Paths of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Interactions, Identities, and ...

created at a time when many in the United States—even more than today—were struggling with or hiding from the troubled legacy of the country’s Afro-Atlantic slave pas

In chapter 11, Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie’s “Slaves Supplicant and Slaves Triumphant: The Middle Passage of an Abolitionist Icon” proposes an alternative dialectic between the kneeling slave image and postabolition representations of former slaves at various times and places all over the Atlantic world. The chapter examines a transition in the visual representation of the slave from the beseeching captive to the grateful ex-slave. Kerr-Ritchie argues that the popular visual image of slave supplication was crucial in constructing the metaphorical image of ex-slaves’ gratitude for their freedom. Even though visual depictions of heroic and triumphant slaves also exist—challenging the more troubling images of supplicant and grateful slaves—representations of enslaved men and women as passive victims are still disseminated via websites, textbooks, scholarly book covers, academic journal covers, conference posters, and public monuments. Through a well-studied genealogy of the images of supplicant, grateful, and triumphant slaves, this chapter deepens readers’ understanding of the Atlantic visual culture of slavery.

In the twelfth and final chapter of this book, “Picturing Homes and Border Crossings: The Slavery Trope in Films of the Black Atlantic,” Awam Amkpa and Gunja SenGupta locate Black Atlantic modes of filmic history-telling within the borders of mixing among local memories, national histories, and pan-African sensibilities. These modes emerge in the representations of slavery in three films: Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (United States, 1991), Euzhan Palcy’s Rue Cases-Nègres (Martinique, 1983), and Ousmane Sembène’s Ceddo (Senegal, 1977). The authors argue that on discursive and stylistic levels, these films creolize the medium of film in the same way that transatlantic slavery and colonialism hybridized the languages of Europe, Africa, and the Americas. The chapter sheds light on the ways Afro-Atlantic directors fragment and transform traditions into empowering narratives of diasporic history.

Challenging the prevailing Atlantic-world scholarship that usually focuses on economic exchanges and demographic data, the slaving