Recently, there has been an outpouring of scholarship on the relationship between slavery and memory. Ana Lucia Araujo has been at the forefront of this rich interdisciplinary trend, producing several edited works and conference panels that bring together scholars from across Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Araujo has now produced her own major work on the topic, examining the conflicting debates over the memorialization of slavery and the slave trade, focusing particularly on the connections between Benin and Brazil. For Araujo, the Brazil-Benin nexus represents a unique field for testing the meanings of memory because of the persistent circulations of ideas and peoples between the two regions since the eighteenth century. She argues that despite deep and enduring South Atlantic connections, the memorialization of slavery in Brazil and Benin has nevertheless evolved in very local ways.
The first three chapters of the book are mostly introductory, reviewing well-worn subjects such as the slave trade (chapter one), the recent history of debates over the memorialization of slavery in the US, England, Senegal, and Benin (chapter two), and the history of connections between Benin and Brazil (chapter three). It is not until chapter four, nearly a third of the way into the book, that Araujo begins to move beyond the secondary literature and present her own original research. For experts, these early chapters will seem rather superfluous and at times rushed. Had Araujo edited these early chapters down to a single introductory chapter, she would have drawn greater attention to her own considerable contributions and spared her readers the task of wading through more than a hundred pages of uneven introductory material.
Setting aside these early distractions, Public Memory of Slavery has much to offer. Araujo's major contribution on the Benin side is her close historical reading of contemporary memorials – monuments, statues, paintings, castles, museums, and so on. Araujo demonstrates remarkable aptitude and creativity in teasing out the broader social and political contexts that shaped the production of public art and architecture. Araujo lays out these various interpretations and debates, revealing the deep ambivalence of these memorials. For example, the monuments of the UNESCO-funded Slave Route project in Benin are supposed to promote memories of the enduring connections between Dahomey and the African diaspora; however, monuments like the Tree of Forgetting actually imply permanent alienation and ‘identity loss’ (p. 176). Likewise, one of the monuments along the Slave Route was allegedly built by Ogoni refugees from Nigeria who were forced to labor on the project in conditions not unlike those of slaves (p. 179). Finally, the museum dedicated to Ouidah's most prolific slave trader, Francisco Félix de Souza, portrays de Souza as a great humanitarian, philanthropist, and businessman. For Araujo, the contradictory depictions of slavery that are encoded in these memorials reveal ‘plural and conflictive memories of slavery’ (p. 195).
On the Brazilian side, Araujo argues that slavery and the slave past are mostly absent from public space, found only in fleeting references, such as samba lyrics during Carnaval or Candomblé rituals. Her main point is that memories of slavery have been subsumed in the interest of ‘racial democracy’, but that celebrations of Brazil's ‘African’ past nevertheless open up space for remembering slavery. There are some slight contradictions in her analysis here. On the one hand, Araujo claims that ‘slavery heritage and the slave past’ are ‘absent from the public space’ (pp. 208, 267). On the other hand, she provides ample evidence of precisely the opposite – numerous monuments to the runaway rebel leader Zumbi, the Museu Afro-Brasileiro with its many objects directly related to slavery, the House of Benin, Salvador's pelourinho (whipping post) where Afro-Brazilian cultural groups engage in public performances, etc. The memorialization of slavery and the slave trade are not the primary impetus behind these public monuments, as is the case in the UNESCO Slave Routes project in Benin; however, just like in Benin, the representations are rife with ambiguity. They are never simply about racial democracy. After all, how can monuments to a celebrated runaway slave leader NOT invoke slavery? Likewise, how can outdoor public performances at the whipping post NOT invoke slavery? In her effort to distinguish Benin from Brazil, Araujo goes a bit too far in arguing for the absence of slavery in Brazilian memory. A more subtle approach would have recognized the very similar ‘conflictive memories’ encoded in the memorials of the two nations, each pushing in different directions – Benin ‘officially’ trying to resurrect memories through projects like the UNESCO Slave Route and Brazil ‘officially’ trying to subsume these memories through celebrations of ‘authentic’ Africa and its contributions to racial democracy. In both cases, history often interrupts sanctioned nationalist projects, revealing deeper and ever more contradictory memories of slavery among competing public and private interests, such as those that Araujo beautifully lays out in her analysis of the da Silva family museum in Benin (chapter seven).
Overall, in spite of its minor organizational and conceptual problems, Public Memory of Slavery is an important and provocative work. No other study so thoroughly chronicles the fraught and ambiguous history of memorializing slavery in the South Atlantic. Araujo's ability to ‘read’ multiple sources – both discursive and non-discursive – makes the book truly interdisciplinary in scope. It will be a crucial starting point for all future studies of slavery and memory in Benin and Brazil.
