Conclusion: Queer Modes of Empathy as an Ethics of the Archive

Abstract

Addressing the boom of memorial events and special exhibitions as well as the establishment of the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool celebrating the bicentennial of the abolition of the slave trade in 2007, the conclusion of Familial Feeling returns to the question of ethics in dealing with the archive of slavery. Reflecting on methodology in literary studies by contrasting surface reading with approaches that foreground negative affects, Haschemi Yekani, via a recourse to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s “reparative” reading, proposes a queering of empathy that should not rest on a celebratory understanding of the past, as trauma overcome, but serve as a foundation of ongoing tension in contemporary narratives of familial feeling and national belonging. For this purpose, Haschemi Yekani examines the 2007 installation Swallow Hard: The Lancaster Dinner Service by artist Lubaina Himid. The author proposes that by engaging with the messy entanglements of marginalised and hegemonic voices in the establishment of Britishness as familial feeling, one can arrive at more complex reading strategies of the literary sources from the historical archive of the early Black Atlantic and the British novel as well as a less congratulatory contemporary memorial culture that seeks British “Greatness” in the past.

At a time of Brexit and re-nationalisations in Europe and the United States, paying heed to historical global entanglements is more relevant than ever.¹ In Britain a toxic combination of Euro-scepticism paired with nostalgia for different British trade policies continues to impact public discourse, imaginations that, dare I say, supposedly would make Britain, too, “Great again” and echo the sentiment that Paul Gilroy has compellingly described as “postcolonial melancholia” (2005). This feeling, he argues, has limited a vision of British society as truly convivial.² Following increased postcolonial independence after World War II and the subsequent rise of neoliberalism and globalisation, Britain at the beginning of the twenty-first century is struggling once more to define its national identity, let alone come to terms with the current challenges Brexit might pose to the status of Scotland and Ireland in the future. After a period of supposed “multicultural” flexibility, we witness the rise of assumptions of more rigid national belonging and contested affects around who can and who should not belong to the nation (“older” migrants from former colonies and commonwealth nations as opposed to newer East European migrants, Muslims versus Christians, etc.). As a way of closing, and more than ten years after the bicentennial of the abolition of the slave trade, I want to briefly shed light on how the transatlantic authors and their narratives that have been at the centre of this book have resurfaced and found their way into the contemporary museum landscape and larger memorial culture. In doing so, I discuss in some more detail the debates on the ethics of the archive (of slavery) and contemporary affective responses to such materials that need to depart from uncritical conceptions of empathy.

Susan Buck-Morss for one criticises the lacking inclusivity of empathy. She writes,

Empathic imagination may well be our best hope for humanity. The problem is that we never seem to imagine this humanity inclusively enough, but only by excluding an antithetical other, a collective enemy beyond humanity’s pale. (2009: 144)

But more than simply the failure to imagine a broad enough conception of empathy, empathy also often implicitly reproduces assumptions that go back to the mentioned eighteenth-century discourse on benevolent sympathy, as Saidiya Hartman emphasises:

We imaginatively witness the crimes of the past and cry for those victimized—the enslaved, the ravaged, and the slaughtered. And the obliterative assimilation of empathy enables us to cry for ourselves, too. (2002: 767)

We cannot continue simply to assume a humanistic paternalistic empathy with the suffering of “Others” that Hartman characterises as the “obliterative assimilation of empathy” which quickly becomes self-indulgent. Instead, with a turn to the writing on negative affects in queer theory and black radical thought, I want to propose a queering of empathy that should not rest on a celebratory approach to the past, as trauma overcome, but serve as a foundation of ongoing tension in contemporary narratives of familial feeling and national belonging. This includes ambivalence regarding the normative aspects of claiming familiarity. Finally, it is specifically the contemporary artistic response to the archive of enslavement and engagement with historical artefacts, as in the work of artist and curator Lubaina Himid, that I will discuss as a form of cross-temporal entanglement, which can function as an alternative to an all-too-congratulatory memorial culture that seeks British “Greatness” in the past.

