Examining slavery at the Fitzwilliam

 

A "trade token", used on a British ship to vouch for the "integrity" of the slave trader (1788)

Hot on the heels of the last slavery exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, here is another show on a similar theme (Rise Up: Resistance Revolution Abolition), co-curated by Victoria Avery, who was also responsible for the Black Atlantic exhibition at the Fitzwilliam in 2023. This exhibition is the result of a study commissioned by the University to identify its links with Atlantic slavery “and other forms of forced labour”. This explains why there are so many references to Cambridge alumni in the exhibits and catalogue.  

The themes of the exhibition appear to be:

• Anti-slavery campaigners with links in and around Cambridge, notably Olaudah Equiano.
• The anti-slavery campaigning movement in Britain.
• Resistance and rebellion in early Black states, primarily, Haiti. The curators state the exhibition focuses on “acts of resistance” rather than “narratives of white abolitionism”.
• Resettlement, comprising a fascinating section about the 3,000 British Black loyalists who fought in the American War of Independence and were offered resettlement in Nova Scotia, and some coverage of an attempt to “repatriate” African slaves in Sierra Leone.
• Some early Black students at the University of Cambridge, specifically, a composer and an actor.  

This is a lot for one exhibition. Is it an art exhibition, a history presentation, or an act of expiation by the University? It sits uneasily somewhere between all three, with some muddled messages as you proceed around the exhibition.

What unites the exhibition, if anything, is a strident tone of injustice, with many heavily pedagogical captions. You will be told the correct interpretation of these exhibits, just in case you missed it; for example, a medal celebrating William Wilberforce is sternly labelled:

Medals like this one  - adopting the individualist conventions of the medium – ensured that abolitionist success was associated for decades to follow with a single white man. This has contributed to the neglect of countless other stories of resistance.

This hectoring style of captioning reminds me of recent exhibitions at the Tate Modern.  

Undoubtedly there are some fine exhibits, but overall the effect is weakened because of the very disparate themes and their wildly differing importance. To remember the first Black actor to play Othello is undoubtedly worth celebrating, as is one of the earliest Black composers as a student at a Cambridge college, but where does that fit in this exhibition of resistance and revolution?

Haiti

Haiti is justified for inclusion as the first successful rebellion by a slave population. Yet the focus here is rather strange. While the story of Toussaint L’Ouverture and the initial rebellion is well known, Haiti after the revolt is not a very edifying tale – as is shown by images in this exhibition. It looked to me there were more objects in the exhibition relating to reaction in Haiti than to revolution.

Dessalines, leader from 1804, introduced “serfdom” (as opposed to slavery, now banned), with all labourers bound to a plantation. The use of a whip was now forbidden, so estate owners used thick vines instead. Before this exhibition, I had no idea that Haiti had ever had a king. Now I know that Henri Christophe, one of the leaders of the rebellion, created a kingdom for himself, with a vast palace, using forced (not slave) labour, “using the corvée system, where people worked without pay instead of paying taxes”. Is this the rebellion we want to celebrate? Do we want to see details of the heraldic arms of the newly created (and short-lived) Haitian nobility?

Links to Cambridge

This is a mixture of significant and trivial. Certainly it is interesting that “the contradictory intertwinement of abolitionism and slavery existed at multiple levels from individuals to institutions to the country at large” [p134]. But does that justify mentioning all possible references to Cambridge alumni, for example that “Cambridge University educated … the heirs of British planters from Barbados, Jamaica and other British colonies long after slavery had ended”? Several references have an unintended effect: “Around 13,000 enslaved people rose up on sixty plantations, including some with connections to the University of Cambridge.” [catalogue, p144]

Contemporary art

One of the common practices with recent exhibitions that take place in an art gallery, but on a historical theme, is to invite contemporary artists to present their interpretation. This is the principle behind, for example, the recent Hew Locke show at the British Museum. However, some of the art seems to be chosen for its compliance with the exhibition theme, but to be in harmony with the message does not always produce an effective piece of propaganda – or art. A collection of hessian sacks by Karen McLean, for example, depicts enslaved women “via their reproductive organs rather than their faces to highlight enslaved women’s resistance and defiance through the control they took over their wombs.”  Sadly, I think that’s just how the slave owners saw the women: as reproductive agents to create more slaves. It doesn’t appear very defiant to me.

