Just less than half a mile away from the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool's Albert Dock, in the shadow of the buildings on the Pier Head known as the Three Graces, is a sign for the area known as the Gorée Piazza. This was originally the site of the Gorée Warehouses, built in 1793 and demolished in the late 1940s after they had suffered significant damage during the Second World War. In his semi-autobiographical novel Ultramarine (2005 [1933]), the Wirral-born poet and novelist Malcolm Lowry alludes to a local tradition according to which the iron hoops on the walls here had once been used to restrain the enslaved. He writes of the ‘Goree Piazzas where they used to chain the slaves: Father showed me a bill of lading for one before he went mad’ (Lowry, 2005: 67). This reference has more to do with legend than with history, for by the time the Gorée Warehouses were built, the Somersett case of 1772 had already established a pre-abolitionist precedent according to which, in theory at least, any enslaved Africans who reached England could not be removed from the country against their will (Nadelhaft, 1966).

Irrespective of the historical veracity, the naming of this site nevertheless relates directly to Gorée Island, a centre of slave embarkation off the coast of Dakar in Senegal, with which slave traders and sailors of the time would have been familiar. The continued and problematic presence of Gorée in the cityscape of central Liverpool encapsulates the central thesis of this chapter: that Gorée, through a series of representations including fictions, films and political speeches, has long been unmoored from the West African coast, having been granted a symbolic existence in a wider Black Atlantic space. In the terms of Kinsey A. Katchka, ‘“Gorée” is no longer a uniquely historical location, but an historical abstraction that can be relocated elsewhere’ (2004: 3). Developing the logic of such an observation, Jean-Louis Roy, in the epigraph cited above, elevates the island to the status of a ‘continent de l'esprit’ [‘continent of the spirit’].