Memory and Affect

By turning to memory and affect then, I conclude my interrogation of the historical rise of the British novel in showing how the construction of an exceptional British response to slavery continues to shape current politics of remembrance, as does the concept of familial feeling. While the history of the United States and the impact of slavery on the genealogy of American families has been at the core of heated debates for a long time, it is only more recently in the wake of the bicentennial in 2007 that Britain has begun to address this past more seriously as part of a national (and shameful) heritage with the prominent opening of the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool, as mentioned in the introduction. Much later than in the United States, British families now explore their often brushed-over “entangled family histories”.³ While I cannot discuss at great length the role of the various museum exhibitions and memorials in relation to the bicentenary here, it seems noteworthy that abolition shows up as a familiar trope of reconciliatory Britishness.⁴ Looking at these exhibitions and the feature film Amazing Grace (dir. Michael Apted), Waterton et al. criticise the homogenising narratives of the bicentenary that relied heavily on “generic templates of benevolence, heroism, justice and shared values” (2010: 26) and thus promoted “a celebratory narrative of the munificence of abolition as opposed to the complicity, guilt and shame of enslavement” (2010: 29). Wood, too, calls 2007 a shibboleth and criticises “an undue emphasis upon a celebratory approach to a supposed magical and chimerical moment of transformation” (2010: 164). Britain’s role as pioneering the earliest form of what can be labelled a “human rights campaign” avant la lettre thus informs the country’s contemporary attempts in reconstructing its past. The fight against slavery is commemorated by honouring the legacy of white and Black abolitionists like William Wilberforce and Olaudah Equiano. However, while it is commendable to acknowledge Black agency in the past finally more fully, exhibits like the mentioned “Black Achievers Wall” in Liverpool run the risk of levelling the archive of the early Black Atlantic. This caters to a politics of feelings built on a “happy”⁵ inclusive history which threatens to unremember or overwrite the (many) lives lost precisely by accentuating the achievements of those (few) modern Black subjects whose testimonies have survived to this day. In other words, this contemporary appropriation of early Black Britons functions, as mentioned in relation to Seacole in the previous chapter, as a retrospective idealisation of Britishness as “always already multicultural” thereby resorting to an all-too-contented archive of Britishness.⁶ Equiano, Sancho, and Seacole, who are honoured on the wall in Liverpool, are reduced to poster children of a celebratory memorial culture that engages too little with the actual—as I have argued throughout this book, often contradictory—texts of the authors (and I believe it is no coincidence that the least canonical of the writers discussed here, the more quarrelsome Wedderburn, did not make the list so far).⁷

Nations and national memorial cultures feed the self-understanding of communities (cf. Bhabha 1990; Anderson 1991). In this context, we need to proliferate an understanding of national histories not as sacrosanct enclosed entities but as always contested and entangled with various Others. The mission of this book then in relation to British literary history was not simply to “add” Black voices to the canon, to the realm of respectable Britishness, but to enquire about a shared “tone” or “tonality” of Britishness, about the entangled aesthetic projects of creating familial feeling. In order to interrogate when something or someone feels familiar it focused on four different tonalities of Britishness that are emphatically not understood as a teleological account of the rise of affective realism in prose writing which simply caters to ever more inclusivity. Instead I highlighted four different entangled tonalities in the shifting imaginary of what constitutes Britishness, influenced by the debate on the abolition of the slave trade and moral sentiment in the eighteenth century to the rise of imperial ambitions and social reform in the nineteenth. While Defoe and Equiano laid foundations for an insular versus a more dialogical concept of modern subjectivity, respectively, Sancho and Sterne conversed as men of letters whose digressions challenged aesthetic conventions of how to narrate both Black and white subjectivity. Employing different narratological means, the early nineteenth-century writing of Austen and Wedderburn imagined resistances to a domestic ideal that controls women and violently ignores the British progeny in the colonies. Dickens and Seacole, on the brink of greater imperial expansion in the mid-nineteenth century, could neatly dismiss slavery as an American abnormality and consolidated a more “homely” version of Britishness, which in Seacole’s text embraced people of colour, whereas Dickens envisioned the nation only ever as white exclusively.

