Abstract

In the introductory note to her play Rockets and Blue Lights (2020), black British playwright Winsome Pinnock states that the play was inspired by J.M.W. Turner’s 1840 iconic paintings The Slave Ship and Rockets and Blue Lights. Taking her cue from Turner’s harrowing visual impressions of transatlantic slavery and stormy seascapes, Pinnock weaves a web of interconnected stories that endeavour to retrace the lost, commodified lives of enslaved Africans, while exploring the ongoing legacy of the slave trade. This article will discuss the strategies the playwright deploys to address this disavowed history and critically engage with the memorialisation of slavery. As Pinnock claims, the wealth of commemorative events marking the bicentenary anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade in 2007 have since peddled “the abolitionist narrative of white saviourismµ and turned England into “an abolition theme parkµ (2020: 11). Her powerful play, in turn, aims to problematise acts of memorialisation and transform a legacy of absence and silencing “into an exercise of counter-memoryµ (Fernández Campa 2017: 94).