12 Years a Slave
In our ’post-racial’ age the legacy of slavery lives on, by Paul Gilroy
The controversy around Steve McQueen’s movie shows that, rather than fade away, racism has proved durable and potent
▻http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/10/12-years-a-slave-mcqueen-film-legacy-slavery
Any residual effects of past inequality are effectively privatised – seen only on an individual scale. If you cannot succeed in contemporary conditions, that failure can only be a result of your own shortcomings. The newly multicultural market cannot be bucked; and slavery, though not yet quite forgotten, is entirely overshadowed by the heroic story of its abolition by the morally charged forces of economic progress.
Steve McQueen’s new film, 12 Years a Slave, contests this ground and returns us abruptly to the problems of race and human freedom. It revives the righteous agenda of 19th-century abolitionism and asks what might happen if we employ the recent history of racial slavery as a lens through which our contemporary predicament is considered? What understanding of freedom, of literacy, creativity and legality does a reflection on that archive now yield?
Le film de Steve Macqueen sur le site du Guardian :
▻http://www.theguardian.com/film/movie/156376/12-years-a-slave
