Michelle Todd
12 Years a Slave
November 3, 2015
SOCI-1010-N06 Introduction to Sociology 83300.201580
12 Years a Slave
In 2013, director Steve McQueen released 12 Years a Slave, his film adaptation of Solomon Northup’s 19th century slave narrative of the same name. Interpreting McQueen’s film within analytic frameworks including comparative slavery studies, trauma studies, feminist theory, film theory, and the rhetoric of visual cultures, the authors create a wide range of analyses that address several critical questions.
The critical conversations surrounding Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave revolves around the film’s realism, specifically its realistic portrayal of the violence and trauma of slavery and the image of the tortured slave body. McQueen creates prolonged, unflinching images of slave torture and suffering, lingering on graphic scenes of brutality, including whipping, hanging, beatings, and rape. In fact, in the very act of attempting to resolve the ambiguity of McQueen’s images, this competing discourse strangely repeats and performs the very paradox of realism itself. In this way, the discourse surrounding McQueen’s realist images of the trauma and violence of slavery perform a fundamental split that continuously reflects and implicates the images themselves.
This analysis contextualizes the paradoxical instability of McQueen’s realist images of the trauma and violence of slavery and the discourse that surrounds them within a larger lineage of the history and politics imbedded in the depiction of slavery within visual culture. The audience is confronted simultaneously with the violence of slavery as well as with the inherent impossibility of its representation, this analysis probes the ways in which McQueen’s realist images actively resist and exceed the historical frame, getting at fundamental questions of trauma and representation in