Creating Memorials, Building Identities

The book is not restricted by geographical strictures like many studies but includes work on European, Caribbean, African and North American examples of memorialisation.

The book ranges across chronologies including case studies on all centuries from the 18th to the 21st and often mixing chronologies within the case studies themselves.

The book is determinedly interdisciplinary ranging across music, visual arts, literature, museum and film studies allowing for a dynamic range of examples to be brought forward and juxtaposed making it a more interesting study than many heretofore discussions of memorialisation.

It uses the latest theories in the study of memory by black Atlantic and French philosophers and melds them with the authors' own development of a theory of "guerrilla memorialisation" which is followed through a number of the case studies.

It follows on from the work of Marcus Wood and Paul Gilroy to discuss the complex issue of representation and the black body in the wake of the horrors of the Transatlantic slave trade using the work of contemporary artists to analyse the limits and potentialities of representation in the wake of catastrophe.