Naming the money and unveiling the crime: contemporary British artists and the memorialization of slavery and abolition

Rice discusses recent work in the Northwest of England to memorialize slavery and abolition in the context of Paul Gilroy's and Barnor Hesse's discussions of the legacy of empire and contemporary multiculturalism., and Paul Ricoeur's and Dominick LaCapra's more abstract disquisitions on the working of memory. He describes the importance of Lancaster historically in the slave trade and the historical amnesia that exists in the town, and outlines the development of the STAMP organization that aimed to counter these tendencies. He shows how the work of two artists, Kevin Dalton-Johnson and Lubaina Himid, have been instrumental in foregrounding Lancaster's involvement in the slave trade in the run up to the bicentennial celebrations in 2007. He uses published and unpublished interviews with the two artists to examine the contexts of memorialization, public and private memory, and community involvement, all of which contributed to their final pieces examining the legacy of slavery in the Northwest, nationally and internationally.