Slavery on Display

Abstract

‘In the period after slavery,’ writes sociologist Paul Gilroy in The Black Atlantic, ‘the memory of the slave experience is itself recalled and used as an additional, supplementary instrument with which to construct a distinct interpretation of modernity.’ Though Gilroy is less concerned with the fine arts in this canonical volume, four visual exhibitions of the past year stand as an unwritten chapter of his text. Each struggles differently with how to stage displays of Atlantic-world slavery and its afterlives. Recently on view at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, ‘Afro-Atlantic Histories’ mobilizes Gilroy’s concept of ‘the black Atlantic’ to encompass transnational identities formed after centuries of forced transportation and migration across Europe, Africa, and the Americas. The exhibition uses art to illustrate historical experiences within this loosely defined