These often-contested attempts of rendering Blackness “familiar” have ongoing effects. Christina Sharpe, for instance, describes the affective and embodied afterlife of slavery as all-encompassing, like the “weather”, a mundane deadly climate of anti-Blackness. Sharpe challenges language and draws connections across time that are distinctly not sentimental, to “depict aesthetically the impossibility of […] resolutions by representing the paradoxes of blackness within and after the legacies of slavery’s denial of Black humanity” (2016: 14), as she describes the project of her book In the Wake. It is with this contemporary affective dimension in mind that I want to once more address the ethics of the archive that I had to navigate in the literary readings in the preceding chapters.

Ethics of the Archive

How can (postcolonial) literary and cultural scholars intervene into homogenising and progressivist accounts of family and the trauma of slavery while paying close attention to the affective imprint these often-sentimentalised accounts might leave on readers today? In contrast to highlighting creative counter archives and writing back as many artists and scholars do, I have (re)turned to the official archive of English literature in this book, an archive that is readily accessible to readers.⁸ Nevertheless, by reflecting on the ethics of reading that has informed my research, I want to argue in this coda that a non-celebratory approach to the (entangled) official archive can be both queer and reparative. Rather than turning our backs to canonical literature, I see potential in reframing, analysing the past without over-emphasising “achievement” as has been the case in some of the mentioned bicentennial commemorations.

Methodologically there are currently two competing strands in how to deal with the textual documents of enslavement. One can contrast the more overtly politicised queer impulse of embracing negative feelings and affects, which critics such as Ann Cvetkovich endorse, with what Stephen Best and others call a depsychologising form of “surface reading” (cf. Best 2012; Best and Marcus 2009). In a paradoxical move, my own readings would fall somewhere in the middle between these seemingly contradictory approaches via a recourse to a Sedgwickian reparative ethics of the text. Before explaining this proposal in greater detail, I will juxtapose the two competing methods of reading.

Cvetkovich traces what she calls America’s “political depression” back to the “absent archive of slavery”. She analyses Hartman’s personal account of the history of the transatlantic slave trade, Lose Your Mother (2008a), as an attempt “to bring slavery (and its ghosts) to life again, especially affectively, in order to demonstrate its persistent effect on the present” (2012: 136). Cvetkovich compliments Hartman’s honesty in including the disappointed affective connections to Africa she seeks and often does not find in her account of her travels as an African American scholar to Ghana to research the history of enslavement. Cvetkovich sees this embrace of feelings of failure and despair in relation to the afterlife of slavery as harbouring the potential for Sedgwickian “reparative feelings” (2012: 141). Closely linked to the idea of the reparative is the understanding of the temporality of the archive: Is it a signifier of remote violence of the past, or, is there a more immediate connection to how bodies are politicised and policed today?⁹ Hartman explores what she calls the “time of slavery” to describe a notion of contemporaneity of past and present, not a progression or the overcoming of trauma, but coevality.¹⁰ She frames this as

the relation between the past and the present, the horizon of loss, the extant legacy of slavery, the antinomies of redemption […] and irreparability. In considering the time of slavery, I intend to trouble the redemptive narratives crafted by the state in its orchestration of mourning, the promises of filiation proffered by petty traders, and the fantasies of origin enacted at these slave sites. As well, the “time of slavery” negates the common-sense intuition of time as continuity or progression, then and now coexist; we are coeval with the dead. (Hartman 2002: 759)

But how does such an insight translate into methods of reading archival material, to avoid “redemptive narratives”? Should readings be guided by emotional reactions, inflected by our different contemporary positionalities in relation to the rampant daily forms of racism(s)? And how is such an emotional attachment translated formally into modes of representation so that they do not simply reproduce the violence they hope to abate. As I pointed out earlier, historically progressive abolitionist accounts very often promoted sentimentalising spectacles of Black suffering. Accordingly, Hartman frames the dilemma of the contemporary engagement with the archive of slavery: How can we “tell a story about degraded matter and dishonored life that doesn’t delight and titillate” (2008b: 7)?

