We are living in a moment in which slavery and its legacies are discussed more fiercely and publicly than ever before. How did we get here?
Since the late twentieth century, there has been growing attention to the history of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade. A series of commemorations since the 1990s led to the construction of monuments and memorials remembering the victims of the Atlantic slave trade in various countries across the Americas, Africa, and Europe.
In 2007, the bicentennial of the British abolition of the slave trade propelled a huge wave of conferences, new books, and documentary films focusing on British participation in the trade of enslaved Africans, and motion pictures such as Amazing Grace (2006), which praised the role of William Wilberforce in fighting against the British Atlantic slave trade. In 2012, a few years before the commemoration of the sesquicentennial of the abolition of slavery in the United States, Steven Spielberg—who had already directed the 1997 film Amistad about the titular slave rebellion—released Lincoln, which, like Amazing Grace, featured a great emancipator in the figure of President Abraham Lincoln. Despite focusing on the history of slavery, however, these films emphasized the role of white saviors, thereby neglecting the many ways enslaved people fought for their own freedom.During an era of ongoing violence against Black men and women, and following the emergence of Black Lives Matter as a global movement in 2013, new movies and television series began to focus on the lives of specific historical figures who were enslaved in the Americas. The film 12 Years a Slave (2013), which told the story of Solomon Northup, a Black man born free in the state of New York but kidnapped in Washington, DC, and sold into slavery, won several Academy Awards in 2014, including for Best Picture. In 2016, The Birth of a Nation (which despite the title is not to be confused with the 1915 white supremacist movie by D. W. Griffith) brought to the big screen the bloody slave revolt led by Nat Turner in Southampton, Virginia, in 1831.
Released in 2019, Harriet presented the story of Harriet Tubman, the enslaved woman who escaped slavery by the middle of the nineteenth century and helped emancipate many other bondspeople. The production of these movies responded to the demands of popular audiences tired of seeing the history of slavery presented through the lens of European and American men represented as heroes who abolished the Atlantic slave trade and slavery.In Brazil, the painful memory of slavery since its abolition in 1888 has remained present through religious and public festivals such as Carnaval. But despite this visibility, it is only in recent years that federal, state, and municipal governments have begun to invest in permanent markers commemorating the country’s history of slavery. Nonetheless, like the United States, Brazil also witnessed a growing number of cultural productions focusing on the country’s history of slavery. Movies such as Quilombo (1984), directed by Cacá Diegues, tells the story of the Palmares quilombo, the largest and longest-lasting Brazilian runaway slave community. In recent years, several comic books have also told the story of the states created by enslaved, freed, and free Black individuals, born in Brazil and in Africa, to resist slavery in the seventeenth century.1 Recently, African American novelist Gayl Jones published her epic novel Palmares, which also drew on the history of Brazil’s most important quilombo.2
Cultural products addressing the history of slavery are also related to the growing number of academic studies exploring new dimensions of the lives of enslaved people in the Americas. Some of these works have focused on specific biographies and how bondspeople resisted against slavery.3 Nonetheless, the impact of most work by historians of slavery has remained confined to the academy. But as slavery has become a topic of growing concern in public discussion, this landscape has dramatically altered.