Testimonials

“Caron Knauer’s powerful American Slavery on Film: Hollywood History compares past explorations of slavery with contemporary ones. Knauer’s book includes a chronology of slavery and a discussion of revolts, from the well known (Denmark Vessey, Nat Turner) to the less discussed (Greenup, and Cato’s Rebellion, ‘the largest slave revolt in the South.’). Knauer’s book serves as a reminder of resistance: enslaved people weren’t passive; people didn’t accept oppression and often resisted any way they could. Equally important, Knauer describes how we discuss slavery in an archival era. With so many lives undocumented, our attempts to comprehend, integrate, and uncover less examined narratives matters. How we discuss history shapes future generations.”

 

– Rochelle Spencer, Editor of BE: A Journal of Black Experimental and Interdisciplinary Work. Read the full article on Medium.com

“Each chapter contains an exploration of issues raised by the film being analyzed, including looking at the legacy of slavery in America which continues to plague the nation to this day.

 

Knauer engages both the works and issues they raise in a contemporary context, while also giving the reader a greater understanding of the history (or in the case of Tarantino’s Django Unchained, historical fantasy) tackled in each film.”

 

– Jennifer Dean, Film scholar

“At Spelman College, during the late 1990s, students viewed Haile Gerima’s Sankofa and Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust as part of Spelman College’s African Diaspora in the World course. Those films motivated students to think of ourselves differently, to see ourselves as part of a larger community, to read and write our stories. Knauer tells us of literary’s connections to freedom, how the ‘ability to write a pass allowed enslaved people to have greater movement (71).’ Literacy combatted ‘surveillance and identification systems,’ allowed for telling the ‘horrors of and truths,’ and by describing the quest for freedom, kept resistance alive (71–74).

 

In modern times, layered with racialized violence, Knauer’s book suggests that today’s films and novels reduce antipathy: they spread awareness and keep us focused.”

 

– Rochelle Spencer, Editor of BE: A Journal of Black Experimental and Interdisciplinary Work. Read the full article on Medium.com

“Caron Knauer’s American Slavery on Film: Hollywood History is an achievement singular among all the books I’ve read in a long, long life of eager reading. The research is nothing less than beyond formidable in its persistent search for the truth, and is one unsettling, but rewarding, report after another for the reader.”

 

– Joseph Caldwell, Author of In the Shadow of the Bridge (2020), In Such Dark Places (1978) and other books. He was awarded the Rome Prize for Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters

 

“When Knauer and I met for coffee earlier this month, I was impressed by her knowledge. She explained the ways films and books intertwine. Books root and provide source material for many of the films discussed in American Slavery on Film. For example, Solomon Northup’s memoir brought about Twelve Years a Slave; Nightjohn was based on ‘Gary Paulsen’s award-winning seventh- to twelfth grade young adult novel’ (65). Alex Haley’s best-selling novel, ‘what he eventually called faction, a combination of fact and fiction’ that ‘took him twelve years fraught with financial struggles to research and write’ inspired the miniseries Roots (29). To understand these films is to understand literacy, history, and the translation and transmission of ideas.”

 

– Rochelle Spencer, Editor of BE: A Journal of Black Experimental and Interdisciplinary Work. Read the full article on Medium.com