The Living Consequences

Paul Davis, the Providence Journal writer who has previously chronicled Traces of the Trade and the history of the slave trade in Rhode Island, has a new feature story about Tom DeWolf’s Inheriting the Trade: A Northern Family Confronts Its Legacy as the Largest Slave-Trading Family in U.S. History in Sunday’s edition (available online now).

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The Providence Journal, which has frequently covered Traces of the Trade and other stories relating to the history of Rhode Island and the slave trade, has a review in Sunday’s edition of Tom DeWolf’s Inheriting the Trade: A Northern Family Confronts Its Legacy as the Largest Slave-Trading Dynasty in U.S. History.

The book review is a companion to a feature story about the film leading the Sunday arts section, but the review is available online now. The review is not kind, but I think the reviewer’s reasoning is highly instructive about Tom’s intended audience.

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Variety, the entertainment industry daily, has a complimentary review this morning of Traces of the Trade.

The reviewer, John Anderson, describes Traces as a “courageous scab-ripper of a tale … raising very troubling questions about what it means to be black or white in America.”

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While we were in Park City, Utah for the Sundance Film Festival, my cousin Tom DeWolf appeared on C-SPAN 2’s Book TV. The program, which ran an hour and 15 minutes, can currently be viewed online here.

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Tomorrow’s edition of the Christian Science Monitor includes a feature story about Traces of the Trade, entitled “Family confronts the North’s slave-trading past.”

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Since Sundance ended over the weekend, there have been two more prominent reviews of Traces of the Trade.

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In this post, I want to discuss, and link to, the various reviews of Traces of the Trade which have come out during the Sundance Film Festival. I intend to cover the good, the bad, and the ugly, and to offer a thought or two in response to the reviewers.

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I attended a screening of Li Ying’s 2007 documentary Yasukuni this afternoon at the Sundance Film Festival, with (and thanks to) my cousin Holly.

Yasukuni is a moving examination of issues surrounding the Yasukuni shrine in Toyko, exploring the shrine’s significance from the perspective of a variety of Japanese and non-Japanese voices. Li Ying is a Chinese-born director living in Japan for many years, and Yasukuni is competing at Sundance in the foreign documentary category.

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My cousin Katrina, who directed Traces of the Trade, was on a panel at Sundance this afternoon on filmmaking and being “Black in America.”

The panel was hosted by film critic Elvis Mitchell, who collaborated on The Black List, now playing at Sundance, and also included actor and filmmaker Danny Glover; Melody Barnes, who works in policy on Capitol Hill; actor, musician, and comedian Nick Cannon, starring in this year’s American Son; and Orlando Bagwell, the documentary filmmaker who hosted our panel on public outreach yesterday.

The panel was an engaging, wide-ranging, and often entertaining exploration of a variety of serious issues confronting black filmmakers and those interested in making films about the black experience in the U.S.

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Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North had its world premiere this evening before a sold-out crowd at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah.

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