Some of the most effective recent art in the exhibition appears to have  little connection with the themes. There is a great picture by Rosmarie Marke (Which One, No Choice – Fleeing) of the Sierra Leone Civil War of 1997, but what is its connection with the rest of the exhibition?

Conclusion

It seems clear that the British Act of 1807 did not end the UK’s involvement with slavery, and I would have welcomed a more nuanced approach. Instead, there is a mixture of central and peripheral topics. The Atlantic slave trade is a fundamental and justified theme; it’s just a shame this Fitzwilliam show dilutes the message.

The Great Mughals: was it really paradise?

 

The carpet described in this exhibition as “The Ilchester carpet” ... but what has Ilchester got to do with it? It is Mughal in origin. 

The slogan (by a famous Persian poet) “If there is paradise on Earth, this is it”, is used to describe The Great Mughals exhibition (V&A, London): we are invited to see the period as an earthly paradise of tranquillity and beauty. We hear recorded sound of fountains and birds singing. We see object after object of spectacular wealth – jewellery, carpets, ironware, decorative weapons (not intended to be used in anger), as well as illuminated manuscripts, clothes, and paintings. But it turns out, not that you would learn this from the exhibition, that the three Mughals (Akbar, Shah Jahan, and Jahangir) who form the focus of this exhibition were perhaps not so great after all.

Clearly the V&A thought they were great, and that was sufficient. But everything was presented as an example of conspicuous consumption, and (at least walking round the exhibition) it was never clear where all this money came from, and whether the rulers spent it wisely. It looks like they had huge amounts of it, and spent it lavishly. As far as I could see, the paintings  (including the illustrated manuscripts) and the architecture were magnificent, and the textiles (hangings, clothes, and carpets) had wonderful detailed designs, but I wasn’t in a position to judge the many other objects on display (jewellery, ironware, glassware). It looked, well, expensive. Our criteria today are rather different to that of the 17th century.

What the exhibition didn’t tell me was:

• How none of the items I could see in the exhibition are actually held today in India? Does India have any collection of its own history?
• Where did the money come from to pay for all this stuff at the time of its creation?
• Were the Mughals (in 1066 and all that parlance) good kings or bad kings?
• More about the artistic quality of the items exhibited. What makes Mughal art distinctive?
• More about the various styles that the Mughals incorporated – not just the occasional (and easily identified) links to European art, but art of other Asian regions, plus more about what was being produced before the Mughals conquered the north of India.
• More about the Taj Mahal, rather than just a running video with dramatic shots of the building at sunrise and sunset

The catalogue, although lavishly illustrated, like the exhibition itself, answered few if any of these questions. The historical presentation is minimal – for example, the story of how Akbar reconquered much of North India is reduced to two sentences:

In 1556 the control of Hindustan by Babur’s descendants was precarious. Yet by 1571 Akbar’s territory could reasonably be described as an empire.  [Catalogue, p35]

It sounds like magic, and presented in this way, it is. You feel that there is probably more that could be said. In stark contrast, standard historical accounts of the period describe many years of warfare often with the family fighting among themselves. From the history books, Akbar doesn’t appear to be the nicest of rulers. He came to power aged only 13, and the de facto regent, Maham Anga,

overplayed her hand by promoting her own son, the ambitious Adham Khan, who in 1562 recklessly assassinated the kingdom’s leading minister of state. This so enraged the nineteen-year-old Akbar that, although the youth was his own foster-brother, he threw him over a palace balcony to his death. [Eaton, p180]

The contest to win control after Akbar’s death is described as “a bloody, fratricidal contest” [Eaton, p235]

As for Jahangir, after his son Khusrau fomented a rebellion, Khusrau’s supporters “were impaled along both sides of a road, while their miserable leader was placed on an elephant and mockingly made to receive his supporters’ ‘homage’ as they writhed in agony.” When Khusrau rebelled again, Jahangir partially blinded him. [Eaton, p204]. Jahangir’s end was not so illustrious, either:

in the last five years of his life, from 1622 to his death in 1627, the emperor became so incapacitated by drink and opium that Nur Jahan [his wife] took many administrative matters into her own hands. [Eaton, India in the Persianate Age, 2019]

That is not the image depicted by this exhibition.  

