ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book describes the relationship between the slave ship and modernity from the sixteenth century onwards through an examination of its materiality and memory. It looks at the relationship of memory studies to the slave experience, including critical methodologies and the question of ethnography. The book elucidates the relationship between the memory of the Atlantic and its labouring classes specifically the multi-ethnic pirates who provided counter-modernity to that posed by capital. It examines the nature of the material life of the plantations but also the significance of the African burial ground in New York for thinking about hybridity and the Atlantic labouring class. The book presents some reflections on the human implications for humanism and the nature of being, looking at contemporary struggles against slavery and their relation to memory.
