“The slave ship imprint”: Representing the body, memory, and history in contemporary African American and Black British painting, photography, and installation art

Taking Betye Saar’s declaration that the “slave ship imprint is on all of us” as its catalyst, this article traces the afterlife and afterdeath of the infamous eighteenth-century white-originated, white-produced, and white-disseminated “plan” of the Liverpool slave ship Brooks across the vast bodies of works produced by contemporary African American and black diasporic painters, installation artists, photographers, and performance artists. Over the centuries, mass-produced diagrammatic representations of the Brooks have circulated in their thousands with the result that this one vessel has been increasingly divorced from its historical point of origin to become etched into official historical memory and white western visual culture as the quintessential embodiment of the archetypal slave ship. Adopting a comparative perspective to come to grips with the under researched arena of black diasporic art histories, this article examines an array of works produced by contemporary African American and Black British artists to begin to trace the ways in which they cut to the heart of the otherwise distorted or even entirely elided realities of black histories, memories, and narratives of transatlantic slavery.