Celluloid Chains: Slavery in the Americas through Film ed. by Rudyard J. Alcocer, Kristen Block, and Dawn Duke (review)

This volume is a collection of 16 original essays on films made between 1975 and 2015 about slavery in the US, Latin America, and the Caribbean. It includes an introductory essay and an appendix on films about slavery The volume is arranged chronologically, following the films' production dates. Some of the films are obscure, but others are quite well known, for example, the Cuban film El otro Francisco, the US television series Roots, the Hollywood films 12 Years A Slave and Django in Chains, and the Brazilian film Quilombo.

Rudyard J. Alcocer's introductory essay uses the title and subtitle of the book to introduce the book's broad themes—slavery in the Americas, history and memory, fact and representation, and film as a storytelling medium. He also gives a synopsis of each essay, which together represent "disciplinary diversity" (xxxi), though the contributors' backgrounds are uniformly in languages and literatures, area studies, and history.

The essays are of high quality with informed perspectives and critiques and thought-provoking insights into particular films and the themes that emerge from the study of slavery more generally. Each essay touches on multiple issues and some overarching ones, such as the relationship between history and representation, race, and slavery narratives. But some themes stand out in individual essays: film production and contemporary society (Paulk on the Cuban film El otro Francisco; Norrell on the US television series Roots), race (O'Toole on the Peruvian film Cimarrones, Badiane on the Cuban film Roble de olor), memory (López-Calvo on the Brazilian film Quilombo), representation (Alcocer on Herzog's Cobra Verde), the visual and aesthetics (Osborn on the Cuban film Cecilia, Piñuelas on the Danish director Lars Von Trier's US film Manderlay), agency (Curtius on the Martinican film Passage du milieu), film theory (González-Vélez on the Puerto Rican film El Cimarrón), comedy (Francis on the French film about colonial Martinique, Case départ), history (Gabriel on Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained), stereotypes and tropes (Arbino on the Dutch/ Curaçaoan film Tula: The Revolt), the body and gender (Hobson on Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave), and freedom (Williams on the Canadian production The Book of Negroes). There is also a final essay (Block) on teaching about slavery in the classroom.

The volume's biggest drawback is the way in which the essays are organized. Instead of grouping them thematically or by geographical region, the editors arranged them in simple chronological fashion. Because the topic is so vast, the history so complex, and the geography spread so wide, the organization does not provide a sense of intertextuality or inter-film dialogue—how films about slavery as a whole stand together, how the films and filmmakers (some of whom are not from the regions the films refer to) interrelate, how they are situated in their respective national and regional contexts, or what overarching themes emerge from studying films about slavery in a particular region. Because of the complexity of the information and the way it is presented, one therefore does not come away with a good overview of the main issues or of cross-cutting themes.

Even though the introductory essay and some of the individual essays try to synthesize, it is perhaps inevitable that in a volume of such breadth and detail no single essay could accomplish this. A more detailed index would have helped, but the index is surprisingly thin and consists mostly of names. Although some themes, such as history and memory do appear, others, such as gender, do not. In addition, for a volume about film, analysis of the visual—which also does not appear in the index—is somewhat lacking. Only one or two essays are oriented toward the visual, and most contain few clips or other illustrations. This makes many of the essays...