Catalogue

I had hoped that the catalogue would give me some more answers, but I was disappointed in this respect. The catalogue comprises three parts, one for each reign: Akbar, Jahangir, and Shah Jahan. Each part has a very short general introduction by Susan Stronge, followed by much shorter and more detailed essays on individual works or genres (coins, Chinese porcelain). That leaves the catalogue, and the exhibition, short on historical background; perhaps 5% of the text is historical background. The curator, Susan Stronge, recently edited a publication on jewellery from India, so it is to be expected that she would have an interest in this aspect.

Like the exhibition, the catalogue seems to exist in an art-historical bubble, seemingly independent of politics, economics, and the wider social context. This show could have been a much more educational experience; we no longer look at artefacts and just admire the beauty, however stunning they may look. We ask questions.

Rajeev Kinra, in the introduction, stresses the non-sectarian nature of Mughal rule in India (he uses the term Hindustan to mean the northern part of India ruled by the Mughals). All religions were tolerated as long as they promoted the Mughal empire. I’m not so sure; Guru Arjun, one of the early Sikh leaders, was put death by Jahangir, and Guru Hargobind, his successor, was imprisoned for seven years. I don’t think I will be looking to the “great” Moghuls for guidance on how to run an empire any time soon. 

Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence (1920)

 

Edith Wharton at The Mount, the country house she designed and had built in 1902

This was a very disappointing read. I read two or three books by Wharton when I was much younger, but perhaps I am more discerning today. What was wrong with this book? I can think of several reasons.

Lack of characterisation

I couldn’t believe that the main characters, May Welland, Newland Archer, and Ellen Olenska, could carry the weight of thought that Wharton tried to invest in them. In fact, of these three, only Newland Archer’s thinking is revealed. The novel could have been written in the first person by him.

Perhaps this lack of characterisation is a problem with a genre where if you decide to write about boring characters trapped in their environment, the book risks being boring itself.

The book attempts to present a Jamesian moment of decision: will Newland Archer desert his wife for an adulterous affair with Countess Olenska? But we feel he is too slight for us to bother much either way.

I was fascinated by the minutiae of New York life for the super-rich around 1890. At that time, it appears that if it didn’t happen in New York society, it wasn’t worth thinking about – at least, for the lucky participants. A social whirl of balls, opera, summer houses in Newport (where Wharton also had a house) but a life of complete philistinism, a cultural desert. Plus the way the men were able, if they wished, to run a double life with the tacit acceptance of their behaviour, clearly known about by the women, but not mentioned.

I was not impressed by Wharton’s feeble attempt to depict a bohemian artist, the tutor M. Riviere. Clearly she has a fondness for things cultural and presents this as a foil to the empty lives of the rich – but  Riviere’s character is as shallow as the main three roles.

The love scenes descend into romantic fiction, and resemble romantic fiction in that these characters are no better drawn or believable than the heroes of Mills & Boon.

How is Countess Olenska so notable, so individual? Newland is struck that she calls one of the wealthy relatives’ houses “gloomy” (“the words gave him an electric shock, for few were the rebellious spirits who would have dared to call the stately home of the van der Luydens gloomy”). In contrast, he states, of her rented house “It’s delicious – what you’ve done here”. But we never hear quite what she has done; she remains shallow, as are the other characters, since we have no evidence otherwise.

Nor was I impressed by the plot. It is very unlikely that as a lawyer, Newland Archer would be given a case involving his own family. But his legal work seems so undemanding of his time that perhaps it doesn’t really matter. There is no problem in him having time off for his emotional life,

Perhaps the lovingly detailed description of East Coast life  is to be expected. Wharton was born into a rich New York family; she privately published a collection of poems, and “came out” as a debutante. For much of her life she lived financially secure, from a legacy and her husband’s income. I would have imagined her experience in the First World War would have hardened her, yet this novel was only published in 1920.

Nostalgia?

Perhaps the book is, as some have claimed, an exercise in nostalgia, for a world that would never return. However, if this was New York in the 1890s, I want nothing of it. This is an existence totally dependent on slavery; Olenska’s visit to Boston is noted because she did not have a servant with her. She states it wasn’t worth it for only two day: “For two days it was not worth while to bring her”. Newland sees this as “unconventional”. Olenska is unusual in having a named servant, but one maid in the novel has no name except the description “mulatto”: we first hear of a “a mulatto maid-servant in a bright turban”. There is no description of the ethnic background of any of the other slaves, except for Olenska’s Nastasia, so why the repeated mention of “mulatto”? It must have some significance that escapes me (and escapes the World’s Classics edition editor).