Abstract

Britain, like much of Europe, has a hypocritical love affair with the memory of its colonial past, yet there are many whose memory is, and always will be, different from that ‘narrowed narrative’. As an artist, I believe that transatlantic slavery and the brutal plantation as an agricultural cauldron which laid the foundations for the industrial revolution, is everybody’s history. Without repairing that legacy, the damage to the fabric of society simply continues to deepen and the idea that ‘privilege views equality as discrimination’ and its monologue becomes the voice of society. The arts provide a mechanism to balance the dominant narrative of ‘academic history’, which has evolved into academic genocide and in that process, prohibited snapshots of the past from being more complete in their rendering of the human story.