The last slave ship : a practice-led exploration, via the production of a literary artefact, into the possibility of harnessing tonal signifier texts to make a creative intervention into the cultural amnesia surrounding Liverpool's slaving past

Liverpool’s pivotal role in the Atlantic Slave Trade has become dessicated through musealisation, and a dominant white identity; a situation which has resulted in the marginalisation of Liverpool’s black population. This thesis is a practice-led exploration into harnessing tonal signifier texts to make a creative intervention into the cultural amnesia surrounding Liverpool’s slaving past. The thesis attempts to suggest an alternate discourse by translating Antony Gormley’s “things which cannot be articulated” into a novel, referencing the politics of civil disobedience, micro nationhood, identity, memory, and texts that engage with Machery’s “ideological necessity” of silence.