The task of remembering the transatlantic slave trade poses a particular challenge to historians and artists alike. Not only does it revolve around an emotionally and ideologically loaded issue, there is also rather little documentary and testimonial evidence to draw upon, particularly so regarding the Africans’ view of the trade. To make things worse, the most important and often quoted source – the second chapter of Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative (1789) dealing partly with life in the belly of a slave ship – has recently been uncovered to be probably ‘fictional’ rather than based on personal experience. On the one hand, the arts are particularly called for in this situation to fill the documentary gaps and silences through acts of experiment and imagination, and they may indeed have a redemptive effect by offering, in Hayden White’s terms, successful ‘emplotments’ of a traumatic past. One the other hand, this redemptive potential simultaneously poses a serious ethical challenge: As Theodor W. Adorno has warned with reference to the Holocaust, it is precisely by making ‘sense’ of human suffering, and by making accessible to the ‘senses’ what is utterly senseless and incomprehensible, that injustice may be done to the victims. In this paper, I will try to illustrate this problematic by looking at two recent films that have attempted to represent the horrors of the middle passage – Steven Spielberg’s canonical Amistad (a terrible failure, in my view), and Guy Deslauriers’ film The Middle Passage [Passage du Milieu]. Based on a script by the Martiniquean novelist and poet Patrick Chamoiseau, the latter example uses an aesthetic approach which may point at a way out of the dilemma outlined above.
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机译：记住跨大西洋奴隶贸易的任务对历史学家和艺术家都构成了特殊的挑战。它不仅围绕着情感上和意识形态上的问题，而且很少有文献和推荐证据可供借鉴，尤其是关于非洲人对贸易的看法。更糟的是，最重要且经常被引用的资料来源-奥拉达·伊马塔诺（Olodah Equiano）的有趣的叙事（1789）第二章部分涉及奴隶船腹中的生活，最近被发现可能是“虚构的”，而不是根据个人经验。一方面，在这种情况下，尤其需要艺术来通过实验和想象力的行为来填补文献上的空白和沉寂，并且它们确实可以通过用海登·怀特的术语提供成功的“尝试”来产生赎回效果。过去的创伤。另一方面，这种救赎潜力同时也构成了严峻的道德挑战：正如西奥多·W·阿多诺（Theodor W. Adorno）在提到大屠杀时所警告的那样，这恰恰是通过使人类痛苦的“感觉”，以及使“感觉”容易获得的东西。完全是毫无意义和不可理解的，以致受害者可能会遭受不公正待遇。在本文中，我将通过查看最近两部试图代表中间段落恐怖的电影来说明这一问题-史蒂文·斯皮尔伯格的经典《阿米斯塔德》（我认为这是一个可怕的失败）和盖伊·德劳瑞尔斯的电影《中间》段落[Milageu段落]。根据马提尼克岛小说家和诗人帕特里克·查莫瑟乌（Patrick Chamoiseau）的剧本，后一个例子采用了一种美学方法，可能指出了摆脱上述困境的一种方法。
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