This is not an exhaustive list of resources, but examples of films, books, podcasts and artists that we have found helpful when thinking through the ideas that form this project. If there’s anything you think we have missed, email us at [email protected].
Websites & Databases
Litfest reading list - https://litfest.org/projects/the-litfest-atlantic-slave-trade-reading-list/
Lancaster Black History Group - https://lancasterblackhistorygroup.com/
Runaway Slaves in Britain - https://www.runaways.gla.ac.uk/
Legacies of British Slavery - https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/
Slave Voyages - https://www.slavevoyages.org/
British Newspaper Archive - https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/
Lancashire County Council Archives - https://www.lancashire.gov.uk/libraries-and-archives/archives-and-record-office/
Family Tree Search - https://www.familysearch.org/en/
Non-fiction Books
Olaudah Equiano - The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, 1789
Frederick Douglass - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845)
Harriet Jacobs - Incidents in the Life of Slave Girl, 1861
Walter Rodney - How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, 1972
Benedict Anderson - Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 1983
Audre Lorde - The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House, 1983
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o - Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, 1986
Melinda Elder - The Slave Trade and the Economic Development of 18th Century Lancaster, 1992
Paul Gilroy - The Black Atlantic, 1993
bell hooks - Art on my mind: visual politics, 1995
Gretchen Gerzina - Black England: A Forgotten Georgian Past, 1995
Richard Dyer - White: Essays on Race and Culture, 1997
Alan Rice - Radical Narratives of the Black Atlantic, 2003
Alan Rice - Creating Memorials, Building Identities: The Politics of Memory in the Black Atlantic, 2010
David Olusuga - Black and British: A Forgotten History, 2016
Reni Eddo-Lodge - Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, 2017
Afua Hirsch - Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging, 2018
Akala - Natives: Race, Class and the Ruins of Empire, 2018
Robin DiAngelo - White Fragility, 2018
Jason W. Moore & Raj Patel - A History of the World in 7 Cheap Things, 2018
Alan Rice - Inside the Invisible: Memorialising Slavery and Freedom in the Life and Works of Lubaina Himid, 2019
Olivette Otele - African Europeans: an Untold History, 2020
Dan Hicks - The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution, 2020
Alice Procter - The Whole Picture: The colonial story of the art in our museums & why we need to talk about it, 2020
Richard Atkinson - Mr Atkinson’s Rum Contract: The Story of a Tangled Inheritance, 2020
Imogen Tyler - Stigma: The Machinery of Inequality, 2020
Paterson Joseph - The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho, 2022
Thomas Harding - White Debt: The Demerara Uprising and Britain’s Legacy of Slavery, 2022
Fiction
Chinua Achebe - Things Fall Apart, 1958
James Baldwin - If Beale Street Could Talk, 1974
Octavia Butler - Kindred, 1979
Alice Walker - The Colour Purple, 1982
Toni Morrison - Beloved, 1987
Jane Harris - Sugar Money, 2017
Lola Jaye - The Attic Child, 2022
Articles
Stuart Hall - Constituting the Archive, Third Text, 2001 - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09528820108576903
Alan Rice - Naming the money and unveiling the crime: contemporary British artists and the memorialization of slavery and abolition, Patterns and Prejudice, 2007, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00313220701431450?needAccess=true
Peju Layiwola - Making Meaning From a Fragmented Past: 1897 and the Creative Process, Open Access Arts, 2014 - https://openartsjournal.org/issue-3/2014s15pl/
David Olusoga - The history of British slave ownership has been buried: now its scale can be revealed, The Guardian, 2015 - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/12/british-history-slavery-buried-scale-revealed
Dr Desha A Osbourne - Facing Our Past: the difficult history of mahogany, National Trust for Scotland, 2021 - https://www.nts.org.uk/stories/facing-our-past-the-difficult-history-of-mahogany
Paul Lashmar and Jonathan Smith - ‘My forefathers did something horribly wrong’: British slave owners’ family to apologise and pay reparations, The Guardian, 2023 - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/04/british-slave-owners-family-apologise-reparations-trevelyans
Gary Younge - 'Lest We Remember - How Britain Buried its History of Slavery', The Guardian - https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2023/mar/29/lest-we-remember-how-britain-buried-its-history-of-slavery
The Guardian - Cotton Captial https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2023/mar/31/a-tale-of-two-cities-the-struggle-for-a-black-history-of-manchester
Films & TV
Stuart Hall, It Ain’t Half Racist Mum (1979) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-7CqOKD5c8
Jemima + Johnny (1966) https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-jemima-johnny-1966-online
Spike Lee, Do the Right Thing, (1989) https://www.amazon.co.uk/Do-Right-Thing-Ossie-Davis/dp/B01BIBHNRW
Maureen Blackwood, Home Away From Home (1993) https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-home-away-from-home-1993-online
Lee Mun Wah, The Color of Fear (1994) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_dzu-UqHjc
Oil in Our Creeks (2018) https://vimeo.com/232225374
Onyeka Igwe, A So-Called Archive (2020) https://mubi.com/films/a-so-called-archive
Steve McQueen, Small Axe (2020) https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/p08vxt33/small-axe
Afua Hirsch, African Renaissance: When Art Meets Power (2020) https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000lwf5
Subnormal: A British Scandal (2021) https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000w81h
Podcasts
Astrid Madimba and Chinny Ukata, It's a Continent, https://open.spotify.com/show/16rc6UHQgcHh4zMcSExDdP?si=8c464e5e447f4b45
Moya Lothian-McClean, Human Resources, https://open.spotify.com/show/6DFKmhsCeMdOQUTfShcdx9?si=6d3206be6ec44944
The Wonder House, Decolonising the Archives with Arike Oke, https://open.spotify.com/episode/0Oe1zqlEfLwaoPV78AIEMu?si=2deb14219dcc491c
Subhadra Das, Bricks + Mortals, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/culture/projects/bricks-mortals
The Urban Political - Episode 39 – The Urban Hinterlands of Slavery - https://urbanpolitical.online/episode-39-the-urban-hinterlands-of-slavery/
Stigma Conversations - https://thesociologicalreview.org/podcasts/the-stigma-conversations/
Artists
As the history that we learn today has largely been recorded from the point of view of white Europeans, the voices of enslaved Africans and their ancestors have often been sidelined. There are many artists who have used their creative practice to navigate their experience of the legacies of slavery and the global inequalities rooted within this. Here are some examples.
El Anatsui
Bruce Onobrakpeya
Cheri Samba
George Osodi
Yinka Shonibare
Sonia Boyce
Lubaina Himid
Hew Locke
Ingrid Pollard
Jade Monsterrat
Claudette Johnson
Romauld Hazoume
Chris Ofili
Jacob Lawrence
Fabrice Monteiri
Kwame Akoto-Bamfo