In her essay, “Venus in Two Acts” reflecting on the writing of Lose Your Mother Hartman herself is explicit in her reparative understanding of narrative, especially what she calls counter-histories of slavery, which I will try to reconstruct in some detail. Hartman argues:

Loss gives rise to longing, and in these circumstances, it would not be far-fetched to consider stories as a form of compensation or even as reparations, perhaps the only kind we will ever receive. […] For me, narrating counter-histories of slavery has always been inseparable from writing a history of present, by which I mean the incomplete project of freedom, and the precarious life of the ex-slave, a condition defined by the vulnerability to premature death and to gratuitous acts of violence. (2008b: 4)

In her understanding, storytelling is a form of reparation that is needed to counter historical injustice (cf. also Lowe 2015). Hartman calls this a method of “critical fabulation”:

“Fabula” denotes the basic elements of story, the building blocks of the narrative. […] By playing with and rearranging the basic elements of the story, by re-presenting the sequence of events in divergent stories and from contested points of view, I have attempted to jeopardize the status of the event, to displace the received or authorized account, and to imagine what might have happened or might have been said or might have been done. […] I have emphasized the incommensurability between the prevailing discourses and the event, amplified the instability and discrepancy of the archive, flouted the realist illusion customary in the writing of history, and produced a counter-history at the intersection of the fictive and the historical. (Hartman 2008b: 11–12)

For her, the scholar’s task is to come up with counter-histories. While I find this creative impulse highly instructive, I did not turn to contemporary reimaginations of the archive¹¹ but rather to the historical contemporaneous entanglements of early Black Atlantic and canonical authors and, as I have emphasised, this entanglement is of course an encounter shaped by cultural hegemonies that do not simply give rise to oppositional writing. On the contrary, within the framework of being dependant on creating familiarity there is a complex interplay between embracing British colonialism and demanding to be heard as Black subjects with agency. In this context, it seems to me to be exactly the task of the critic to deal with the ambivalent feelings that the historical sources give rise to, which is, of course, what Hartman’s account self-reflexively accomplishes as well. However, in a too strong focus on writing back to the archive, be it in fictional re-writings or in academic self-reflexiveness regarding the “emptiness” of the archive, we might forego the chance to read the fissures of the historical sources that we do have access to. And in many ways, in “Venus in Two Acts” Hartman herself urges scholars to tell the story of slavery in multiple ways that do justice both to the textual corpus available to us and acknowledge that the loss of other voices is a symptom of systematic violence that we cannot ignore. Hartman thus engages with the absences and presences in the archive of slavery. The editors of the Social Text issue on “The Question of Recovery” from 2015, too, argue that “we must develop new approaches to archival recuperation that could illuminate forms of black politics beyond narratives of radical redemption or liberal inclusion” (Helton et al. 2015: 8). Thus, while I did not follow “critical fabulation” as a method, my reference to four different tonalities of entangled literary voices aims to diversify an understanding of a distinctly British narrative of familial feeling in relation to the abolition of slavery and its aftermath in a colonialist society.

In contrast to Hartman (and Cvetkovich), Best suggests an entirely different way of interpreting the archive of slavery. Best calls for a radical turn away from what he terms “melancholic historicism” (2012: 472) and a disregard of feeling when dealing with slavery. The pivotal point here again seems to concern the assumed affective connection between representations of the past and the present: If one believes that “slavery” is a cause of contemporary political depression, what reparative work is one asking the text/imagery to perform? Any affect one can have in relation to slavery is “after the fact”, after all. Best suggests that scholars of the history of slavery should attempt to “flatten” the archive and limit the affective investment in literary texts. Pointedly, he asks, “Why must we predicate having an ethical relation to the past on an assumed continuity between that past and our present and on the implicit consequence that to study that past is somehow to intervene in it?” (Best 2012: 454) and he continues, “we might thus have to resist the impulse to redeem the past and instead rest content with the fact that our orientation toward it remains forever perverse, queer, askew” (Best 2012: 456). I agree with Best here that resisting the emotionalising discourse of an ongoing trauma of slavery, often tied to reproductive/heteronormative family conceptions after all, might offer ways of rejecting unifying the narratives of Black belonging in favour of more ambivalence, for example regarding what it meant to be Black and British in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century in relation to the sources at hand. According to Best, the past is a queer object of our current emotional desires for redemption that we should resist.

