“These are dark, contested histories, and yet they need to be told in multiple ways, on multiple levels,” said Charles Forsdick, Drapers Professor of French at the University of Cambridge, at his guest lecture at the University of Miami on Sept. 26.
Forsdick has been on the curatorial committee at the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool, England, since its founding in 2007. He is a key contributor to the acquisition of artifacts and artworks and exhibition planning at the Museum.
The ISM opened its doors as the first museum in the world to focus exclusively on past and modern slavery. It remains the only robust and publicly funded slavery museum in the world today.
Forsdick spoke about the curatorial decisions made in the pursuit of most effectively portraying this history, the reactions of academia and the public at large and the tribulations of covering a topic as broad as the global history of slavery while working with finite square footage.
This event was part of the Henry King Stanford Distinguished Professors Lecture Series, organized by UM’s Center for the Humanities.
Here are four takeaways from the lecture:
Liverpool
Liverpool imported the most enslaved Africans out of any European city during the slave trade from 1526 to 1867, making it the ideal location for the ISM.
According to Forsdick, Liverpool was founded as an industrial manufacturing city as a result of slave agriculture in the British Caribbean and South American colonies.
One exhibit features the legacy of slavery pertaining to the city’s topography – Bold, Tarleton and Cunliffe Streets in downtown Liverpool are all named after prominent slave merchants.
A whitewashed history of abolition
Forsdick emphasizes the importance of interrogating and disrupting state-endorsed celebrations of abolition and the widely-held belief that the British Parliament’s Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 was a heroic deed.
“Remembering abolition is a philanthropic, legislative process discredits the brazen resistance of the enslaved,” said Forsdick. “We must dispel the myth of abolition as a gift of freedom.”
The ISM shares the courage of enslaved leaders like Toussaint Louverture of the Haitian Revolution and Nigerian-British writer, Olaudah Equiano, while shedding light on the British government’s three centuries of complicity in the trafficking and sale of enslaved Africans.
Black history at large
Although Forsdick and his colleagues discuss slavery, they do not reduce black history to the history of slavery through their curatorial choices.
For example, one ISM exhibit displays the artistic effects of the African diaspora, while another celebrates the achievements of Black individuals through figures like Nelson Mandela and Oprah Winfrey.
However, modern-day “Afrophobia” in Britain is also part of the conversation, with educational areas also being open to the public in ISM. The International Slavery Museum’s Centre for Youth Education is named after Anthony Walker, a Black teenager tragically murdered in Liverpool in 2005.
Across the pond: a study in contrast
Forsdick left his American audience with the question of why the U.S. cannot.
If Britain can undertake such a comprehensive feat in commemoration, funded by taxpayer dollars, and curated by scholars who are evidently extremely passionate about their work, why can’t the U.S. do the same?
Especially when our history of slavery is arguably even more shameful in scope and enduring in legacy?
The Smithsonian Museum of African-American History, while educational, does not comprehensively grapple with the difficult and contested history that is American Chattel slavery.
Perhaps the most memorable takeaway from Forsdick’s lecture: it is due time to put discomfort aside and tell the critically important stories of our past through the establishment of an American Museum of Slavery.