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Slavery in the Americas carries a deep legacy of European-imposed racialist class stratification, subsequent anti-Black degradation, erosion of bodily autonomy and the unquestionable reliance on economic exploitation.
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Generations of inequitable power relations set a precedent for privileging white land-owning elites, whose plantations were the site of settler-colonizing agendas of brutal resource extraction at the expense of indigeneity and Black cultural sovereignty. The capitalization off Black slave labor occurred whether toiling in the cotton fields of the southern United States, or in sugar plantations generally associated with Cuba.
Free Black labor would be the foundation for establishing a well-defined, privileged, capitalist exploiter class and the grotesquely subjugated underclass of African chattel in the United States, the Caribbean and Latin America. The slave economy would even propel the United States to become the global capitalist hegemon it is today. Conceptualizing the historic reality of slavery provides the backdrop for understanding its artistic representation and is the basis of my comparative analysis.
Capturing the artistic representation of this massively important era in human history provides insight into collective consciousness, societal ethos, and offer disparate ideations around Black subjectivity. That is what I have gleaned seeking to analyze three popular depictions of slavery whether in cinema or television from Cuba and the United States. The Cuban slave narrative selections are “El Otro Francisco” (The Other Francisco, 1975) and “La Ultima Cena” (The Last Supper, 1976). The U.S. slave narrative depiction is “Roots: The Saga of an American Family” (1977). Two depictions are adaptations from books of the same title.
What are some underlying themes slave portrayals seek to have uncovered? How do these depictions speak to larger questions around governmentality, political economy and internationalism? What does this mean for resistance and counter-hegemonic discourses? These are some questions I want to explore.
“El Otro Francisco” (1975) and “La Ultima Cena”
My exploration into slavery depictions begins with Cuban film “El Otro Francisco,” which is an adaptation of a 1839 novel by Anselmo Suarez y Romero.
What I found unique about this adaptation was that the film served as a Marxist critique of the literature it is based upon. The purpose of the critique was to emphasize the importance of conceptualizing slavery through a lens of political economy, rife with class antagonisms as opposed to idealism or liberal romanticism.
This informed my appreciation for what the film was trying to do-get us to challenge our imaginary, thus challenge the idealistic iteration of slavery the novel perpetuates. Idealized notions of slavery across the Americas de-politicize and sanitize this inhumane institution, while de-centering the complex experiences of enslaved African people, limiting their agency and resistance.
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This is what director, Sergio Giral wants to highlight. Moreover, by challenging the romantic perceptions of plantation life as instead sites of capitalist exploitation informing racist abuse, “El Otro Francisco” helps center narratives around marginality while connecting it to larger structural forces.
Director Tomas Gutierrez Alea in “La Ultima Cena” (The Last Supper) deeply implicates Christianity when constructing a narrative around slavery in Cuba. Additionally, while the twelve slaves in the plantation owner’s Biblical re-creation symbolically represent Jesus’ 12 disciples, it also functions to de-individualize narratives around slavery, which starkly contrasts U.S. depictions as described below.
The nuanced and holistic characterization of the enslaved Africans was refreshing to see, as it conveyed Afro-Cubans as resisters, subversively using the master’s own slovenly drunken behavior against him. It was unusual seeing Christianity portrayed as embedded in the colonial history of the Americas, a powerful representation.
“Roots: The Saga of an American Family” (1977)
This six-part miniseries was unprecedented for its time. Based on the classic text by Alex Haley, “Roots” brought slave narratives to America’s televised living rooms in vivid fashion. The cultural significance of these portrayals were monumental, and spoke to larger themes around African-American subjectivity, discordant belonging, while incorporating the U.S. ethos. The fictional story follows Kunta Kinte who is violently ripped away from his homeland The Gambia, and boarded onto a European slave ship about to undergo the deleterious Middle Passage before arriving to the Americas and immediately being sold into slavery.
I noticed how religion was used in this adaptation-there was repetitive disassociation between Christian piety and the inhumane actions of slave capture, which suggested redemption for colonial Christianity, even though Kunta Kinte is portrayed as Muslim. There is also more presentation of brutalized black bodies, and less focus on the resistance to that brutality. Overall, structural and economic forces involved in the slave trade were de-emphasized in the narrative construction of “Roots” and more so focused on the individual’s experience.
Conclusion
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African-Americans have frequently expressed dissatisfaction with one-dimensional Hollywood slavery depictions. Often U.S. cinematic portrayals of slavery focus on the low positionality of the black slave, and appeal to pervasive torture pornography of subaltern bodies ingrained in the U.S. psyche as entertainment. Even narratives of retribution and revenge like in Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained” (2012), require a white savior.
But outside of the generally more nuanced and holistic representation of black subjectivity displayed in Cuban slave depictions, there are heavy themes and politics to consider. U.S. capitalist ethos prefers individualism, Great Man Theory of interpreting history, a-politicization and the redemptive components to Christianity.
Socialist Cuba’s ethos is centered on collective uplift, ideology and historical materialism. Through comparative analysis, some of the most notable slavery depictions in Cuban and American cinema/television speak to larger themes of resistance, economics and Black subjectivity. Transnational Black diasporic representation matters.
Kimberly Miller is a doctoral student at Indiana University, Bloomington studying Black women's aesthetic consumer choices and their effect on geopolitical economy. Her areas of interests include critical race theory, Marxist feminism, global politics and postcolonial studies.
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