Nevertheless, the archive of slavery, the result of historical exclusion, wavers between loss and recovery: it is characterised by the problematic absence of subjugated voices, the violence of the sources that did make it into official archives, and the graphic depictions of harm that we have access to today. Both the canon of slave narratives and abolitionist writing as well as the visual depiction of injured Black bodies affect contemporary readers of these materials in visceral ways. Consequently, what media-specific reflections do we have to bring to our methodologies? Is there a fundamental difference between the “identity forming” act of writing in first-person literary accounts and the objectifying process of becoming an image, which Best diagnoses for the visual archive of slavery? Especially for the realm of the visual Best bemoans the striking emptiness of the archive:

These questions have everything to do with an emptiness at the heart of the archive: however exhaustive one’s catalog of the visual archive of slavery, it will always be lacking in works by slaves themselves. There are no visual equivalents of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. We have yet to discover a Frederick Douglass or Olaudah Equiano of the canvas. When it comes to the representation of the inner life of the enslaved, few of our sources are visual in nature. For slaves are not the subject of the visual imagination, they are its object. (Best 2011: 151)

While I find Best’s caution about the unchallenged linearity between violence of the past and romanticised notions of contemporary intervention absolutely conclusive, the attempt to establish a less ideological form of engagement with cultural objects as a form of “surface reading” can also appear caught up in a hope for a “cleansing” of the archive from messy emotionality. His argument regarding “the representation of the inner life of the enslaved” that the self-penned narrative provides in contrast to the objectifying visual media must be met with some caution. The accounts that he cites were often heavily edited, sometimes penned by white amanuenses, and embedded in the discussed generic framework of sentimentalism.

David Kazanjian hence also formulates hesitation towards forms of surface reading that supposedly produce knowledge closer to the historical truth of the text, rather than the “melancholic historicism” of the reader’s present. He defends what is disparagingly called (poststructuralist) “overreading”:

On its face, the charge typically means that the overreader has attributed a meaning to a text that would have been impossible for the context in which the text was written or for the people who wrote the text. The charge also suggests that overreaders have an inadequate knowledge of history, that they have improperly assigned contemporary meanings to a noncontemporary text, that their perspective is unduly clouded by contemporary presuppositions. […] The charge of overreading presumes a strict separation between historically contextualized reading and ahistorical reading, which in turn presumes that one can adequately determine the context in which a text was written and linger in that context with the text in a kind of epistemic intimacy. That is, the charge presumes that one can read as if one inhabited the same historical scene as the text one is reading; in this sense, as a kind of time travel, the charge of overreading belongs in the genre of science fiction or speculative fiction. (Kazanjian 2015: 80)

Once more the relationship between the temporality of the text’s present and its current interpretation is crucial. It seems to me that two legitimate concerns in Kazanjian’s defence of overreading are conflated. The first pertains to the mentioned historical contextualisations of texts: how much are readings informed by our limited ability to grasp the historical context of a text and presentist investments in it? In this regard, he is surely right that the underlying assumption of a “correct” interpretation based on “epistemic intimacy” seems suspect. On the other hand, there is concern that the very content of a text might get distorted to the point where a reading is so overdetermined by contemporary meaning that it bears no relation to the source itself, and I do believe that a self-critical interrogation into methodologies of reading needs to account for the text in the form of the events and characters that are represented verbally. So, what if, for a moment and only as a first step, we focused less on the historically accurate or less accurate interpretation of the text and more on the level of narration in a purely structuralist understanding of what is said how (cf. Rimmon-Kenan 2009: 3), as an ethics of the text.

