Prolegomenon: Turning Sorrow into Meaning

This chapter introduces the main themes of the book, framed as an exploration of human memory practice in the visual arts, with a focus on public art and memorialisation. These enquiries are contextualised within broader framework of writing and philosophical thought on the representation of trauma, with particular reference to the Atlantic Slave trade of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, and the European Holocaust of 1941–1945, alongside other instances of catastrophic human cruelty. Among diverse artistic and institutional responses to such traumas, aspects of artistic activism are also introduced. The chapter concludes with a brief overview of the book’s structure and chapter thematics.