Living Cargo: How Black Britain Performs Its Past
Steven Blevins
Offering a wide-ranging study of contemporary literature, film, visual art, and performance by writers and artists who live and work in the United Kingdom but also maintain strong ties to postcolonial Africa and the Caribbean, Living Cargo explores how contemporary black British culture makers have engaged with the institutional archives of colonialism and the Atlantic slave trade in order to reimagine blackness in British history and to make claims for social and political redress.
Steven Blevins calls this reimagining “unhousing history”—an aesthetic and political practice that animates and improvises on the institutional archive, repurposing it toward different ends and new possibilities. ... Read more
Living Cargo argues that the colonial archive is neither static nor residual but emergent. By reassembling historical fragments and traces consolidated in the archive, these artists not only perform a kind of counter-historiography, they also imagine future worlds that might offer amends for the atrocities of the past.
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