Shadows of the Slave Past : Memory, Heritage, and Slavery

Over the last twenty years, the Atlantic slave past has received increased attention in the Americas, Europe, and Africa. The rise of the public memory of slavery resulted from the political struggle of social actors fighting for social justice or seeking to occupy the public arena, sometimes in order to obtain political gains. Relying on transnational and comparative examination of monuments, memorials, and museums located in various regions of the Americas, Europe, and Africa, this book seeks to understand how slavery and the Atlantic slave trade are remembered, commemorated, and "heritagized" in the public space.

This book is a transnational and comparative study examining the processes that led to the memorialization of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade in the second half of the twentieth century. Araujo explores numerous kinds of initiatives such as monuments, memorials, and museums as well as heritage sites. By connecting different projects developed in various countries and urban centers in Europe, Africa, and the Americas during the last two decades, the author retraces the various stages of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery including the enslavement in Africa, the process of confinement in slave depots, the Middle Passage, the arrival in the Americas, the daily life of forced labor, until the fight for emancipation and the abolition of slavery. Relying on a multitude of examples from the United States, Brazil, and the Caribbean, the book discusses how different groups and social actors have competed to occupy the public arena by associating the slave past with other human atrocities, especially the Holocaust. Araujo explores how the populations of African descent, white elites, and national governments, very often carrying particular political agendas, appropriated the slave past by fighting to make it visible or conceal it in the public space of former slave societies.