(Re)Mediated History: 12 Years a Slave

12 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 halfminute, 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

If this sounds like intellectual elitism, then let me hasten to add that even among the most educated classes, few seem to know much about slavery, though most are at least aware of the limitations of their knowledge. Central to the story of this film’s inception, after all, is the account of Steve McQueen’s discovery of Solomon Northup’s book—a book not at all obscure to anyone at all familiar with nineteenth-century African-American history and literature. As most now know, Twelve Years a Slave was something of a sensation when it was published, connecting with the work of Harriet Beecher Stowe (to whom the book was dedicated) to press the case against the continuation of slavery in the US. But while Northup’s account is in many ways singular, Northup was hardly alone in providing vivid testimony of the realities of the system of slavery. In a study that was essential—indeed, foundational—in inspiring and guiding serious scholarly interest in slave narratives, Marion Wilson Starling provided in 1946 “a bibliographic guide to the location of 6006 narrative records,” records that “extend from 1703–1944” (xxvi). These records, Starling notes, “are to be discovered in judicial records, broadsides, private printings, abolitionist newspapers and volumes, scholarly journals, church records, unpublished collections, and a few regular publications” (xxvi). Included among those narratives are the book-length autobiographies and biographies that have been celebrated for their historical importance, including works by Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and Northup, among many others.¹

With such a rich field of testimony available, we should not still need the shock of recognition that seems in many ways to be the main point of 12 Years a Slave, but that is where we are—still, after all these years. And that is where we were, too, when Northup’s narrative was first published. Nineteenth-century Americans also knew about slavery, but, on the whole, that knowledge did not inspire any serious concerns or action to end the practice. Of the many slave narratives published before the Civil War, many were devoted to making the realities of slavery clear to readers who found it all too easy to accept the existence of slavery as a fact of life—a fact that was, for many Americans, conveniently remote geographically, if always discomfortingly close economically and politically. By relating the stories of their experiences under slavery, those who had managed to achieve that tenuous...