Public Memory of Slavery: Victims and Perpetrators in the South Atlantic (review)

Ana Lucia Araujo's work has its moments of reinforcing and redirecting several discourses that are quite important to modern and postmodern intellectual conceptualizations. However, for the most part, those moments are fragmentary and narrative, more anecdotal than analytical. To be sure, Araujo's work is important, as witnessed by what it does and what it evokes. What it does is evidenced in her introduction and the book's first and last chapters.

The introduction attempts a juxtaposition of memory and history and serves as a reference to the book's title and thesis. Yet, it overlooks the ways in which many contemporary historians begin their work: from the vantage of memory. They look for the sources closest to the event on the assumption—true or not—that those sources carry the greatest validity. Their examinations of the oral, graphic, plastic, photographic, video-graphic, and now, digital records, pose the same series of critiques that have always confounded and guided historians. So here, the question of memory as a historical source—as history—is moot.

The attempted juxtaposition leads to a strength of this volume. Chapter one engages critical questions of historiography and methodology that have been central to shaping the study of Atlantic World slavery and colonization, African slavery, precolonial African histories, and studies of the African diaspora. The chapter reminds us of the ongoing debate between various schools of historical thought and the struggle of each school to represent "legitimate" and "official" history. As Araujo points out, if only in passing, all the historiographic wrangling is about politics, and hence policy and political economy.

However, the middle chapters do not carry sufficient weight to support a thesis that proposes a more holistic conceptualization of South Atlantic slavery and colonization. These chapters do not sustain analytical arguments that center on a sense of African agency as slaves and slavers. Nor do they broaden the conceptual parameters that make the shared memories of slavery and colonization integral to the construction of Atlantic World histories and critiques of modernity and postmodernity.

The final chapters, however, provide a sense of where a work like this might go. The "Legacy of Francisco Félix de Souza" (chapter six) and "Forgetting and Remembering the Slave Past" (chapter seven) show where a more nuanced and focused analytical critique might have led. Chapter six does more than simply pose the question of whether a "Brazilian" (read "white") slaver in Benin was the dominant figure of his era. Questions are posed subtextually about his colleagues and partners, particularly those who were African. These questions begin to rewrite histories of slavery and colonization on both sides of the Atlantic.

The questions posed by the slaver De Souza are expanded in the examination of two households of former slaves in Benin and Brazil. The treatment of these two families underscores the dynamism of slavery and colonization as processes that have many, many actors. The theoretical strand is the concept of agency, particularly among those thought to be without power. The chapter works the historicity of the actors into a guide for arguing public policy by declaring and articulating identity and its forms of representation.

Paradoxically, the most thoughtful and analytically provocative elements of the work highlight its shortcomings. It might be argued that the work attempts too much: that it is two or three works rather than one. Araujo has brought out the possibility of a work on theory and methodology that raises very serious questions and opens insight into public history. Another volume, equally theoretical, would focus on epistemology and historiography—on the questions of what constitutes history and why. This volume would seriously consider memory as a historical source, precisely and most powerfully because of where Araujo has situated it: among slaves and their descendants. A third volume might consist of the discrete historical analysis that could be had in the examination of the three families...