Heather Love, too, calls for an “alternative ethics, one grounded in documentation and description rather than empathy and witness” (2010: 80). Love understands this as part of a greater “descriptive turn” in literary studies which favours a method of reading that is “literal rather than symptomatic” (2010: 383), “close but not deep” (2010: 375), “that departs from a depth hermeneutics and is primarily descriptive in its orientation” (2010: 382). Rather than position transatlantic and canonical British writers as politically opposing projects of literary identity formation, I was more intrigued by their entangled tonalities. This focus on aesthetics, via Ngai’s (2007) conceptualisation of tone, is certainly indebted to an interest in surface and precise description. However, like Ngai, I would caution that the descriptive and the affective seem less easily resoluble than such a methodology, or trust in the scholar’s ability to provide surface readings, might suggest and this finally brings me to the concept of reparative reading, which literary and queer critic Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick coined. As is well-known, Sedgwick proposed reparative versus paranoid modes of reading in her influential 1997 essay “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction Is About You”. Looking at the described methods of affective versus descriptive reading, it is interesting to note that Cvetkovich’s reading of Hartman as well as Best and Love refer to the reparative mode that Sedgwick favours, but it seems to me from two rather contradictory points of view: Best positions the reparative on the level of the text, trying to account for what is actually stated in the source as an ethics of the textual that should not be overdetermined by contemporary affective responses. Sedgwick calls this an “accountability to the real” (1997: 2). And in this regard Kazanjian’s defence of “overreading” comes too easy because it only focuses on the charge against correct historical contextualisation. If we understand interpretation also as a dissecting of the actual words on the page, then there can be an interpretation that is indeed closer to the text than others that might appear more far-fetched.

In the late 1990s, Sedgwick criticises New Historicists and critics of the left for paranoidly trying to uncover, to expose a hidden political agenda of the sources they analysed. Instead, Sedgwick chooses a close reading of the text that is open to surprise. To her, rather than linger on the inevitable, queer readings should embrace contingency. Nevertheless, Sedgwick is not merely descriptive, and this is where the affective dimension re-enters that is central to Cvetkovich. Cvetkovich, in some ways, at first sight, appears more indebted to a paranoid political position in her turn to negative affects. But rather than position a form of positive identity politics as the only alternative, which a simplistic understanding of counter-history would promote, Cvetkovich via Hartman normalises failure; her essay is called “depression is ordinary” after all. She frames the engagement with negative affects as psychologically reparative and, paradoxically, potentially politically mobilising. The fact that we might not be able to reconstruct a coherent archive of slavery or the historical truth, also means that other pasts and other futures become imaginable. So, whether we follow a turn to surface, or to affect, the impulse that unites these approaches is their Sedgwickian interest in an ethics of engagement with texts and with politics that is not immediately self-evident in an ideological framing of positive representation. For her this is what characterises the reparative mode. As Sedgwick concludes,

No less acute than a paranoid position, no less realistic, no less attached to a project of survival, and neither less nor more delusional or fantasmatic, the reparative reading position undertakes a different range of affects, ambitions, and risks. What we can best learn from such practices are, perhaps, the many ways in which selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture—even of a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them. (Sedgwick 1997: 35)

Clearly then we can see how the novel as a central literary cultural form has also offered different ways to find sustenance, to create community across difference but also express dissent in relation to hegemonic norms.

Following such an understanding of reparative reading, it is important to engage directly with the violence of the past taking seriously the textuality of the sources. By returning to the rise of the British novel from a transatlantic perspective, I did not intend to offer a “redemptive” understanding of British multiculturalism that we can project to the past to make us feel better about today. With the close readings in the preceding chapters I hope to have demonstrated that prose writing offered aesthetically diverse and politically ambivalent imaginations of British modernity that were both violently exclusionary and at the same time also a creative resource for claiming familiarity. This ambivalence and yet attention to the text is what I glean from the debates on the ethics of reading. Our reading practices can be “reparative” only in the queer/postcolonial understanding of resisting a linear narrative of liberal emancipation. Or, in the words of José Muñoz, to imagine a mode of the reparative that acknowledges the violence of the past does not require a mythical idea of “wholeness”:

Indeed I do find the reparative to be a productive theoretical stance. For me it is a resource to imagine something else that might follow social stigma or even ruination. While I am interested in the work that the reparative might offer groups who have experienced some version of social violence or death, I would certainly agree that the reparative is not automatically about the integrity or sense of wholeness a collective or group may long for. (Muñoz 2013: 110–111)

To close, I want to suggest that the work of artist Himid departs from a simplistic celebratory approach to the history of enslavement/abolition in Britain. Her work in many ways functions as such a queer reparative lens on the artefacts that were displayed in the context of the bicentennial.

