European slave-trade reminders stay provincialized at margins, sparing metropolitan consciences

Evidence

Consciousness of slavery, of course, was not completely absent from the European public sphere. This is revealed, for example, in the telling façades of many center-city Bordeaux buildings, or the visible presence of the slave-trading market in Liverpool, or in various material signs of the British slave trade in the port city of Bristol, traces of lives lost. But here too the reminders are provincialized within the archite(x)ture of European space, lingering at the metropolitan margins without troubling prevailing conscience at the centers of power. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 842

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the Grafting & Growth essay’s pattern of infrastructure that encodes history in material form yet keeps it out of center-stage awareness.