“The Black Atlantic can be defined, on one level, through the desire to transcend both the structures of the nation state, and the constraints of ethnicity and national particularity,” writes Paul Gilroy in The Black Atlantic, his seminal 1993 text. Gilroy theorises that the modern black experience, shaped by enslaved people and their descendants, surpassed any one land to form its own hybrid nation consisting of shared African diasporic cultures.
The book’s title inspires a new exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge that seeks to grapple with the museum’s connections to the transatlantic slave trade. In 1816, Richard Fitzwilliam donated vast sums of money, literature and art to the University of Cambridge, which gave birth to the museum. The donations were made possible by the huge wealth of his grandfather Sir Matthew Decker, a Dutch-born English merchant who helped establish the South Sea Company in 1711, which was responsible for the trafficking of enslaved African people. The Fitzwilliam brings together collections from across the University of Cambridge and other institutions, as well as 21st-century artworks that ask the question: whose stories get told?
