Living cargo: how Black Britain performs its past

Offering a wide-ranging study of contemporary literature, film, visual art, and performance by writers and artists who live and work in the United Kingdom but also maintain strong ties to postcolonial Africa and the Caribbean, "Living Cargo" explores how contemporary black British culture makers have engaged with the institutional archives of colonialism and the Atlantic slave trade in order to reimagine blackness in British history and to make claims for social and political redress. Steven Blevins calls this reimagining?unhousing history??an aesthetic and political practice that animates and improvises on the institutional archive, repurposing it toward different ends and new possibilities. He discusses the work of novelists, including Caryl Phillips, Fred D?Aguiar, David Dabydeen, and Bernardine Evaristo; filmmakers Isaac Julien and Inge Blackman; performance poet Dorothea Smartt; fashion designer Ozwald Boateng; artists Hew Locke and Yinka Shonibare; and the urban redevelopment of Bristol, England, which unfolded alongside the public demand to remember the city?s slave-trading past

Outgrowth of the author's thesis (doctoral--University of California, Davis, 2008) under title: History unhoused.

Introduction: history unhoused: performing the life of human bio-cargo -- History and human cargo -- Beautiful remnants, brutal remains: dwelling on the melancholy archive -- Living rough: the disposition and dispensation of aleatory life -- Assembling human bio-cargo. Compound fractures: archival constellations, narrative violations -- Blood pressures: queer inheritance and intimate affiliations -- Exorbitant life in an age of austerity. Bespoke history: redressing the past, tailoring the present, fashioning the future -- @Bristol: dissident publics in a neoliberal city.