This illustrated talk will explore the landmark 2007 exhibition Trade and Empire: Remembering Slavery curated by SuAndi, Kevin Dalton Johnson, Emma Poulter and Alan Rice at the Whitworth Art Gallery. Rice will outline the curatorial methodologies he and Poulter used to create their sections of the exhibition and discuss selections made and declined and the controversies they caused. These will range from eighteenth and nineteenth century slave narratives by Olaudah Equiano and Henry Box Brown to Contemporary art and textiles by Godfried Donkor and Althea McNish. Finally, he will discuss his donation to this Portico exhibition: an 1846 edition of the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and the way its innovative binding using artwork by Lubaina Himid enables new and dynamic readings of the Transatlantic importance of Douglass who visited Manchester in that very year.

Alan Rice is Professor in English and American Studies at the University of Central Lancashire, Preston. He has degrees from the University of Edinburgh, Bowling Green State University, Ohio and Keele. He has worked on the interdisciplinary study of the Black Atlantic for the past three decades including publishing Radical Narratives of the Black Atlantic (Continuum, 2003) & Creating Memorials, Building Identities: The Politics of Memory in the Black Atlantic (Liverpool UP, 2010). He is an advisor to museums in Liverpool, Lancaster and Manchester. In May 2014 he launched as co-director, the Institute for Black Atlantic Research (IBAR) at UCLAN with special guest writer, Caryl Phillips. He is currently working on a monograph on the works of the 2017 Turner Prize nominated, Black British artist, Lubaina Himid and their relationship to slavery and memory due to be published by Liverpool University Press in 2017.