museum of Modern Art: www (...)

7The self-esteem which Malcolm X talks about here, rightly recalling material history that is in keeping with the notion of dignity, is widely conveyed by a painter like Charles White (1918–1979). From the 1930s on, through his art, he helped to reinforce this positive image of Black culture. In 1970, his series of posters Wanted recalled the revolt of the maroons, the runaway slaves. On poster number 14, two portraits in his characteristic graphic style are depicted in ovals: on the left is the portrait of a child, on the right that of an adult. The date ‘1619’ floats above the child whilst ‘19??’ echoes it above the adult.4 This chronological abbreviation recalls the date on which the first enslaved Africans arrived in the American colonies, but leaves the date of their liberation undetermined. 1970 is a turning point then. At the same time as new artistic forms were displacing traditional paradigms, a whole iconography of resistance was also being created by photography, with members of the Black Panther Party as the most celebrated subjects for pictures. The aesthetics work in both visual and militant terms, and in a frontal way support the propaganda-like character that was appropriate in the context of the repressive policies directed against African-Americans. Malcolm X’s book opens with the reproduction of a brass plaque depicting the king, Oba, and his followers. These ornamental plates are believed to have appeared in the fifteenth century but the history of the kingdom goes back to the fourteenth century (Igbafe 2007: 41–53; Plankensteiner 2010: 22–8).

• 5 For a contemporary reception of the exhibition, see the conversation with Fred Wilson where the wo (...)

8A central concern for many artists is to connect the history of African descent to a period that precedes the establishment of the triangular trade, or that points to a cultural genealogy that is not yet one of dehumanisation. But this journey to the ‘mother country’ requires a willingness to reflect on what this displacement has produced in creative approaches, which are set primarily in Western contexts. Most of the African masks that are used by artists as historical references have been seen in the museums of major American and European cities and, when they are inserted into artists’ creations, it is also the story of colonial instrumentalisation by the museum institution that is being told. The work carried out in 1992 by Fred Wilson (b. 1954) at the Maryland Historical Society Museum in Baltimore was an important step in this direction. The artist created Mining the Museum, a ground-breaking installation in progress, which for the first time confronted the collection assembled by a museum of history and society with the interpretation that a contemporary artist can make of this collection in a project that shows up the past of racism and offers a didactic approach to an interpretation of history marked by slavery. By juxtaposing objects from the collection, for example seventeenth- and eighteenth-century items each of which, in its own way, represents a social, political and economic reality, in this case silver tableware next to slave chains, and by naming this installation Metalwork, 1793–1880, Fred Wilson gives expression to a space-time continuum during which the most horrendous institution of torture could coexist, paradoxically, with a façade of refinement.5

• 6 See illustrations of the works mentioned here at www.culturetype.com/2019/03/10/the-armory-show-a- (...)

9These temporal and spatial confrontations are also possible because the contemporary art that has been developing since the 1960s has initiated a virulent institutional critique with the museum as one of its primary targets and pointing the finger at the racial and sexual discrimination suffered by some artists. In the mid-1970s, Faith Ringgold (b. 1930), with her fellow artists, demonstrated in front of New York museums to demand better representation of all segments of art society, which was largely dominated by white males. References to the history of slavery are recurrent throughout her work, notably through the representation of emblematic figures such as Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman.6 These heroes and heroines are at the origins of a history of the revolt against slavery and depicting them as saving symbols and eternal effigies is a way of confirming the primacy of a collective memory that is no longer shackled by the weight of alienation. During this pivotal period of the 1970s when political action was rubbing shoulders with artistic creation, African-American, Caribbean and black artists in Great Britain were constructing their identity by making their voices resound in unison, recalling common, collective and united origins.

• 7 For a presentation of Savacou magazine, see www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGdzoeG4Vh8.
• 8 See in particular the series painted by Jacob Lawrence between 1936 and 1938, The Life of Toussain (...)
• 9 For some reproductions of Romare Bearden’s work, Black Odyssey, see the link to the exhibition www (...)
• 10 See Green 2009. On this notion of recommencement, see the installation Begin Again Begin Again fir (...)

