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Pictures and power: imaging and imagining Frederick Douglass, 1818–2018

interest to many scholars of slavery, especially those who are grappling with the ways in which slavery’s legacy continues to affect the present. For example, Rachel Sarah O’Toole considers theways inwhichCarlos Ferrand’s 1982filmCimarrones seeks to uncover the ‘forgotten’ history of slavery in Peru, but in doing so erases the role of the historian in interpreting archival evidence. Ferrand, according to O’Toole, used historical events to ‘bestow authority’ (p. 61) onto his film, but rather than present the facts, he instead uses the counter-memory of slavery to comment on contemporary Peruvian revolutionary and anti-racist politics. Similarly, Case départ, a French comedy film from 2011, uses a timetravel motif to teach its black protagonists important lessons about their identity in twenty-first-century France by transplanting them to eighteenth-century Martinique. As Gladys M. Francis explains, this film is not ‘about slavery’ (p. 216) nor about the history of the French colonial Caribbean, but rather uses slavery to explore black identity in a Western context. In his essay on Cobra Verde (Werner Herzog, 1987), Rudyard Alcocer builds on the questions he raises in the introduction about what is necessary to define a film as being ‘about slavery’ and ‘how best to represent... slavery as it existed in the Americas’ (p. 104). Must these films be historically accurate? Should they represent slavery from the perspective of the enslaved? Who is best placed to express the ‘truth’ about slavery? These are questions picked up in the concluding essay by Kristen Block, which discusses the challenges and rewards of using film when teaching slavery. Block convincingly argues that changing cinematic representations over time can be used to illustrate the historiographical shifts in our understandings of slavery, and that films (chosen wisely) can also increase students’ emotional understanding of the experience of enslavement and its legacy. The collection ends with an appendix listing 69 additional films about slavery, from the earliest cinematic productions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Porter, 1903) to television mini-series like Underground and La esclava blanca (both 2016). (It would perhaps have been useful to include the films discussed in the collection in this list to make it more comprehensive.) That a third of the films listed were released since 2000 demonstrates the continuing public interest in films about slavery. This collection is thus a welcome addition to the growing scholarship on the ongoing phenomenon of representations of slavery in the Americas through film.