Enfilade

Barbara Walker, Vanishing Point 29 (Duyster), 2021 / © Barbara Walker, 2023.
More information on the Vanishing Point series is available here»

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Opening soon at The Fitzwilliam:

Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance
The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, 8 September 2023 — 7 January 2024

Curated by Jake Subryan Richards

A landmark exhibition exploring the impact of the Black Atlantic staged in the Museum’s historic Founder’s Galleries, which were built using the profits from enslavement and exploitation.

Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance brings together significant national and international loans with collections from across the University of Cambridge’s museums, libraries, and colleges to tell both a Cambridge story and a global one. Using as its starting point the story of the Museum’s founder, Viscount Richard Fitzwilliam, whose family wealth came in part from the South Sea Company and East India Company, the exhibition charts a history from pre-colonial Africa and the Caribbean, the rise and racialisation of Atlantic enslavement, and histories of resistance by enslaved people and their allies. Artworks and other objects illustrating the financial, scientific, and commercial transformations in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain that came about because of enslaved labour are shown in dialogue with modern and contemporary artworks by artists including Donald Locke, Barbara Walker, Keith Piper, and Jacqueline Bishop that respond to hidden histories and reveal stories of courage, resistance, hope, and repair.

Black Atlantic is curated by Dr Jake Subryan Richards, acclaimed early career historian of law, empire, and the African diaspora in the Atlantic world at the London School of Economics. It is the first in a series of exhibitions and gallery interventions planned for 2023–2026.

The catalogue is published by Bloomsbury:

Victoria Avery and Jake Subryan Richards, eds., Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance (London: Philip Wilson Publishing, 2023), 192 pages, ISBN: 978-1781301234, £30 / $40.

Published to accompany the landmark exhibition on view at the Fitzwilliam Museum in autumn 2023, the catalogue contains contributions by curators, historians, and artists.

Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance brings together significant national and international loans with exhibits from the Fitzwilliam’s collection and from other University museums, colleges, and libraries. Objects and artworks illustrating the financial, scientific, and commercial transformations in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain that came about because of enslaved labour are shown in dialogue with modern and contemporary artworks by artists including Donald Locke, Barbara Walker, Keith Piper, and Jacqueline Bishop that respond to hidden histories and reveal stories of courage, resistance, hope, and repair.

c o n t e n t s

Contributor Biographies
Acknowledgements

Foreword by Luke Syson
Introduction

Section 1 | Before Atlantic Enslavement
• Africa: Akan Region
• Indigenous Islands in the Caribbean Sea
• Europe: Slavery before Racism, Blackness before Slavery

Section 2 | Cambridge Wealth from Atlantic Enslavement
• Royal Patronage
• Making Money: Dutch Connections
• Technology for the Transatlantic Trade
• Warfare between the British, Dutch, and Spanish Empires

Section 3 | Fashion, Consumption, and Racism
• Blackness in European Art
• Enslavement and Fashion

Section 4 | Plantations: Production and Resistance
• Production, Knowledge Generation, and Exploitation
• Plantation Violence
• Remembering

Further Reading
Image Credits
Index