Ana Lucia Araujo offers a much needed transnational and comparative view of the complicated public debates and processes surrounding the memorialisation of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade in the latter half of the twentieth century. In Shadows of the Slave Past, she argues that the inherent complexities of both topics have made it difficult for various “social actors that lead these initiatives” to accurately convey their “multidimensional” aspects to the community at large. When a certain perspective dominates public opinion, it serves to minimise competing voices and “hinders the emergence of possible initiatives that could more effectively address and perhaps contribute to healing the wounds of the past” (8).

In six thematic chapters, Araujo is primarily concerned with three categories of memorialisation initiatives: slave trade heritage sites, monuments and memorials, and museums and museum exhibitions. Chapter 1 explains how writings and images produced by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British abolitionists frequently decontextualised various aspects of enslavement in West Africa and West Central Africa. By minimising the impact of intra-African warfare and the role of African agency on the Atlantic slave trade, such accounts continue to grossly misinform modern public opinion.

Chapter 2 focuses on the creation of slave departure sites in West Africa as tied to larger Holocaust memorialisation endeavours in Europe. To demonstrate such connections Araujo employs the concept of “multidirectional memory”, which Michael Rothberg characterises “as subject to ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing; as productive and not privative”.Footnote ¹ While the majority of slaves bound for the Americas left West Central African ports in modern day Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Angola, complex issues ranging from conflicting local and regional histories to chronic warfare and instability have long impeded public initiatives to remember their slave pasts. Comparatively fewer numbers departed from Cape Coast and Elmina in Ghana, Ouidah in Republic of Benin, and Gorée Island’s “House of Slaves” in Senegal. Yet these same West African ports gained “prominence and popularity” from a potent combination of international tourism and media coverage afforded to visiting celebrities and global political leaders. Araujo gives extended discussion to the House of Slaves as a blatant instance of public dialogue “rather marked by present political issues than by concerns with historical accuracy” (60).

Shifting her focus to the Americas, the author takes a comparative view of the United States and Brazil. Here Araujo suggests much of the physical evidence in many urban locales that imported slaves via the Atlantic slave trade remained largely “concealed” from public eyes in both countries until the 1990s. Following the Cold War’s end in the US and recent demise of Brazil’s longstanding military dictatorship, these governments had few options but to publicly recognise slavery’s long shadow. Black activists and scholars worked tirelessly for public support as archaeological discoveries revealed irrefutable and highly-visible proof of slavery’s importance in crucial public spaces. The African Burial Ground in New York City and Rio de Janeiro’s Valongo Wharf are perhaps the best-known examples of major sites of slavery that created seismic shifts in national attention. Compared to the US, however, few such sites exist in modern Brazil. Locals engage in what Araujo calls “memory replacement” or the creation of alternate sites of remembrance and historical legend, which is “an effective way of addressing the lack of official initiatives publicly recognizing the sites where slaves were disembarked and kept before being sold” (104).

Some of the book’s more fruitful comparative illustrations involve what the author calls the “Invisible Sites of Slave Labor”, the subject of Chapter 4. At former plantations and public buildings, general audiences in both countries often see very different portraits of slavery and slave life. As Araujo shows, US sites frequently depict affluent slaveholder lifestyles but minimise most discussion of daily slave life under elite rule. The contribution of slave labour has achieved some recognition in regards to building of public structures, though it remains ineffectively presented and its impact otherwise “diluted”, according to Araujo (126). Brazilian examples offer sharp points of contrast. She argues that “most heritage sites and museum exhibitions” throughout Brazil flatly contradict the image of a slave system as comparatively “more humane”, a notion popularised in the influential scholarship of Gilberto Freyre (and later propagated by the work of Frank Tannenbaum and others). Victimisation remains the predominant theme of these depictions, in the author’s view, and they continue to deny the notion of slave agency.

In the US and Brazil, slavery’s abolishment represents a pivotal historical moment in the collective conscience of both nations. In Chapter 5 Araujo examines the processes of memorialisation primarily through the so-called “Great Emancipators” in historical memory, President Abraham Lincoln and Princess Isabel Cristina of Brazil. While the chapter adds nothing to the exhaustive coverage long afforded to Lincoln and his Emancipation Proclamation, it offers an excellent look at changing perceptions of the princess in Brazilian culture. In most public discussions over the last 150 years, the extent of Lincoln’s role in abolishing slavery has increased substantially. Such emphasis leaves little room or willingness to publicly recognize the enormous personal struggles of the enslaved populations to end the institution of chattel slavery in the US. Meanwhile, the contributions of Africans and Afro-Brazilians to bringing about slavery’s end in Brazil are now more widely recognized than those previously ascribed to elites. The change is, in Araujo’s estimation, due to a combination of socio-political realities and persistent activism in the decades following the demise of Brazil’s military dictatorship.

Returning to themes touched on in an earlier chapter, the work closes with an examination of broader memorialisation trends sweeping the Atlantic world. Monuments erected in Europe honouring Jewish resistance movements during World War II made powerful statements about the heroic qualities of all oppressed peoples fighting for their freedom. Such symbols easily translated with the transnational struggles for civil rights, assorted independence movements in Latin America and the Caribbean, and a maturing body of studies keenly focused on slave resistance and slavery. Araujo sees a public shift in the Americas—the Caribbean, particularly—as part of an overall increase in celebrations and public tributes to slave rebels, warriors, and maroons. The maroon is a particularly striking example of strength and defiance for populations wrestling with colonialism’s legacies, and it bolsters the “political agendas” of new governments as they aim “to assert their political, economic, and cultural independence vis-à-vis the former European colonial powers and the United States” (207).

Documenting “how post-slave societies remember, display, reenact, conceal, and forget the unpleasant stages of their involvement in the Atlantic slave trade and slavery” (211) is an enormous task for any one volume. Given the sheer scope of the project, the narrative is understandably thin at times. In her attempts to show interconnectedness with the varied movements and processes in disparate places, for example, one finds few vital links to the Caribbean throughout much of the story told herein. These caveats aside, Araujo has succeeded in producing a highly informative, thought provoking, and an ultimately timely work that is recommended as a well-conceived introduction to the topic.