AbstractAddressing the boom of memorial events and special exhibitions as well as the establishment of the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool celebrating the bicentennial of the abolition of the slave trade in 2007, the conclusion of Familial Feeling returns to the question of ethics in dealing with the archive of slavery. Reflecting on methodology in literary studies by contrasting surface reading with approaches that foreground negative affects, Haschemi Yekani, via a recourse to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s “reparative” reading, proposes a queering of empathy that should not rest on a celebratory understanding of the past, as trauma overcome, but serve as a foundation of ongoing tension in contemporary narratives of familial feeling and national belonging. For this purpose, Haschemi Yekani examines the 2007 installation Swallow Hard: The Lancaster Dinner Service by artist Lubaina Himid. The author proposes that by engaging with the messy entanglements of marginalised and hegemonic voices in the establishment of Britishness as familial feeling, one can arrive at more complex reading strategies of the literary sources from the historical archive of the early Black Atlantic and the British novel as well as a less congratulatory contemporary memorial culture that seeks British “Greatness” in the past.
Black Atlantic maritime networks, resistance and the American ‘domestic’ slave trade