Monument Building, Memory Making and Remembering Slavery in the Contemporary Atlantic World

This thesis is a comparative study of the creation of monuments and memorials to commemorate the Transatlantic Slave Trade and slavery in the Circum-Atlantic region. It is based on interviews conducted with people who were directly involved in the processes which created these monuments, to understand their role in the process and to gain insight into the forces and issues which impacted on the process. Since monuments and memorials to the Transatlantic Slave Trade are in public spaces, archival research was done to ascertain the level of public discourse generated by the memorialization process and how this discourse impacted the process. The case studies were chosen to allow for the comparison of the process of memorialization in different parts of the region which had different historical relationships with the Transatlantic Slave Trade. This allowed for analysis of memorialization within different political contexts. The first case study was Ghana an African nation with ports from which for enslaved Africans trafficked across the Atlantic. Saint Lucia is an English speaking, Eastern Caribbean island nation which received enslaved Africans during the period of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Saint Lucia has a majority population that is descended from formerly enslaved Africans. The third case study is of the state of Louisiana in the United States of America which received large numbers of enslaved Africans whose descendants are a minority in the population. The comparison of these case studies illustrates how the memorialization process is directly impacted by the contemporary socio-political environment and the economics of each state. It also illustrates how the power of various stakeholders involved in the process creates silences and engenders forgetting, as various agendas are pursued.