Offering a wide-ranging study of contemporary literature, film,
visual art, and performance by writers and artists who live and work
in the United Kingdom but also maintain strong ties to postcolonial
Africa and the Caribbean, Living Cargo explores how
contemporary black British culture makers have engaged with the
institutional archives of colonialism and the Atlantic slave trade in
order to reimagine blackness in British history and to make claims
for social and political redress.
Steven Blevins calls
this reimagining “unhousing history”—an aesthetic and political
practice that animates and improvises on the institutional archive,
repurposing it toward different ends and new possibilities. He
discusses the work of novelists, including Caryl Phillips, Fred
D’Aguiar, David Dabydeen, and Bernardine Evaristo; filmmakers Isaac
Julien and Inge Blackman; performance poet Dorothea Smartt; fashion
designer Ozwald Boateng; artists Hew Locke and Yinka Shonibare; and
the urban redevelopment of Bristol, England, which unfolded alongside
the public demand to remember the city’s slave-trading past.
Living Cargo
argues that the colonial archive is neither static nor residual but
emergent. By reassembling historical fragments and traces
consolidated in the archive, these artists not only perform a kind of
counter-historiography, they also imagine future worlds that might
offer amends for the atrocities of the past.