10In 1970, the Jamaican journal Savacou, produced, among others, by the poet Edward Kamau Brathwaite, chose slavery as the theme for its first issue.7 The story is told through the prism of the San Domingo Revolution and C. L. R. James’s book, The Black Jacobins, was chosen as the main case study (James 1938). Toussaint Louverture and Frederick Douglass are the two personalities most frequently represented by artists when it comes to affirming the pride of victory over slavery.8 The story of the Middle Passage is also an inspiration for many works. In 1977 the Black Odyssey series by Romare Bearden (1911–1988) created a double perspective by mingling mythological stories with those of Africans. Toni Morrison did the same, in the same year with her The Song of Solomon whilst in 1990 Derek Walcott (1930–2017), with his epic poem Omeros, brought the imaginary qualities of the Caribbean to meet Homer’s Aegean.9 These tos and fros made possible by the imagination and by creation can be found in the most radical works that choose poetry and the power of images to recall the chronological disorder that accompanies any attempt to erase the past. Sankofa (1993) by filmmaker Haile Gerima (b. 1946) creates a flashback between the present and a return to the plantations, a journey through time that Octavia E. Butler (1947–2006) also proposes in her novel Kindred (1979). Artists slip into the interstices of history to create new narrative forms with images, installations and sounds. The perpetuation of archives and stories requires their reactivation in contemporary modes, for which historicity is at one and the same time a transmission, a repetition and a return. Renée Green (b. 1959) borrowed the title of one of the chapters of Harriet Jacobs’s autobiography ‘Loophole of Retreat’ for one of her installations (Sites of Genealogy: Loophole of Retreat) in 1990. By choosing literally to occupy the attic of the PS1 Museum in Queens, New York, she recreated the conditions in which Jacobs spent seven years of her life, hidden in a cramped attic. Renée Green evokes a perpetual renewal of history where each beginning is a new beginning.10

• 11 See in particular Cameron Rowland's exhibition at Artists Space, New York, in 2016: artistsspace.o (...)

11Poetry and allegory accompany the critical function of contemporary art when it comes to confronting the ferocity of the totalitarian regime represented by slavery and the slave trade, but artistic practices of a more sociological nature are also emerging among artists of the new generation. In his autobiography, the activist Assata Shakur, imprisoned as early as 1973 as a result of her militant actions for the black cause, recalls that prison in the United States is a legal way of perpetuating slavery by forcing the most disadvantaged communities to work practically for free (Shakur 2001 [1987]: 65). Cameron Rowland (b. 1988) refers to the seminal essay ‘Bonded Life, Technologies of Racial Finance from Slave Insurance to Philanthrocapital’ by Zenia Kish and Justin Leroy (2015). In his artistic practice, this essay allows him to explore the economic and political links between the conditions of contemporary prison labour and the history of exploitation specific to slavery. The artist builds on this historical continuity of capitalism by creating installations in which he exhibits objects made by prisoners or the contracts of a contemporary insurance company already active at the time of slavery. Such companies provided slave owners with life insurance for their ‘property’.11 “Thought draws the imaginary of the past: a knowledge becoming,” states Édouard Glissant at the beginning of Poetics of Relation (Glissant 1997: 1). Supported by conceptual art and by the artists from the 1960s and 1970s who were involved in social and political demands, works like those of Cameron Rowland’s function as a transmission between a past and a present that are bound together by a historiography, a possible ‘knowledge in the making’.

• 12 “Like the post-Civil War United States, where the failure of Reconstruction (1865-1877) meant the (...)

12This continuity of designs sealed by future history contrasts with academic research which can be seen, on the contrary, as a work of discernment, making it possible to distinguish the specificities and transformations of different systems of oppression and domination. The ambition of this dossier is to show how artists work in the cavities of this history, updated and reinterpreted by sensitive forms. These are mutually nourished and artistic movements in the United States and in South Africa intersect in a common destiny marked by racial segregation and the apartheid system.12

• 13 “[…] the police deliberately opened fire on an unarmed crowd that had gathered peacefully at Sharp (...)
• 14 We refer here to the argument developed by Susan Newton-King in the conference entitled ‘Slavery, (...)
• 15 François-Xavier Fauvelle considers that the regime set up in 1948 was in some respects a reversal (...)
• 16 In a study of the Slave Lodge, the historian Anthony Holiday identifies the rapid rehabilitation o (...)

13In South Africa, the 1960s saw a radicalisation of the apartheid regime and the emergence of new forms of resistance that went from non-violent protest to armed struggle (Enwezor & Bester 2013: 170-225). On 21 March 1960 the violent police repression of the peaceful demonstration against the pass laws, restricting the mobility of populations categorized as ‘black’ and coloured, is considered the decisive event in this shift.13 In protest at the Sharpeville massacre, Albert Luthuli, followed by thousands of other South Africans, burned his pass. The establishment of this passport for internal use, intended to segregate and control the movement of marginalised populations within the territory, dates back to 1760 when slaves in the Cape were forced to move from urban areas to agrarian zones (Savage 1986). The purpose of issuing these identity documents was to control the movements of enslaved people, who were not yet subject to the racial categories forged a few centuries later under the apartheid regime.14 The history of slavery and the slave trade in the south of the African continent over several centuries cannot be understood as a matrix that predetermined the establishment of racial segregation from 1948 to 1991.15 It nevertheless constitutes a decisive lever in the political, economic and social struggles that began in the 1960s.16

• 17 On the spectacular aspect, see Ndebele 1991: 43.

