The Slave Narrative and Filmic Aesthetics: Steve McQueen, Solomon Northup, and Colonial Violence

In recent years, the cultural and political memory of slavery has occupied an unusual prominence in public comment and debate. Various explanations for this can be found in the reemergence of calls for reparations, renewed scholarly attention to the relationship between slavery and capitalism, and several anniversaries commemorating the abolition of slavery in the Atlantic world.¹ Concomitant with this heightened awareness, there has been a dramatic upsurge in popular cinematic works of widely varying quality and ideological intent focused on black history and the legacies of slavery. In some cases, slavery has merely served as a backdrop to Hollywood action-drama—for example, Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained (2012), a stylized revenge thriller that revives the archetype of the "black cowboy"—while in others black experience is subordinate to the further mythologization of a small number of "white anti-slavery heroes," such as Abraham Lincoln and William Wilberforce; Steven Spielberg's Lincoln (2012) and Michael Apted's Amazing Grace (2006) exemplify this approach.²

Popular and critical discussion peaked in the winter of 2013-14 with the release of Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave (2013), an adaptation of Solomon Northup's 1853 account of his kidnapping, enslavement, and eventual return to liberty. This film, the first cinematic adaptation of a slave narrative, immediately garnered overwhelmingly positive reviews. Consider David Denby's assessment in The New Yorker that 12 Years a Slave is "easily the greatest feature film ever made about American slavery" and Peter Bradshaw's view that the film constitutes a triumphant "essay in outrage and injustice." 12 Years a Slave has rapidly become regarded as the definitive feature film about slavery.³ However, I argue that McQueen's 12 Years a Slave elides the formative role slavery has played in the creation of the modern self and modern world. Notwithstanding McQueen's undoubted gifts as a filmmaker and artist, his adaptation fails to register the larger meaning of slavery and implicitly presents racism as anachronistic rather than as continuing systematized oppression. This is especially ironic given that McQueen's wider oeuvre—especially his art films and video-installation work—has criticized contemporary racialized labor exploitation, its roots in colonialism, and chattel slavery's intricate relationship to capitalism.

To substantiate these claims, I proceed along two lines of inquiry. First, I compare McQueen's adaptation to Solomon Northup's text to identify systemic patterns of omission and addition in the McQueen version and consider their impact. As Stephanie Li has noted, "film adaptations of historical texts inevitably raise questions about how true they are to their original sources" (336). My objective, however, is not to find fault with McQueen's version for any lack of fidelity to the original source material. Northup's narrative is, after all, itself a mediated text: it was transcribed and edited by David Wilson, a New York lawyer, writer, and politician, to whom Northup told his story. The text is thus not without its own inconsistencies and tensions, and it cannot be uncritically treated as authentic testimony to Northup's lived experience of slavery. For example, while some critics have noted the veracity of many elements of Northup's narrative, others have drawn attention to its striking similarities with Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 anti-slavery sensation, Uncle Tom's Cabin, which was published one year before Northup's text (Eakin and Lodgson xvi).⁴ Hence, faithfulness to Northup's original should not automatically be considered a positive, nor is any lack of it necessarily detrimental. Instead, I seek to answer Li's question, "what has been lost or gained in the translation to the big screen?" (336), and address the implications of this translation.

I will also address the impact of McQueen's signature filmic language, which frequently blurs the boundary between narrative and nonnarrative form, in the context of debates over the representability of slavery. Questions centered on the ethics and aesthetics of configuring slavery take on a new pertinence given McQueen's gift for sumptuous cinematography, an art perfected over many years' collaboration with cinematographer Sean Bobbitt, and his...