Slavery and Film, Creativity and Academia, and Is Slavery a Good Metaphor for AI?

Dr. Dexter Gabriel is an associate professor of history at the University of Connecticut. He’s published and taught widely on the histories of slavery, resistance, and freedom, including teaching a superb class on slavery in popular culture, particularly film. He’s the author of the 2023 book Jubilee’s Experiment: The British West Indies and American Abolitionism (Cambridge UP, 2023).

But in addition to this, Professor Gabriel conducts a second, equally impressive intellectual and creative life in a wholly different register. As P. Djèlí Clark, he’s the author of acclaimed and award-winning speculative fiction, including the much-loved Dead Djinn universe books, Ring Shout, and his most recent, The Dead Cat Tail Assassins.

We have a really rich and deep conversation with Dexter, about how he juggles such an array of interests and pursuits, the question of whether there can be a “good” portrayal of slavery on film and what that would look like, whether there are lessons for our future with AI from our past with slavery.

In part two of this conversation, coming soon on this feed, we speak with P. Djèlí Clark about his speculative fiction.

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