James Young's articulate discussion of memory and history in relation to memorials to the Holocaust by Shimon Attie has great resonances for discussions about contemporary memorials for victims of transatlantic slavery. Questions of national myths, the past and various differing multivocal memories of it, the conservative nature of cityscapes and most crucially of how to articulate loss in an amnesiac culture are all germane for the Black artist in her memorial praxis. Lubaina Himid's interest in memorialising the slave trade is not confined to the museum or gallery space, and in a series of interventions since the early 1990s, Himid has sought to promote debates about the need for physical memorials to honour the victims of the slave trade in British landscapes through artistic pieces that project possible memorials, and occasionally in statements, interviews and comment pieces. As she says herself, her interest in memorials, though spawned in London, was piqued afresh when she moved to the north-west of England in 1988, by their seeming absence. She says:

‘These past 500 years have not been without cost to our humanity but can the survivors of the African Diaspora lay claim only to the judgment of Ham? Is our colour a curse from a malevolent God? Or is it inscribed with death by the wish and the will of the dominant culture?’ Lubaina Himid’s hard-hitting rhetorical questions cut to the heart of her protest aesthetic by coming to grips with the omnipresent realities of white supremacy as a body-and-soul-destroying force that bleeds through every aspect of an African diasporic social, political and cultural imaginary. ‘After all, it was they who inscribed Africans with their notion of negritudinal darkness to offset their self-attributed whiteness’, she insists. Himid holds the racist hate of a white-dominant culture to account for perpetuating acts of discrimination and persecution against the ‘survivors of the African diaspora’. As she unequivocally demonstrates, white western society alone is responsible for inventing the racist ‘notion of negritudinal darkness’ as an entirely fabricated construction that was created solely to define an illusory and mythic imagining of a ‘self-attributed whiteness’. Faced with these traumatising realities, she is categorical in her conviction that ‘Black was an act of Self-naming’. For Himid, a determination to bear witness to acts and arts of Black self-naming interrogates the stranglehold exerted by a white racist mainstream imaginary which shows no sign of abating, especially on the enduring battleground that is white western art history.

Staging her own radical and revolutionary acts of ‘Black self-naming’ as well as self-imaging and self-representing, Himid takes the white racist biases of a dominant art world to task. Writing of her repeated reimaginings of the Black male figure gesticulating for aid after a shipwreck in the French painter Théodore Géricault's epic work, The Raft of the Medusa (1818–19), she confirms:

By way of providing further context for her decision to paint this ‘invisible’ figure, she explains that ‘[t]he accident of discovering the signalling negro came when I was 40 in 1994 having been painting seriously for 12 years’.

Cotton.com (2002), Lubaina Himid's portrayal of slavery and the imperative to remember it, and her later work Swallow Hard: The Lancaster Dinner Service (2007) are located securely in the northern cities of Manchester and Lancaster. Here she conjures the global interconnections that construct those cities’ identities and wealth and shows how these affect the local economy. Her signature work, Naming the Money (2004), is different, foregrounding the multiple geographies that resulted in enslaved Africans being present throughout Europe and the Americas, showing the multiplicity and diffusion of the experience of transatlantic slavery for those caught up in its maelstrom. She uses large-scale and multiple sensory modes to mirror the transnational and North–South ubiquity of the experience of slavery and of its consequences then and now. Himid refuses conventionalised images of degraded and abject enslaved Africans in a work of affirmation and joyful exuberance. When asked ‘Why such exuberance?’, Himid answers:

This carrying of history is shown by the wonderful African-inspired primary colours and designs of the installation (Figures 65–67). Her work as originally conceived for the Hatton Gallery in Newcastle was spread over five rooms with one hundred colourful, cut-out, life-sized figures arranged in groups. A soundtrack comprising music from the African diaspora and European opera was mixed with readings by Himid of elliptical poetic pieces, each one expressing the identity of the characters she has conjured who, having suffered enslavement in Africa, are now slave servants in Europe. Renamed in Europe, they cling to their African identities, and Himid imagines for them their African names and experiences through these readings and also through the texts affixed to the back of each figure, ironically on accounting paper. As the audience wanders through the installation, the backs of the figures with their plain wooden boards are easily overlooked. However, they are key to a full understanding of the work. Each figure has a scrap of cloth from the Hatton Gallery's extensive collection exemplifying the importance of cotton to the trade that has enmeshed these human beings.