14In response to the Sharpeville Massacre, Albert Luthuli and Martin Luther King Jr. issued a call to action against apartheid. This was one of the most important gestures of solidarity between the struggle against the apartheid regime in South Africa and the civil rights movements in the United States. This struggle also manifested itself in the artistic forms and practices developed in this political context. Art historian Colin Richards analyses this 1960s shift of paradigm in South African photography, which renewed the debate on artistic and documentary practices and values. In particular, he observed this shift in the work of Ernest Cole, who, according to the author, “underscores with special intensity the passage from liberal humanism to the more radical, critical humanism encountered, for example, in the writings of Frantz Fanon and later Steve Biko ad also mediated by developments in racial politics in 1960s America” (Richards 2013: 238–9). Richards analyses the emergence of an artistic language that is in keeping with the political and ethical issues of the 1960s and, in his view, constitutes a re-conceptualisation of the notion and values of humanism. The critical humanism he analyses in the artistic practices of this period, which is linked to the Black Consciousness movement founded by Bantu Stephen Biko in 1968, draws on the Black Power ideology of Black Americans as well as on the experience of the Pan-African Congress and African nationalisms (Fauvelle 2013 [2006]: 422). This new humanism, theorised by Njabulo S. Ndebele, marks a new relationship between the intimate and the public spheres that artists renegotiate in their struggles against the apartheid regime.17 The photographs analysed by Richards, like the one that Cole looked at, break with the spectacular representations of the regime, paradoxically consolidating the segregationist thinking that asserts that identities are based on predetermined groups. The critical humanism that artists adopt no longer seeks to represent exceptional events but rather to give expression to the singular manifestations of individuals fighting for freedom.

• 18 The Ouidah 92 festival was held for the first time in February 1993.
• 19 The works of Simonet Biokou, the Dakpogan brothers and Cyprien Tokoudagba are amongst the best kno (...)
• 20 Mention may be made here of the exhibition Temps modernes. La mémoire de l’esclavage et l’art cont (...)
• 21 See fabricemonteiro.viewbook.com/marrons.
• 22 Amongst his works, mention may be made of his contribution to the project Black Athena Reloaded 2: (...)

16The astonishment with which Soyinka describes how he was shackled, and how his stuttering prison guard was embarrassed, contrasts with the practices of torture he describes elsewhere, comparing them with those of the Gestapo. The astonishment and uneasiness are all the more disturbing because they seem to belong to a bygone era, perfectly distinct from contemporary preoccupations which, in the case of Nigeria, were then focused on the Biafran war of secession which caused the deaths of nearly two million people. Yet it is precisely this rhetoric, implicitly justifying the repression or denial of independent states, that Soyinka condemned as early as 1960 in The Dance of the Forest. The tragic past, long perceived as a burden for these new states, became a major political issue a few years later, in the case of Benin, when President Nicéphore Soglo came to power. The creation of Ouidah 92, a festival of Vodun (voodoo) arts and culture revived the past of the slave trade by emphasising the revitalisation of the country’s religious heritage, which had been condemned during the Marxist-Leninist regime of President Matthieu Kérékou.18 In this context, Beninese artists were commissioned to produce works which were then placed in heritage sites such as along the Slave Route, set up under the aegis of Unesco in 1994 in the former sacred forest of Kpassezume, or in the former court building of Ouidah (Seiderer 2009). The artists, often coming from families of craftsmen who originally made paintings, bas-reliefs or appliqués for kings or Vodun altars, produced sculptures, installations and paintings which depicted slavery and the transatlantic slave trade.19 This wave of artistic production in 1992, promoted by the Beninese state with financial support from France, was in keeping with the political ambivalence of the time. Like monuments and sites established as heritage assets, these works make the era of the slave trade ‘the founding age of a cultural heritage’ (Ciarcia 2008: 5-9) in which the Vodun religion emerges as a privileged resource. Although culturalism remains a fertile rhetoric, the aesthetic and political registers continue to become more diverse, echoing the epistemological and ethical debates seen in academic research.20 Here, we might single out the pared down and timeless aesthetics of the Marrons series (2010) by Fabrice Monteiro (born in 1972),21 the visual, sound and olfactory installation of La Bouche du roi (2005) by Romuald Hazoumé (b. 1962) or the performances and installations of Pélagie Gbaguidi (b. 1965).22 Monteiro’s re-enactment of chained bodies staged with the inhabitants of Ouidah, the realisation of the technical plan of the Brooks by Hazoumé, using kpayo cans for contraband petrol, and the dislocated images of Gbaguidi’s irreconcilable history are all ways of rewriting this tragic past. For the first, this past is subsumed under a timeless aesthetic; for the second, it is anchored in the paradoxes and ambivalences of Benin’s present-day economic and political reality; for the third, this past is dislocated and irreconcilable. Monteiro’s photographs make sense within a global reflection that the writer Thiong’o Nom wa Ngugi, in ‘The Legacy of Slavery’ (2017) identifies with the endemic violence of capitalism. La Bouche du roi, like the works of Soyinka, can be seen as a micro-history, the consequences of which are scrutinized and denounced in the light of the daily life of citizens. Finally, Gbaguidi’s dismembered aesthetics materialise and bring up to date the infernal disintegration that this past orchestrates.