Slavery

Crystal Kornickey holds up casts of her hands in a studio at the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, S.C., on Thursday, Feb. 16, 2023. She is one of 36 people whose hands will be cast in bronze for a memorial to the likely enslaved people discovered in an unmarked burial ground. In recent decades, advances in DNA research have allowed scientists to use ancient remains and peer into the lives of long-dead people. In Charleston, that's meant tracing some…

Forced labour, bonded labour and forced child labour affect millions of people worldwide. Credit: Shutterstock Even though the practice of slavery has been formally abolished, an estimated 49.6 million people are in forced labor globally, a quarter of which are children. Modern slavery is an umbrella term that refers to situations…

The past returns in all its ugliness and torment in Sylvaine Dampierre’s rigorous documentary which challenges the preconceived notion that the march of time automatically parallels the march of progress. In 1842 in the Guadeloupe archipelago, an enslaved man named Sébastien was accused of sorcery by his master, and left to die in his cell. Centuries later, workers at a sugar factory in Marie-Galante, the island where Sébastien died, read out transcipts from the trial surrounding his death.In opening a portal to the…

Credit: Delivering Effective, Long-Term Support and Integration for People with Lived Experience of Modern Slavery (2023). Research from the University of Liverpool, which proves that long term emotional support for survivors of modern slavery is vital, is being used to urge policy makers to provide more support, pointing to the success of an initiative from the charity Causeway. …

Eleanor Shearer’s propulsive debut opens with an enslaved woman, Rachel, running. The novel is set in the Caribbean around the time of the Slavery Abolition Act, a move by Britain to emancipate its slaves that left them bound to their masters in enforced “apprenticeships” that were not much better than slavery itself.Rachel is fleeing a plantation in Barbados, where the master tells the slaves that they are now “free” but also that they “cannot leave”. “What is freedom?” Rachel asks as she runs. Thus she sets in motion…

Antoine Fuqua’s “Emancipation” is yet another movie about slavery. Our Black colleagues express a resounding fatigue with films on Black oppression and triumph. Watching these films is stressful, and people grieve those ancestors brutalized for profit and pleasure. But the main reason these movies drain so many people is that they risk rendering the past as over and offer only salvation as a route to survival. Critical portrayals of U.S. history are timely: The Supreme Court is debating outlawing affirmative action, and…

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse LoughreyGet our The Life Cinematic email for freeWill Smith horrified his daughter Willow on the latest episode of Red Table Talk.On Wednesday (14 December), Smith and his children Willow, 22, Jaden, 24, and Trey Smith, 30, took over Jada Pinkett Smith’s Facebook Watch series.During the episode, Smith opened up to his children about the “gruelling and transformative” process of filming his newest movie, Emancipation.The Oscar-winning…

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse LoughreyGet our The Life Cinematic email for freeAntoine Fuqua was just a child when he was shot on the streets of Pittsburgh. But the memory is spectacularly vivid. “I was 15,” says the 56-year-old director of the Oscar-winning Training Day. “I remember running through an alleyway and I remember it raining and I remember hearing a voice say ‘run’. I don’t know where it came from. But I remember every detail of those moments. Every…

When Will Smith made a guest appearance last week on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, there was no avoiding The Slap – his eruption of anger at comedian Chris Rock during the Oscars. But first, host Trevor Noah wanted to talk about Smith’s latest film: “You play one of the most famous unknown people … from America’s history.”That person is today known as “whipped Peter” or by his given name as an enslaved man, Gordon. A photograph showing his scarred back after his escape from a Louisiana plantation in the 1860s became…

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse LoughreyGet our The Life Cinematic email for freeJoey McFarland, a producer of the film Emancipation, has apologised after showing a real photo of an enslaved man at the red carpet premiere. In the Antoine Fuqua-directed historical film, Will Smith plays a man named Peter, who battles through the wild terrain of Louisiana to escape enslavement.Smith’s character was inspired by a memorable photo of an enslaved man commonly called…