From Ports of Empire to Capitals of Culture: Museums of Slavery and Colonial History

Former port cities of empire and colonialism are steeped in material vestiges of their past. From old maritime waterfronts to grand mercan tile architecture, from street names to statues, and from monuments to museums: there are reminders at every step; one only has to look. These sites are what the historian Pierre Nora (1989) calls-sites of memory’ (lieux de memoire)—sites which evoke collective memory, when there has been an incomplete break with the past, where continuities, or legacies, remain. This chapter focuses on museums of slavery and colonial his tory as sites of ambivalent memory and identity in the port cities of Liverpool, Marseille, and New Orleans. As Aldrich (2005: 8) argues in Vestiges of Colonial Empire in France: Perhaps ambivalence is the best way to describe attitudes to the colonies—a mixture of nostalgia, residual pride, misgivings about the worth of the effort, sometimes shame about what was done, occa sional outrage. Examining monuments, museums and other markers of the colonial patrimony is a way of charting and understanding that ambivalence.