Ana Lucia Araujo. Shadows of the Slave Past: Memory, Heritage, and Slavery.

Abstract

This book offers a whirlwind tour of the public memory of slavery around the Atlantic Basin, from Gorée Island in Senegal, to the African Burial Ground in New York City, to the Church of Our Lady of the Rosary of Black Men in Salvador, Brazil, to name only a few of its many stopping points. New information and powerful insights abound on nearly every page. The book examines diverse representations of slavery and finds most of them wanting in the complexity and provocation historians might wish for. As Ana Lucia Araujo argues, the conflicting interests and perspectives of the various social actors behind monuments, museums, and other heritage sites often push the representations toward fulfilling particular political or emotional agendas and away from the goals of historical accuracy and accountability. Following on her earlier book, Public Memory of Slavery: Victims and Perpetrators in the South Atlantic (2010), and several edited volumes on related subjects, Shadows of the Slave Past: Memory, Heritage, and Slavery confirms Araujo as a leading scholar of the memory of slavery, and one with a distinctively (perhaps uniquely) broad perspective on this important subject.