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Part of
A Comparative Literary History of Modern Slavery: The Atlantic world and beyond
Edited by Karen-Margrethe Simonsen, Madeleine Dobie and Mads Anders Baggesgaard
[Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages XXXVII] 2025
► pp. 380–393

Chapter 21
Filling the blanks in history

This chapter grew out of a crucial question: Can contemporary performance, as a practice, help us compensate for the lack of first-hand slave testimonies? Can it lead us to experience what happened inside the belly of the dying slave ships, give us insight into what the silenced chained bodies endured? Created in 2015, my multimedia performance The Flesh of History serves as both a starting point for reflecting on this void, and an example proving that living art can contribute to filling the blanks in the history of slavery, to rescuing the dead and soothing their descendants, and to subverting written historical sources to value and develop another form of archives.
Keywords: slave-ship, memory, performance, un-ghostization, healing, living archives
Article outline
  • Step 1: Lightening darkness
  • Step 2: Fleshing the invisible
  • Step 3: Facing historical lapses
  • Step 4: Falling into the hold
  • Step 5: Embodying
  • Step 6: Calling the undead
  • Author queries
  • Notes
  • References
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References (20)
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