Cultural Heritage and Slavery

In the context of the global cultural heritage boom, community-based and national identity projects in the Caribbean intersect with the interest in cultural tourism to the region, including sites commemorating enslavement. In former plantation slavery societies, in which descendants of enslavers and descendants of enslaved Africans live together, power and property relations are still marked by the slavery past. Calls for reparations made on European states and local descendants of enslavers for the enslavement of African people are a source of political and social conflicts. This volume, appearing at the beginning of the Second International Decade for People of African Descent, refers to the tangible and intangible cultural heritage of enslavement and its long-term consequences in the Caribbean and Circum-Caribbean, such as Anti-Black racism and racialized social inequality. It treats sites of commemoration and of denial, the representation of enslavement and of African cultures in museums, and dominant discourses on national history as well as in counter-narratives of the descendants of the enslaved and Maroons. Chapters on Jamaica, Martinique, French Guiana/Suriname, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela and Colombia reflect the diversity of collective memories and public history approaches towards material and immaterial vestiges of slavery. The book is intended for scholars, students, teachers and the wider public.

S. Conermann, University of Bonn; U. Schmieder, Leibniz University, Hannover, Germany; M. Zeuske, University of Bonn, Germany.