Blood Pressures

The fourth chapter explores the bio-medicalized forms of human bio-cargo to find expression in the sign of “blood” as the particularized biological “matter” of family history, now articulated in enthusiasm for DNA mapping as a way to restore family genealogies lost in the Middle Passage. The chapter looks to creative works by Bernardine Evaristo, Dorothea Smartt, and Inge Blackman, and Isaac Julien, which provide compelling anti-genealogies of intimacy and belonging irreducible to the brute substance of bio-matter.

@Bristol

The sixth and final chapter of Living Cargo concludes with an interrogation of urban regeneration in the city of Bristol, situating the neoliberal city’s alliance with private real estate investors and corporate investors in relation to the concurrent campaigns by black community activists that the city acknowledge its historical involvement in the transatlantic slave trade and that it reorient economic redevelop for the benefit of communities struggling against that historical legacy. The chapter looks at artists Hew Locke and Graham Mortimer Evelyn alongside political protests, street actions, and popular uprisings that raise fundamental questions about state, civic, and institutional responsibility to the past, and laid the groundwork for a transformation of its public cultures.

Living Rough

The second chapter offers an extended reading of A Harlot’s Progress that illustrates the novel’s spectacular orchestration of far-flung art-historical citations taken from the social satires of William Hogarth. By depicting the search of an eighteenth-century abolitionist for an authentic, first-person account of the violence of slavery, the novel underscores the condition of human life at the intersection of law and commerce, and the problematic relationship between the reading public and the instances of cruelty on which they are easily transfixed.

History Unhoused

The introduction of Living Cargo presents the book as a project of unhousing the past; about opening up archives and drawing history out; and about the opening out that occurs when history goes public. It is also about the social, political, and ethical demands such openings make on public and private lives; and about the publics and counterpublics that are produced when history is on the move. When history is unhoused, when it travels narratively, visually, performatively its movements help bind people together, as surely as its institutional enclosure helps keep them apart. In other words, this book is about the black public cultures of postcolonial Britain; the particular historical resonances that join together many disparate communities in the UK under and beyond the banner of the nation; and the transnational circuits of exchange economic, social, political, affective that takes British colonial history for a ride.

Bespoke History

The fifth chapter begins with a consideration of bespoke tailor, menswear designer, and global fashion icon Ozwald Boateng in order to simultaneously think about the historicity of fashion and the commodified “branding” of the past. The chapter contrasts Boateng’s carefully cultivated public persona with another fashionable icon, Yinka Shonibare MBE, an artist best known for refashioning aristocratic dress of the eighteenth and nineteenth-century in African batik.

Compound Fractures

The third chapter considers the ambivalent role of the law in the geography of colonial biopolitics by examining three of Caryl Phillips’s novels. It addresses the relationship between Phillips’ self-reflexive historiography and the conditions of precarity they depict, underscoring the continuity between the biopolitical institution and instrument of the colonial modernity in the contemporary forms of human bio-cargo that arise in its wake.

Beautiful Remnants, Brutal Remains

The first chapter analyzes David Dabydeen’s A Harlot’s Progress and Fred D’Aguiar’s Feeding the Ghost in relation to the way in which recent scholars of the African Atlantic have wrestled with the perennial problem of the “example” as a representational form, in which particular acts of violent atrocity must stand in for extended, systematic, and non-singular event(s) of modernity.