“Silence Louder than Any Noise”: Caryl Phillips’s Crossing the River and Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave

Abstract

Caryl Phillips and Steve McQueen, inspired respectively by John Newton and Solomon Northup, sound history to conjure up the world that enforced silence to wield absolute power over Black lives. Defamiliarisation and distancing feature among the narrative techniques used to revisit the diasporic past. While Caryl Phillips interweaves fiction and historical sources, the elaborate staging and framing techniques of Steve McQueen expose the roots of racialisation by offering a vision of the experience of enslavement through moments that could be described as filmed performances. What interests both authors are the inner workings of slavery as a repressive institution based upon the silencing of slaves and the tacit acquiescence of all.