![]() ![]() ![]() Brown and Hamilton duped Northup to travel with them to Washington, D.C., for work as a violinist. ![]() It might also bring to mind the hundreds of thousands of slaves whose names, sufferings, and deaths have been long lost, whose lives were distorted into caricature within 19th-century white fiction, or were at best given life on the periphery of the comparatively few slave narratives we have from the antebellum period.ġ2 Years a Slave, adapted from Solomon Northup’s memoir Twelve Years a Slave : Narrative of Solomon Northup, a Citizen of New-York, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841, and Rescued in 1853, from a Cotton Plantation Near the Red River, in Louisiana, chronicles the harrowing journey of a free man, husband, and father of three who, at the age of 33, was kidnapped and sold into slavery by two white men who called themselves Merrill Brown and Abram Hamilton (real names Alexander Merrill and James Russell, respectively). has already called it, “most certainly one of the most vivid and authentic portrayals of slavery ever captured in a feature film.”) and the points at which the film most clearly reflects and departs from Solomon Northup’s original narrative. During the movie awards season, Steve McQueen’s new film 12 Years a Slave will inspire discussions about its realistic depiction of slavery’s atrocities (Henry Louis Gates Jr. By Daniel Donaghy Title page of an early edition of Twelve Years a Slave. ![]()
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