Category Archives: Colonialism

Dread Scott, “Slave Rebellion Reenactment” (2019)

Credit: The Guardian, a still from video piece

A community-engaged artist performance and film production that, on November 8-9, 2019, reimagined the German Coast Uprising of 1811, which took place in the river parishes just outside of New Orleans. Envisioned and organized by artist Dread Scott and documented by filmmaker John Akomfrah, Slave Rebellion Reenactment (SRR) animated a suppressed history of people with an audacious plan to organize and seize Orleans Territory, to fight not just for their own emancipation, but to end slavery. It is a project about freedom.

The artwork involved hundreds of reenactors in period specific clothing marching for two days covering 26 miles. The reenactment, the culmination of a period of organizing and preparation, took place upriver from New Orleans in the locations where the 1811 revolt occurred—with the exurban communities and industry that have replaced the sugar plantations as its backdrop. The reenactment was an impressive and startling sight—hundreds of Black re-enactors, many on horses, flags flying, in 19th-century French colonial garments, singing in Creole and English to African drumming.

Ingrid Pollard “Wordsworth Heritage” (1992)

photographs of Black people in the landscape

Ingrid Pollard [credit]

[CREDIT]

This photographic work was originally presented as a billboard image on 25 urban sites around the UK. The image takes the form of a mass produced tourist postcard. It shows the profile of William Wordsworth, 19th century English Poet Laureate. Wordsworth and his poetry are icons closely linked with the ‘Lake District’. A group of contemporary Black walkers transform the ‘Romantic’ landscape and ideas of History and Heritage.

From Ingrid Pollard (2004) in The Art of Walking: A Field Guide:

“Going to the Lake District over the years, collecting postcards, deliberately searching out England’s timeworn countryside ‘the way it’s always been,’ searching the postcard-stand for the card that shows a sunny upland scene with a black person standing, looking over the hills. Never finding it. I fantisise about encountering that image amongst the England of craggy rocks, rushing streams and lowly sheep. Simple stories, simple connections.”

Billboard, Kings Cross London. Dr Julian Agyeman & Ingrid Pollard

Nancy Spero “Vietnamese Women” (1985)

Nancy Spero

This is a large hand-printed and painted work that is so long it cannot be taken in without walking along it.

The subject matter is an image of a Vietnamese woman fleeing the massacre of civilians in 1968, taken from the news. Spero states the cigarette in the woman’s mouth is a symbol of survival.

(credit: Walk Ways catalog)

Mahatma Gandhi, “Salt March” (1930)

[CREDIT]

The Salt March, which took place from March to April 1930 in India, was an act of civil disobedience led by Mohandas Gandhi to protest British rule in India. During the march, thousands of Indians followed Gandhi from his religious retreat near Ahmedabad to the Arabian Sea coast, a distance of some 240 miles. The march resulted in the arrest of nearly 60,000 people, including Gandhi himself. India finally was granted its independence in 1947.

Salt Tax

Britain’s Salt Act of 1882 prohibited Indians from collecting or selling salt, a staple in their diet.

Indian citizens were forced to buy the vital mineral from their British rulers, who, in addition to exercising a monopoly over the manufacture and sale of salt, also charged a heavy salt tax. Although India’s poor suffered most under the tax, all Indians required salt.

Mohandas Gandhi and Satyagraha

After living for two decades in South Africa, where Mohandas Gandhi fought for the civil rights of Indians residing there, Gandhi returned to his native country in 1915 and soon began working for India’s independence from Great Britain.

Defying the Salt Act, Gandhi reasoned, would be an ingeniously simple way for many Indians to break a British law nonviolently.

Gandhi declared resistance to British salt policies to be the unifying theme for his new campaign of “satyagraha,” or mass civil disobedience.

Salt March Begins

First, Gandhi sent a letter on March 2, 1930 to inform the Viceroy Lord Irwin that he and the others would begin breaking the Salt Laws in 10 days. Then, on March 12, 1930, Gandhi set out from his ashram, or religious retreat, at Sabermanti near Ahmedabad with several dozen followers on a trek of some 240 miles to the coastal town of Dandi on the Arabian Sea.