(Re)Mediated History: 12 Years a Slave
2014; Oxford University Press; Volume: 26; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/alh/aju022
ISSN1468-4365
Autores Tópico(s)Colonialism, slavery, and trade
Resumo12 Years a Slave is a film that calls, vividly, for its proper context, the historical awareness and understanding by which its representation of slavery might be justly valued. The essays gathered here respond to that call purposefully by directing us to the various histories involved in this most central but still strangely unknown presence in American history. While it might seem reasonable to say, echoing Miriam Thaggert in her thoughtful essay, that “most Americans do know about slavery” (333), anyone with any experience with nonacademic audiences or acquaintances will likely suspect that most Americans know about slavery in roughly the same way they know about, say, evolution. They've heard of it, but they cannot talk about it with any confidence for more than about a half-minute, and some are ready to virtually deny its existence altogether by echoing whatever they've heard about a benevolent institution that ultimately brought many people into the fold of what many white Americans take uncritically as Christianity and civilization. Missing from such knowledge about slavery is any understanding of the systemic operations of slavery that shaped fundamentally virtually every aspect of American life, including the institutional and theological operations of Christianity and the economic and legal practices fundamental to American notions of civilization. Perhaps what is most striking about the film under discussion here is that it is still tasked to do roughly the same work that Solomon Northup tried to accomplish in the book Twelve Years a Slave, first published in 1853—that is, to effect a kind of historical eruption, an account of history (individually authenticated but shared by many) inexplicable by the usual assumptions about the social order.
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