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Anny-Dominique CurtiusReenacting the hold: choreographies of a metonymy of slavery in the museumKeywords: enslaved bodies; archives; iconography of vicarious trauma; reenactment; choreographies of meaning; memory community; agency; slavery museums and memorialsImages of shackled bodies confined head-to-foot in the hold of a slave ship have become a familiar imagery of the horrific conditions of the forced voyages of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean.Detailed diagrams and sketches of cross sections of slave ships showing rows of bodies have filled the pages of logbooks and circulated across times as the only archives of the Middle Passage. Nevertheless, through new memorializing grammars, new modes of occupying the official archives have transformed the reified Africans marked as cargo into ledgers. In the process of memorializing the Middle Passage and deconstructing the power of state-controlled archives, how does the hold stand as a powerful object? What is the power of the new museum for witnessing, imagining, visualizing, and reenacting the hold? In the absence of more authentic objects representing the hold, why do museums increasingly become platforms where visitors are integrated into an imagined memory community and emotionally and intellectually invested into the reenactment of unbearable suffering?From Toni Morrison’s perspective: The impulse to memorialize certain events, people and populations comes at certain times. When what has happened is finally understood or is a forthright assertion of civic or personal pride, tombs and palaces are built, flowers heaped, statues rise, archives, hospitals, parks and museums are constructed. (The Source of Self-Regard, 2019)Ultimately, one may wonder what has indeed been understood about the Middle Passage that can foster emotional and intellectual agency and accountability in the curators and the visitors to engage imaginatively with the hold. The reenactment of the hold of the slave ship in exhibitions and performances in the MACTe and the Louvre will serve as case studies to bolster my analyses in our roundtable discussion.I would like to propose that we reassess a certain number of concepts and positionalities that I examine in my book in progress on slavery museums and memorials. Some of these concepts included in the list of keywords above have gained momentum and mobilized an increasing number of scholarly productions and artistic actions. The MACTe (the Mémorial Acte) was inaugurated in Guadeloupe on May 10th 2015 (National day of Slavery in France) by French President Fran?ois Hollande. This 1,830 square feet memorial museum built on the site of the former Darboussier sugar factory with one side touching the Atlantic Ocean, seeks to educate visitors on the history of slavery in the Americas and its legacies in our contemporary world. A forest of banyan trees once located near the site of the memorial has inspired architects in designing the latticed and silvery metallic frameworks of the memorial. Thus, the intertwining of aerial roots and aerial trunks that characterizes the ecosystem of the banyan tree has symbolically mutated into the eco-architectural matrix of the memorial in order to evoke, along with the museum, the entangled memory of slavery and interrogate its global legacy in our contemporary societies. One of the most significant multimedia exhibitions in the MACTe is the simulation of suffering in the hold of a slave ship represented symbolically by a narrow hallway through which viewers are invited to walk. Groans, moans, lamentations, suffocations, scratching, whiplashes, bell chimes, sounds of shackles, along with high sea winds and heavy rains simulating the atmosphere of a thunderstorm are integrated with 3D representations of shackled bodies curled up in foetal positions.As they carry on with their visit, viewers continue to be haunted by the vision of the hold, because the howling sounds can be heard throughout the second half of the museum space. This first-hand experience of the hold is a metonymy of the Middle Passage as it seeks to develop an imaginative sense of belonging to the past.Regarding the Louvre, Toni Morrison’s (2006) and The Carters’/Beyoncé and Jay-Z (2018) artistic interventions into this world-renowned museum call my attention as they seek to create new art forms by repurposing celebrated Western art. Morrison’s and The Carters’ critical integration of blackness is illuminating since they interrogate blackness from social, racial, gender, aesthetic and political perspectives in a museum that traditionally sustains founding mythologies on a white national coherence.Here, the hold and the ship serve again as powerful metonymies in interweaving art history and the history of ideas with slam poetry by young French artists from the Parisian banlieues, memory, ancestry, citizenship and belonging (Morrison), black wealth and celebrity, spectacle, sexuality, dance and black female agency, masculinity, popular culture (The Carters’).Reconsidering Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s observation that “theories of history grossly underestimate the size, the relevance and the complexity of the overlapping sites where history is produced, notably outside of academia” (Silencing the Past, 1995), I contend that the study of this iconography of vicarious trauma in museums can offer significant critical paradigms to expand our epistemological underpinnings of memory, trauma and post-critical museology studies. Similarly, I want to explore relationality in terms of the “thought of the other and the other of thought” (Glissant, Poetics of Relation,1990) in the new museums where new memory communities are formed, and where subjectivities are impacted, tested and challenged through transformative experiences. ................
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