Museum Visit: The Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance
On 3rd October Becca and Hannah travelled to Cambridge, where they were joyfully reunited with Carolin and the newest MMoR affiliate member – Baby Anton – for a visit to The Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance.
The exhibition, held at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, 8 September 2023 – 7 January, 2024, is the result of an extended period of historical research and a team of curators led by Dr. Jake Subryan Richards and Victoria Avery. Its intention is to ask “new questions about Cambridge’s role in the transatlantic slave trade and look at how objects and artworks have influenced history and perspectives.” The exhibition was thus of great interest for our project, not only in exploring the relationship between the Transatlantic Slave Trade and the racializing practices and discourses of the early modern period, but also as an example of how contemporary institutions continue to scrutinize and present their historical legacy.
There were three different strands underpinning the exhibition which addressed in turn: first the institutional history of the Fitzwilliam Museum itself; second, a material history of the broader transatlantic slave trade; and finally, a set of imaginative and disruptive responses to this history by artists of the Black diaspora.
The first strand of the exhibition was in some senses the most straightforward. Richard Fitzwilliam, who endowed the museum in 1816 had inherited significant familial wealth from his grandfather, Matthew Decker, who in turn profited from the establishment of the South Sea Company in 1711. From its origin, the Fitzwilliam Museum was thus connected to the profits of the transatlantic slave trade, and its collection was enriched in subsequent years by objects acquired in British colonies, as for example the rich collection of Taíno artefacts, and even objects used in slave plantations, such as the giant bell, whose ringing might have structured the daily life of enslaved people in nineteenth-century Guyana. This history was set out visually at the outset of the exhibition through a contrasting set of portraits: one, that of the young Fitzwilliam, painted at the age of 19, and the other a well-known portrait of an unidentified young Black man, previously thought to be Olaudah Equiano. By setting the two side-by-side, visitors were asked to think about who is commemorated, and to consider the politics of who remains unknown.
Tobacco box, Fitzwilliam Museum
Hannah Murphy, Carolin Schmitz, Becca Taite
In addition to objects which testified to the Fitzwillliam’s own connections to slavery, the exhibition featured a wide range of borrowed objects. These accompanied the second strand of the exhibition – a more general overview of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, as well as the development of racializing discourses on the European mainland. Of particular interest for us was Jan Jansz Mostaert’s “Portrait of an African Man”, which was also an important image in the Renaissance Skin exhibition, curated by Hannah, “Visible Skin”. Of necessity, this part of the exhibition covered a huge amount of ground, using informational panels as well as the objects and images to craft a wide-ranging narrative. A fascinating subsection of these objects demonstrated the ubiquity of slavery as a motif in and on luxury items of early modern Europe. Tobacco boxes, porcelain, and other luxury items both materialised the dynamics of the slave trade while simultaneously producing its iconography.
The concept of the Black Atlantic was developed by Robert Farris Thompson in 1983 and fully fleshed out by Paul Gilroy in the seminal book The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness from 1993. Its purpose in theory and critical race studies has always been to reclaim the space of the Atlantic, so often defined by the crisscrossings of slave ships and the mercantile and political dominance of slaving nations, as a space for “Black consciousness”. Despite the brutality of the forced diaspora, Gilroy and others have argued that Black ways of life persisted, giving rise through mobility, community and diasporic practices to a specifically Black consciousness which arises not shaped by white culture, but shaping white ‘modernity’. In the scope of an exhibition which predominantly focused on institutional history and the brutalities of the slave trade, this title at times felt jarring, but the third strand of the exhibition was more in keeping with the exhibition’s title. This comprised a set of artistic responses by Black artists, including Barbara Walker, whose thought-provoking works on Black ‘visibility’ and ‘invisibility’ sat in productive tension to the early modern objects on display.
In the end, the exhibition raised a number of interesting questions, some of which had to do with the difficulties of closing the gap between these strands of analysis. What the exhibition shows, I felt at its end, was the challenge to scholars to provide means of addressing this gap: a challenge to bring together the institutional with the larger scale of trade, on the one hand, and to provide a better and more inclusive history in which the work of the Black Atlantic is interpreted as part of the dominant, historical narrative, rather than a challenge to it.
Hannah Murphy
Barbara Walker’s Vanishing Point 29 (Duyster), 2021. Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge.