While there is much to praise in film, omissions from Northup's original memoir miss opportunity to break Hollywood mould Beta
By Carole Boyce Davies
theguardian.com, Friday 10 January 2014
The legendary African-American historian John Hope Franklin used to say
that black resistance in stories of enslavement tended to be erased in
favour of the narratives of domination and degradation. Yet scholars
tell us that while there was often acquiescence under the inhumane
conditions of American slavery, there was also always resistance.
Take Harriet Tubman, who was born into slavery but deliberately
escaped – and went on to help many more people to freedom. "There are
two things I've got a right to and these are death or liberty … one or
the other I mean to have," Tubman said. "No one will ever take me back
alive; I shall fight for my liberty."
But this resistence is almost entirely missing from Steve McQueen's film 12 Years A Slave,
which opens in the UK today. While the 1854 memoir by Solomon Northup,
on which the film is based, describes several stories of attempted
escapes and fighting back on the part of the enslaved, none of these
appear in the film. It does show Northup's emotional resistance to his
enslavement and there is one scene where he fights back against the man
to whom he was mortgaged, but nobody else in the film seems to be
allowed that.
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