Frank Wilderson, American writer, filmmaker, and critic, elaborated on the newly minted concept in his 2008 Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid. The term “afro-pessimism” was first introduced by Congolese author Sony Lab’ou Tansi in a 1990 article. It is precisely this potential, and the “reverberations” such works unleash, which form the subject of Cheryl Finley’s Committed to Memory: The Art of the Slave Ship, a politically attuned chronicling of slave ship representations from the late 18 th to present century.Ĭheryl Finley writes in a vein of scholarship often termed “afro-pessimism,” characterized by its reliance on concepts of black origin, archival retrieval, and continued empathetic identification with the past. Hayes’s Cash Crop, and his decision to cast himself amongst his representation of the enslaved, are a prime example of the potential of art to tap into deep political, and historical fault lines.

The figures represent the roughly 12.5 million enslaved African survivors of the middle passage. In a society where the murder of unarmed black men, women, and children by law enforcement is routine, how do we think about a piece which literally casts the living in the role of the subjugated dead? Cash Crop, a 2010 installation by contemporary American artist Stephen Hayes, consists of life-sized concrete shackled and bound figures of men, women, children, and even a figure cast from Hayes’s own body. The current global political climate attests to the fact that this thinking is needed now as much as ever. The choices we make in how to reckon, or how not to reckon, with art produced by, despite, and through collective suffering bear investigation, always. What art might do to life, and what the past might mean in the present these enormous questions are unavoidable in such an undertaking.

Carving the space to think about a beauty which is bound to human pain is an endlessly intricate task.

Committed to Memory by Cheryl Finley