‘BETWEEN 1789 & 1815 WITH THE SINGLE EXCEPTION OF BONAPARTE HIMSELF, NO SINGLE FIGURE APPEARED ON THE HISTORICAL STAGE MORE GREATLY GIFTED THAN THIS MAN, A SLAVE UNTIL HE WAS 45’. So reads Lubaina Himid’s quotation from C. L. R. James's Black Jacobins, a pioneering work of radical African Caribbean history, which she includes in the exhibition catalogue Depicting History Today. A few years earlier she had reproduced the same quotation as the caption accompanying her life-size cut-out of Toussaint Louverture. According to Himid's no less than James's reimagining, Louverture’s heroism as a social liberator and political revolutionary remains a source of inspiration due to the fact that he lived the majority of his life as an enslaved man. Working to extrapolate further from James's focus on Louverture's legendary status as an iconic liberator, Himid observes that ‘[i]t is no coincidence that more is known of Bonaparte than L’Ouverture/ Toussaint/ Napoleon Egypt/ Napoleon/ Toussaint/ Egypt/ Toussaint led the only successful slave revolution,/ it took twelve years./ The defeat of Bonaparte's expedition in 1803/ resulted in the establishment of/ the Black State of Haiti’. As an artist who is under no illusion regarding the stranglehold exerted by the widespread whitewashing of western social and political histories that deny and distort the presence of African diasporic peoples, Himid communicates no surprise that the memory of this Black man's heroism is all but invisibilised while that of Bonaparte as the white, male, iconic leader continues to be celebrated.

Across her decades-apart series, Scenes from the life of Toussaint L’Ouverture I (1987) and Scenes from the life of Toussaint L’Ouverture II (2002), Himid excavates and examines Louverture's mythical status as the leader of the ‘only successful slave revolution’. ‘History is painted/documented to glorify the living’, she declares, only to conclude at the end of this same page: ‘They who document/paint the History hold the Power’. In this multi-part and multi-layered series, Himid assumes the role not only of the artist but also of the historian, political commentator and social radical in order to ‘paint the History’ and ‘hold the Power’ over retelling, recreating and reimagining the life and works of this African Caribbean freedom fighter. No lone legend, exceptional icon or ‘single figure’, however, Himid's Louverture is newly rooted in missing genealogies of African diasporic collective and collaborative militancy.

‘In 1997 I began to work on a series which was exhibited at Tate St Ives in 1999/2000 – Plan B. The work brought out the theme of safety and danger and how to tell the difference’, Lubaina Himid writes. ‘What is better, to be stuck in what looks to the outside world to be a safe place but is in fact [a] dangerous place, for ever’, she asks, ‘or to venture into what is a dangerous place but have the free will to find safety’. Debating issues related to physical and psychological confinement versus liberation for African diasporic peoples fighting to survive the prejudices and persecutions of white supremacist western nations, Himid took inspiration for her title for this series from African American writer Chester B. Himes's ‘violent’ unfinished novel Plan B, published posthumously in 1993. As per his provocative narrative in which the US nation functions as the quintessential ‘dangerous place’ for Black people trying to survive against all odds, she confirms that ‘[t]he paintings recall terrifying experiences related through desperate narratives across the centuries by runaway slaves, escaping hostages, fleeing migrants, bombed communities and battered women’. As the protagonists in Himes's novel face life-and-death situations, so Himid argues, ‘The work exposes the dilemma of deciding whether to endure the dangers of a current violent situation or risk life-threatening events during the process of escape’. Working beyond Himes's subject matter to destabilise temporal boundaries and interrogate competing historical contexts, Himid dramatises the tragedies and traumas experienced by ‘runaway slaves, escaping hostages, fleeing migrants, bombed communities and battered women’. She represents and reimagines narratives of slavery and freedom, memories of war and peace and testimonies of domestic and national violence. Himid uses this series to ask and answer a question: ‘Is the inside you know more dangerous to you than the outside you don't know?’ Here she comes to terms not solely with the corporeal wounding but with the emotional suffering facing past, present and future Black diasporic peoples as a catalyst for her – and by extension their – radical formulation of a new ‘Plan B’ in which she and they endorse radical practices of resistance and revolution.

‘My personal/political strategy is to take stock of what is history, our history to reiterate what is already fact and to challenge the gaping holes opened up by the present negligent practice’; so Lubaina Himid summarises her radical and revolutionary priorities as an artist. Over the decades, and across her paintings, drawings and mixed-media installations, she ‘takes stock’ of ‘what is history’ – as defined according to dominant western criteria – in order to interrogate, destabilise and resist the widespread whitewashing of ‘our history’. Himid assumes the role not only of an artist but also of a historian, memorialist and witness to take the centuries-old white supremacist lens to task by filling in the ‘gaping holes’ of African diasporic political, biographical, social and cultural histories. ‘It is obvious that there can be no real future unless the past is consolidated, recognised as present and used as a guide for the future’, she confirms. Working to create radically revised and rewritten visual and textual histories, which then become serviceable in contemporary Black freedom struggles worldwide, Himid's bodies of work provide alternative blueprints of artistry and activism. ‘Black women who have been working since time to create a context for our creativity must be supported by artists in this’, Himid asserts. She is in no doubt that ‘to have work challenged, analysed and talked about can only empower the artist and extend the dialogue’.

