The black ghosts haunting Downton Abbey

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/nov/04/downton-abbey-black-people-history

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Those of us who are seduced by the saccharine comforts of costume drama will have to face facts tonight, when the third series of Downton Abbey draws to a close. It will be months before we find out what happens next. Of course, most of us already know, somewhere in our subconscious. Either that, or we don't really care.

For the reason we watch Downton is to seek solace in a glorious past while trying to cope with the crises of the present. The kindly Crawley family and their beloved servants settle our nerves. Their fiction reassures us, drawing us to a time when life was simple – when, give or take the odd exception, people accepted their place in society, and when our isles were homogeneous and hermetically sealed, as one Lord Fellowes of West Stafford would have us believe.

But what if the classic costume drama were turned on its head? What if we were presented, not with the reinforcement of this untroubled past but its absences – those people and events that have been erased from hundreds of years of national myth-making? What might Sunday evenings be like then?

To test the water, you could start by engaging in the work of two British artists, Kimathi Donkor and John Akomfrah, whose solo exhibitions are currently on at London's Rivington Place and Carroll/Fletcher galleries. Although they work in different mediums – Donkor uses oil paints to create lavish figurative portraits whereas Akomfrah works with film, sound and photography – they share a common concern with the spectres of the past and how their presence might be felt in the present.

In Queens of the Undead, Donkor brings us face to face with four historic female commanders from Africa and the African diaspora. Spanning four centuries, from the 17th to the 20th, these women were fighters, who either led slave rebellions or rose up against Europe's colonising armies. Yet they are little-known here. With his large paintings, Donkor disrupts our memory, showing these women, candidly, in their full glory and complexity. His vivid use of colour grabs your attention, imploring you to stop and consider.

One of these heroic figures, Angola's 17th-century Queen Nzinga, is portrayed wearing 21st-century clothes and using a mobile phone. More disconcerting, however, is Donkor's appropriation of classical European paintings. Jamaica's Nanny of the Maroons, an 18th-century folk hero and former slave, is modelled on Joshua Reynolds' 1778 portrait of Jane Fleming: the two women strike the same pose. This technique makes his work appear to be familiar, even to the amateur eye, but as you stand before it, the centrality of the black figure is unsettling. And it is precisely in this moment of realisation – that you are shocked – that his work is so effective. You find yourself querying history and reflecting on that which has disappeared from view.

Some of Donkor's paintings show more contemporary scenes of police brutality and racism. We see the artist, naked, being hit across the face by a white policeman, and, in another scene, the body of Jean Charles de Menezes being carried by Stephen Lawrence and Joy Gardner.

In Hauntologies, Akomfrah is less overtly political, but the politics of representation is at work here too. Exploring the components of costume drama, the artist is emphatic in his insistence on the place of Africans in western history. The catalyst for his film Peripeteia is a pair of portraits – one of a young woman, the other of a man – from the 16th century by Albrecht Dürer. They are thought to be among the earliest representations of black people in Europe. Akomfrah also draws on The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch, showing close-ups of encounters between white and black figures. "For me this painting has always depicted a utopia," comments Akomfrah, "because it suggests that the Adamic space of our emergence was multicultural!"

In a year in which Danny Boyle was congratulated for including Windrush arrivals in his Olympic opening ceremony, watching Peripeteia reminded me how short-sighted a historical representation that was. Black people have been in Britain for hundreds of years, possibly thousands, and it is a sad indictment of all of us that the work of artists such as Akomfrah and Donkor still seems to be so radical, so rare and so political – while Downton's aristocratic agitprop goes largely unnoticed.

Yet there is overlap in these works of drama. In staging history, they all invoke questions of mourning and memory, and the artists' attempt to exhume the dead. They are all encouraging us to imagine a past, one in which we might place ourselves and from which we might gain comfort. And they are all testimony to the circular nature of history, which repeats itself with such regularity. However, unlike Fellowes, Donkor and Akomfrah are encouraging us to rethink these islands along more hopeful and provocative paths.