There are a number of ways to encounter the memory of slavery in Brazil. So many traces of slavery's legacy are present in social relationships and ways of thinking—both in practices and in things, whether in institutions, public places, or our everyday workplaces—that they become invisible. The same can be said for the South Atlantic, where the presence of slavery's past, while easily visible, is also completely hidden. Ana Lucia Araujo's edited volume African Heritage and Memories of Slavery in Brazil and the South Atlantic World points out exactly this.A fundamental question that runs through this timely book regards the legitimacy of the various narratives about slavery. After all, who actually wrote the stories of slavery, given that enslaved people and their immediate descendants only very rarely left written accounts about their experiences? Giving voice to enslaved people and their immediate descendants through diverse sources and sites is one of the challenges of the volume, a collection that aims to problematize an imagined African heritage in Brazil. This heritage is claimed as a mark of identity, expressed in both practices and materiality. Traces and strategies to conceal and display become the memory of slavery, memory here thought of as a present-day work and also a right, as something that can help heal wounds and overcome trauma. These memories can be contradictory, ambiguous, and selective, according to the subjects who construct them.The field of research on slavery in Brazil and the transatlantic African slave trade was renewed with the incorporation of studies that consider the legacy of slavery. This volume is a valuable contribution to debates that were initiated in past studies of memory and heritage, and it suggests a path for reformulating theoretical problems around sensitive pasts, forgiveness, and reparations. The public memory of slavery is the common thread that links the chapters and gives a unifying theme to the book, which is characterized by a wide range of perspectives, subjects, sources, themes, and experiences. The volume also incorporates different research techniques, including ethnography, a focus on the longue durée, oral history, and document research in archives and museums. Photography, prints, urban space, textual documentation, propaganda leaflets, objects and collections, displays, ritual practices, festivals and celebrations, depositions, and testimonies make up the robust empirical material gathered here. The themes, temporalities, and subjects discussed in these essays are not meant to offer answers to the meanings and destiny of this African heritage imagined in Brazil but rather to highlight the many ways in which it gets defined and transformed.The circulation of objects, ideas, and people that simultaneously spread values and prejudices is explored in photographs of Afro-Brazilians and prints of public punishment and martyrdom, works that consecrated concepts of race and beauty and disseminated moral values under the aegis of European civilization. We also see the relations between colonialism, patrimonialization, and decolonization in chapters that discuss museum exhibits as privileged sites for the production of public memories. The disparity between individual memories and public memory in Angola puts face-to-face both the historical and contemporary concepts of slavery. In another chapter, the biography of objects provides a methodological approach that breaks with the aesthetic and ahistorical gaze that had assured African art a place in the showcases of the great museums of colonialism.Urban space is also explored as a site of dispute in the production of public memories. Wars over memory and controversies over what to remember and what to forget—as well as the subjects of these debates—are analyzed in the context of areas devoted to cultural heritage in the cities of Rio de Janeiro, Salvador, and Luanda. As some authors of this volume problematize the imagined African heritage as the memory of slavery and the African diaspora in Brazil or Angola, the reader is called to acknowledge that the right to memory involves the political struggle for the right to the city.Although academic language prevails throughout the volume, some chapters may appeal to a wider audience interested in reflecting on African heritage in Brazil and its global context. A controversy about the ambivalence of the gaze—particularly concerning the violence of slavery—runs through the work and divides the authors. The volume poses questions about who decides how to represent violence in the narratives of slavery, and according to what evidence (or lack of evidence). Does explicitness about this violence empower the aggressor? Does it terrorize the victim? Does it lead to anachronistic readings? Is it a case of private memories being exposed to the public? The volume expects its readers to feel mobilized to take a position on this issue. As Marc Bloch has already shown, history is imprinted on the landscape. It is our job to forge the tools to interpret these marks. Undoubtedly, this book contributes to that project.