Queering Modes of Empathy

As literary scholars we tend to overemphasise the function of literature as making us see the world through the eyes of another and to immediately equate this with a progressive form of empathy as I have argued throughout. Against such binarism of self and Other, Familial Feeling tried to demonstrate that the literary rise of depicting authentic emotionality and aesthetic tonalities of prose writing were in fact entangled in transatlantic exchanges from their inception. In the context of the museum (catering to different age groups) there is often not enough room for lengthy (textual) explanation of the ambivalent aspects of this exchange and the early Black Atlantic authors unfortunately at times are reduced to placeholders for a one-dimensional progressivist version of agency. However, despite this criticism what is remarkable is that more and more curators, especially in attempts to attract more “diverse” audiences into museum spaces, are aware that there are challenges in exhibiting the same objects and images of Black degradation like the reproductions of the slave ship Brookes, chains, or the Wedgwood medallion over and over. In my experience with the bicentennial exhibitions, one of the best ways to contextualise paternalistic images of white benevolence and Black victimhood was to put the historical artefacts in conversation with the negative contemporary affects that they might provoke. In this way, the museum acknowledges the object in the archive and at the same time provides a material expression of the coeval affective responses to the violence of the past.¹² This form of juxtaposition can open routes into an alternative and not a paternalistic mode of empathy, not a celebration of abolition but a commemoration of enslavement and its afterlife.

Obviously, such a queering of memory is not an easily digestible or marketable aspect of British heritage. As part of their 2007 activities, the Lancashire Museums commissioned contemporary artist (and 2017 Turner Prize winner) Lubaina Himid to produce an installation at the Judges’ Lodgings (Fig. 6.1).

Fig. 6.1

Lubaina Himid, Swallow Hard: The Lancaster Dinner Service, 2007 (installation photograph). (Courtesy Judges’ Lodgings Museum, Lancashire County Council)

With “Swallow Hard: The Lancaster Dinner Service” Himid presents a disarrayed memorial site. According to the descriptions on the artist’s webpage, she collected hundred used ceramic pieces from the local shops in Lancaster and surroundings (plates, jugs, and tureens, some of them cracked) and overpainted them with acrylic paint. The title, “swallow hard”, and the crammed table divert any sentimental impulse of benevolent abolitionism and a celebratory resistance. Using the polished surface of the china, Himid does not deliver cleansing affects or gratifying, “deep” images of emotional suffering, she adds layers to the surface. Both the depicted scenes and the form of overpainting and interweaving of traditional West African patterns (from Mali, Nigeria, and Ghana) with the original design on the ceramics, bear witness to the entangled history that shapes the city of Lancaster to this day. Himid is not offering empathy as a one-way entry into “identifying” with Black suffering, she confronts the viewers with a messier account of enslavement and its abolition. Queering empathy, in this context, means to leave the more uncomfortable aspects of this (family) history on the table rather than sweeping them under the carpet. The dinner service, a signifier of bourgeois decorum and civilisation, clearly shows the British involvement in the slave trade that is often imagined as somehow more polite. On the crowded mahogany table, she assembles images of the merchant class that grew rich next to nameless Black servants whose fictional names she writes within the objects (Fig. 6.2a). Instead of the begging slave on the Wedgwood medallion, she shows the hypocrisy of raging white men and women who are now confronted with the “rapid effects of abolition” (Fig. 6.2b).

Fig. 6.2

(a and b) Lubaina Himid, Swallow Hard: The Lancaster Dinner Service, 2007 (detail). Acrylic on found porcelain, variable dimensions. (Courtesy the artist and Hollybush Gardens, London. Photo: Andy Keate)

Global entanglements, including the history of enslavement, its abolition, and imperial expansion, as well as contemporary globalised structures of inequality shape any understanding of the British nation state. This continues to impact mundane affects of belonging, a feeling of familiarity that objects such as ceramics, often passed down for generations in families, help transmit. With her installation Himid literally puts a smudged version of this family history on display. Enslavement, as authors like Hartman and Sharpe have argued compellingly for the United States, is not simply a thing of the past. We need to confront the ambivalent feelings that this history still instils today, and this cannot be achieved by remembering abolition solely as a success story of enlightened modernity that forgets the ambivalences of the historical documents and neglects the ongoing effects of racism that continue to limit who is seen—those historically excluded Black bodies that Himid paints onto the artefacts as well as the artistic practice by people of colour then and now—and, by extension, who is familiar enough to be considered part of the nation.