At the heart of Himid's many declarations of independence as communicated in her determination to ‘empower the artist and extend the dialogue’ is her rejection of all myopic interpretations of Black female art-making traditions as either monolithic or isolationist. Rather, as Himid theorises, she and hundreds of Blackwomen artists – past, present and future – are the collaborative creators of a multi-layered and ever-shifting ‘context’ for their ‘creativity’ according to which experimentation is the order of the day: no form, subject or practice is off-limits. ‘The themes in the work of black women artists cover a wide spectrum’, Himid confides; ‘We are making ourselves more visible by making positive images of black women, we are reclaiming history, linking national economics with colonialism and racism, with slavery, starvation and lynchings’.

‘Who are monuments for?’ asks Lubaina Himid, and answers: ‘The living/ The dead/ The ancestors/ The descendants/ The disciples/ The friends/ The winners/ The losers/ The city/ The economy/ The cultural historians/ The artists/ The future/ The past’. Over the decades, she has debated and dramatised the form and function of art-making to create paintings, drawings and mixed-media installations which operate not only as works of art but also as commemorative monuments and revolutionary memorials to the millions of untold and unseen lives as lived across the African diaspora. ‘The ideas around memorials and monuments I have concentrated upon have been about how the wasting of other people's lives always includes the wasting of creative people's lives’, she explains. Warring against a white racist ‘wasting’ of Black people's social and political realities no less than their cultural narratives, histories, memories and imaginations, she is under no illusion that ‘if you damage or destroy the creative life you destroy more than just one life. You destroy the potential for positive change, for hope, for continuity and for any kind of understanding about the pricelessness of human life’. For Himid, the construction of a civic monument that not only has the ‘potential for positive change, for hope, for continuity’ but that will also do justice to the ‘pricelessness of human life’ is only possible if its creators acknowledge that the foundations of all western cities are built on the contributions made by Black diasporic peoples, enslaved and free.

Issuing a warning to would-be architects and designers working in the western world – ‘You may also have to take into account a narrow, exclusive idea of whose city it actually is’ – Himid encourages these future memorialists to ask, ‘Who else has claim to a memorial in this city and where are their memorials?’ She is insistent that in the construction of any monument in which there is a real rather than a superficial determination ‘to honour the dead who have been ignored, suppressed or denied when in peril in the past’, there must be an equal commitment to social justice.

‘Venice though is also a symbol for me to how people of the black diaspora have for centuries been the backbone of the cultural development of many European cities but that this presence is invisible’, observes Lubaina Himid. She exposes centuries of social, political, historical and cultural injustices: ‘That such a visible set of people, there because they were used as slaves and signifiers of European wealth, could be so invisible in the discussions around the origins of patterns and architectural forms of the countries from which they came has always been a continuing preoccupation of mine’. Warring against white supremacist erasures of a very real Black presence in every area of national, political, social and cultural life, she is under no illusion that ‘Venice looks like it does because Venetians were impressed by North African/Arabic culture its richness and sophistication its intricacy and its colour and spectacular shifting moving symbolism’. Working to represent, recreate and reimagine denied and distorted traditions of African diasporic artistry, she was inspired to create Venetian Maps, ‘a series of paintings that illustrated this hidden culture that was incredibly influential but never discussed in general touristic guide book conversation’. Again, as per Plan B and her Toussaint I and II series, she chose not to create her nine acrylic paintings in isolation. Rather, she produced ‘a series of texts (now lost) depicting the vanished lives of the black diaspora, the unwritten but intensely experienced narratives of the everyday’. While we no longer have access to her disappeared textual narratives, all of the nine large-scale paintings which Himid created in 1997 survive: Ceramicists, Masks, Miracles, Shoemakers, Lost Toys, Reliquaries, Birdcages, Goblets & Dolphins and Kings.

Working to visibilise an ‘invisible presence’ and a ‘hidden culture’, Himid takes heart and hope in her paintings: ‘everything is there, from the simple yet long lost misery of lost toys to the unrecognised contribution to western culture’. No histories or biographies are off-limits. She transgresses boundaries of class and legal divisions in society to represent ‘the rescuers of dropped relics, slave servants as gondoliers, royal princes on their way across the world, merchants buying and selling, black artisans adapting their craft to suit the location and the tastes of Europe’.