An “Evil” West African King and the Atlantic Slave Trade
The classic comment stating that “Africans sold Africans” during the Atlantic slave trade is very common in online forums or classroom discussions. Commentators who bring this argument, in order to downplay the magnitude of…
Slavery as Caricature
This article is based on my newest book Brazil Through French Eyes: A Nineteenth-Century Artist in in the Tropics published by University of New Mexico Press (2015). French artist…
Beyond Trafficking and Slavery: The Mythology of Racial Democracy in Brazil
Brazil has been in the news a great deal of late, especially in association with the 2014 FIFA World Cup. The most popular images involve football, carnival, samba, sunny beaches,…
Slavery in the Colonial North and the Philipsburg Manor
In the last two decades scholars made significant efforts to emphasize the existence of slavery in the US north. Despite these efforts and because scholarship takes time to reach the…
The Ark of Return: UN Slavery Memorial to be Unveiled Today in New York City
Today, March 25, 2015, is the United Nations International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade, whose theme this year is Women and Slavery. As a…
In slavery matters, numbers are still relevant
Numbers are not everything, but in the case of the Atlantic slave trade they reveal the importance of the institution of slavery and the size of populations of African descent…
Finally in Brazil: Heritage Trails of the Atlantic Slave Trade
Historians Hebe Mattos and Martha Abreu published an excellent article on their weblog (it is in Portuguese and featured on this website in the menu Digital initiatives) about the new heritage trail…
A New “Slavery” Museum in the United States ?
In a famous interview of 1989, Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison pointed out that her book Beloved (1987) was a site of memory of slavery as sites of the slave…
Beyond Freedom’s Reach: A Kidnapping in the Twilight of Slavery by Adam Rothman
Adam Rothman’s new book Beyond Freedom’s Reach: A Kidnapping in the Twilight of Slavery (Harvard University Press, 2015) brings to light the experiences of enslaved men, women, and children on…
12 Years a Slave and the Problem of Depicting Human Atrocities
The problem of portraying extreme violence is part of scholarly and public debates since the end of the Second World War. After the Holocaust, whereas some scholars considered fiction an…