Tracing the shifting meanings of British liberty and subjecthood in relation to persons of African descent in the West Indian colonies - from tentative acceptance and ambivalence in the early eighteenth century, to outright hostility after 1760 - this article argues that planter elites ultimately embraced a rigid, outmoded racial ideology in order to preserve white hegemony. In Jamaica in particular, the master class came to see free 'black' participation in civil society as a threat to their own birthright and privileged status as transplanted Britons. Yet non-white West Indians also made use of the English system of law and liberty in their efforts to affirm their identity as British subjects and to be considered as such by metropolitan Britons.
Using insights from her field of West African art and ethnography, Laura Smalligan (in an earlier journal article concerning the Jamaican slave dance, Jonkonnu) opens up and renews challenging perspectives regarding the indispensable African content of New World slavery. Smalligan argues that the Connu slave pageant stemmed from a particular time, place and outlook (of slaves from the Bight of Biafra, modern Nigeria). Discussion here pivots on two comparisons: of dance, often accompanied by trance states (from West Africa to Anglophone plantation societies in the Caribbean and mainland North America); and, of the way contemporary scholars now - often smitten in this generation by the postmodern literary turn' - view, prematurely, slave ethnicity as heuristically vague and unmanageable, as opposed to local slave society people, black and white, then who in their ordinary talk and activities depicted certain slaves ethnically (and linguistically). These broad comparisons should deepen and advance understandings to that dimension of the African diaspora to the Americas known (fashionably) as ethnogenesis', that is, the process of becoming African-American.
This paper explores some of the ways in which Black-British artists of the 1980s visualised slavery. The paper begins with a consideration of the social and political factors that contributed to the work of these artists, before briefly discussing some of the ways in which slavery and abolition have been constructed within Britain and the ways in which black artists' practice might challenge some of these constructs. The paper discusses specific works by artists such as Mowbray Odonkor, Donald Rodney and Keith Piper. The paper argues that the works it discusses do much to shed light on the ways in which history and identity play out in the work of black artists, particularly during the fascinating decade of the 1980s.
