Twelve Years a Slave and the ‘Unthinkability’ of Enslaved Autobiography

This chapter contextualizes Steve McQueen’s screen adaptation of Solomon Northup’s classic autobiography, Twelve Years a Slave, within the long-running debate over what is usually called ‘the slave narrative’. The recovery of enslaved individuals’ experiences has often been seen as impossible, an inevitable consequence of slavery’s dehumanizing tendencies. Prior to emancipation, pro-slavery propagandists dismissed slave narratives as abolitionist propaganda. Academic historians considered the narratives to be unreliable until the Civil Rights era, but finally began using them extensively in the 1970s. McQueen’s adaptation, perhaps in response to a long history of discounting the veracity of the slave narrative, dwells on the authenticity of Northup’s story without considering the many complex issues raised by historians about the genre as a whole.