Part of review forum on “Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery.”

More than ever, we need histories about the catastrophic effects of the transatlantic slave trade. As it becomes easier to deny the past and its legacy, we need documentation and a narrative of the past that we can digest and share. Ana Lucia Araujo’s Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery does much of this crucial work through meticulous research and sweeping coverage of both sides of the Atlantic. Eschewing the Anglo-centric and US focus of many overview texts, Araujo’s tome highlights Brazil and Latin America. She covers the entire span of transatlantic slave trade from enslavement in Africa through to the afterlives of slavery and the implications in the present. Yet, she manages to personalize many chapters with stories of formerly enslaved people, some of whom were born on the continent. The goal of the book is to show how “people racialized as Black … construct[ed] the hemisphere we know today as the Americas” (18). Arguably, Black people directly and indirectly constructed the world.

The seventeen chapters, introduction, and epilogue move somewhat chronologically coalescing around five features of enslavement and emancipation. They are, first, enslavement in Africa; second, the linked inconceivable yet profoundly formative, Atlantic crossing and spaces where enslaved people were exchanged; third, violence of enslavement in the Americas; fourth, enslaved people’s strategies for enduring the horrors; and, fifth, the fraught, often incomplete act of emancipation. Many of the themes are covered in three chapters. Five chapters explore the ways enslaved people persevered by creating kin, forming families, transforming social practices, and sometimes joining a band of insurgents. Titled parts could have clarified the arc of varied experiences of slavery. However, without section titles the traumatic experiences bleed into one another as people lived them in different times and places.

Araujo also reveals a multidirectional Black Atlantic world. Enslaved Africans were brought to the Iberian peninsula in the fifteenth century and some participated in early expeditions to the Americas. In the eighteenth century, enslavers traveled to Great Britain and France with enslaved people to serve them or learn a trade. But, sometimes, enslaved people made lives for themselves in Europe. During the American Revolution, Black people fought on the British side because of the promise of emancipation. Upon Britain’s defeat, they were dispersed to London and Anglophone colonies like Nova Scotia. Some of them eventually participated in the founding of Sierra Leone. These stories show the myriad ways Black people were mobile, even when they could not control their movements.

When enslaved people tried to take control of their movement and their bodies or when they transformed language, meanings of family, religion, language, can we grapple with that dynamic beyond the trope of resistance? Tina Campt and Saidiya Hartman theorize the practice of refusal in response to anti-Black violence and dispossession in contemporary times. Jessica Marie Johnson analyzes refusal as a practice of freedom during slavery because freedom is something made, not given (Jessica Marie Johnson, Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World [University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022], 167–71). The fundamental definition of refusal developed by Campt and others still seems apt for what enslaved people did under the most impossible circumstances. Campt defines refusal as “a rejection of the status quo as livable and the creation of possibility in the face of negation i.e. a refusal to recognize a system that renders you fundamentally illegible and unintelligible … using negation as a generative and creative source of disorderly power to embrace the power of living otherwise”; (Tina Campt, “Black Visuality and the Practice of Refusal,” Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 29 [2019]: 83). Refusal was not only escape or resistance, it was also the way enslaved people created and curated practices, relationships, and networks by them and for them.

My question about the term “resistance” relates to my struggle with language as an author and teacher. This comprehensive book can help us teach, write, and learn Atlantic world slavery in ways that emphasize the human despite the shackles. However, I find some of the chapter titles startling. In some cases, could different words have underscored humanity? Rather than “catching people,” the enslavement process was how people were stolen. The chapter on “discarded lives” discussed the specter of death. I appreciated the chapter on women sustaining life in the city. However, it was not just that mothers were “in shackles,” motherhood was distorted. Araujo is sensitive to language in many ways. As authors we must remain cognizant of the violence that words do to people in the past and how they affect the reader. As historians we also often pack too much detail when we introduce historical figures and events. The cascade of names and places is overwhelming without constant reference maps. Also, what if details about enslavers were relegated to footnotes?

So, I would like to know more about word choice and the decision to write the “big book” in a time of texting and TikTok. In some ways we need everything in one place, but the book is also not meant to be an encyclopedia. This book amazes us with its depth and, at times, a compelling turn of phrase. It will be read by the many who grasp its importance. The continuing challenge will be helping others understand why they should read it. This book is not a book only about Black people for Black people or those interested in that history. The impact of this history has shaped all of our lives. This is a book for and about all of us.