Facing Up to the Past: Perspectives on the Commemoration of Slavery from Africa, the Americas and Europe

Gert Oostindie, Editor

The ‘memories’ and legacies of slavery may haunt the descendants of the once-enslaved Africans in the Americas and in the European diaspora.Yet it was not until the last years of the millennium that the former European slave-trading nations began to publicly acknowledge this gruesome past as part and parcel of their national history.The Netherlands is a case in point. In 1999, the Dutch government pledged to erect a monument in commemoration of slavery, comprising not only some kind of concrete statue, but equally an institution dedicated to the effort of raising national awareness of slavery and its many legacies. Part of this initiative, Facing Up to the Past: Perspectives on the Commemoration of Slavery from Africa, the Americas and Europe offers refreshing insights in the manifold ways in which the slave trade and slavery are remembered and commemorated – or suppressed – as part of the national identity in the three continents forever connected by the legacies of this triangular trade.The book reflects on the wider question of how a painful past is used – and sometimes misused – in contemporary national ideologies and identity politics.

Gert Oostindie is the director of the Royal Institute of Linguistics and Anthropology in Leiden, and holds a chair in Caribbean Studies at Utrecht University.

isbn 976 637 055 9
publishers Ian Randle Publishers with Prins Claus Fonds Library, 2002
binding paperback, 17 x 22 cm.
22 colour and 29 b&willustrations.
Notes, bibl.
pages 256 pp
price us $ 20.00
rights world, Ian Randle Publishers

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