Inhuman Traffick: The International Struggle against the Transatlantic Slave Trade: A Graphic History by Rafe Blaufarb and Liz Clarke (illustrator) (review)

“You’re reading a comic book about the international slave trade?” The question came from one of my favorite senior colleagues. She had spotted me toting around a copy of Rafe Blaufarb and Liz Clarke’s Inhuman Traffick: The International Struggle against the Transatlantic Slave Trade: A Graphic History. Caught off guard by her query, which I misinterpreted as snarky, I started to reply that Inhuman Traffick is actually, as its title suggests, “a graphic history” rather than “a comic book.” Leaving aside the fact that I had no clue what distinction I wanted to make with that corrective—a self-interested defense of the seriousness of graphic histories, I suppose—my colleague cut me off before I could finish my sentence: “What a great idea! Does it work?” As quickly as that, she had wrong-footed me. Anticipating scorn, I had instead encountered genuine interest. After bumbling for several beats, hemming and hawing, I finally ventured, “I think so. Maybe. I suppose I don’t really know.” My colleague considered me for a moment, apparently pondering whether she wanted to continue this conversation with a half-wit. Her mind made up, she walked away. I slinked back to my office and heaved a sigh. I had no good answer for her entirely fair question: Does it work?

Months later, I still feel a sense of lingering ambivalence about a book that is many things simultaneously, none of them precisely or exclusively an examination of the fight against the international slave trade. That said, Inhuman Traffick is, before anything else, a meditation on the production and consumption of history. Blaufarb begins the book in the manner of many comics: with an origin story, albeit in this case not for a superhero. In a section titled “The Making of Inhuman Traffick,” he recounts how the idea for this graphic history emerged out of a moment of happenstance. While doing research for another project, he tripped over the story of the Neirsée affair, an episode that began when, in 1829, the British navy seized a slave ship sailing off the west coast of Africa. This tale of the unpredictable nature of historical research should appeal to scholars familiar with the contingent quality of archival work: how we often search for one thing in document repositories, only to find something else of equal or greater value. Although I cannot know if other readers will appreciate this sort of glimpse behind the curtain, my sense is that demystifying the nature of the historian’s work is almost always a worthy goal. Tearing down rather than policing boundaries opens the field to interested parties.

Regardless, encouraged by an acquisitions editor at Oxford University Press to write a book proposal, Blaufarb recalls how he produced something that looks in some respects like a treatment for a Hollywood screenplay. Page 2, cell 1 of that document, reproduced in the introduction, features an image of enslaved people waiting in chains on a beach; the panel includes no text. Guards, armed white men, watch over the slave coffle. Torches illuminate the nighttime scene. Cell 2 on the same page cuts to the next morning as the party begins a long march inland. They arrive at their destination, a sugar plantation, in cell 3. The next panel introduces two characters, Sarah and Thomas George, slaves whose marriage was sundered by slave traders. Sarah screams and cries as she is led away from Thomas. He struggles against his chains. In the fifth panel, Sarah works in a sugar boiling room. A thought bubble provides readers a glimpse into her mind: “Will I ever see my husband again?” (xix), she asks. An anguished Thomas, working nearby, wonders in cell 6, “What are they going to do to my wife?” (xix). In this way, Blaufarb offers a sense of the mechanics...