History

‘Linger with the voids’

Examining the relationship between past and present

by Georgina Arnott •

October 2022, no. 447

Black Ghost of Empire: The long death of slavery and the failure of emancipation by Kris Manjapra

Allen Lane, $45 hb, 253 pp

History

‘Linger with the voids’

Examining the relationship between past and present

by Georgina Arnott •

October 2022, no. 447

Kris Manjapra (photograph by Beowulf Sheehan/History Extra)

‘To fully understand why the shadow of slavery haunts us today, we must confront the flawed way that it ended.’ This premise guides the third book of Kris Manjapra, a Bahamian of African and Indian descent and history professor at Massachusetts’s Tufts University. As Manjapra invites us to see, the ‘voids’ in his family’s history reflect the pernicious afterlife of five hundred years of Atlantic slavery; his loss just one of its manifold legacies.

Georgina Arnott

Dr Georgina Arnott joined Australian Book Review as Assistant Editor in 2022 after a career in academic research in Australian history, biography, the British empire and literary studies. She has a PhD in History and an MA in Literary Studies, both from the University of Melbourne. Georgina has been published as a book reviewer, essayist and scholarly journal author. Her first book, The Unknown Judith Wright (UWAP, 2016), was shortlisted for the National Biography Award in 2017, and she is the editor of Judith Wright: Selected Writings (La Trobe University Press, 2022). In 2021 she was named an ABC Top 5 Humanities Scholar and produced the Radio National episode Commemorating James Stirling?