Rebellious Histories: The Amistad Slave Revolt and the Cultures of Late Twentieth-Century Black Transnationalism by Matthew J. Christensen (review)

Abstract

Christensen, Matthew J. 2012. Rebellious Histories: The Amistad Slave Revolt and Cultures of Late Twentieth-Century Black Transnationalism. Albany: SUNY Press. $65.00 hc. $23.95 sc. $23.95 e-book. 202 pp.Sengbe Pieh, often known in US as Joseph Cinque, was one of fifty-three captives who staged a successful revolt aboard slave ship Amistad in 1839. He was an outspoken advocate for rights of captives when they fought in US courts for their return to Africa. More than 150 years later, Pieh is probably most widely known in United States as heroic protagonist of 1997 Steven Spielberg film Amistad, but he is, more significantly, a beloved icon in Sierra Leonean public arts and theater. He is a symbol of Sierra Leonean national pride and a figure of agency and courage of captive Africans. In United States, he is an emblem of moral authority in exaggerated retellings of nineteenth-century America's emerging devotion to liberty and democracy. His image has been exploited by both Sierra Leonean and US governments to create an imagined heritage of revolutionary heroism in defense of freedom, a lineage from which both governments claim descent. At same time, for political activists, Pieh is an icon of Black transnationalism and centuries- long struggle against global capital's exploitation of people of African descent around world.Matthew Christensen investigates this powerfully elastic trope of revolutionary-who-would-not-be-enslaved in his new book Rebellious Histories: The Amistad Slave Revolt and. Cultures of Late Twentieth-Century Black Transnationalism. As Christensen illustrates, Sengbe Pieh and Amistad revolt are mobilized as symbols by people of African descent to critique contemporary patterns of racialized, global and emblematize complex dynamics of black transnational subject formation within global networks of capitalist production, past and present (10). Ironically, however, image of slave revolt is also appropriated as a rhetorical tool of neoliberal propagandists, who perniciously utilize language of freedom and equality to justify development and other political schemes (such as structural adjustment programs of 1990s) that force African nations into dependent status through debt, undermine opportunity for citizens of African nations, and exacerbate inequality for people of African descent.Christensen's recounting of life of Amistad narrative reveals that, by twentieth century, slave revolt was largely forgotten in Sierra Leone by everyone except a few academics. In 1987, narrative resurfaced through two complementary documents, one published by Sierra Leonean government at request of then presidentjoseph Saidu Momoh and other produced a few months later by United States Information Service for distribution through its Sierra Leone ambassador. Both documents celebrated heroes of Sierra Leone in attempts to bolster each office's hegemonic power over state and national imaginary (58).But these simplistic images of state power and heroism did not go uncontested. Through well-veiled double-speak that skillfully avoided government censorship, Charlie Haffner's play Amistad. Kata-Kata (1988) produced a counter- history to totalizing narrative produced by governments. As Christensen deftly argues, trope of cannibalism-the fear that reportedly motivated Sengbe Pieh and his compatriots to slave-ship rebellion-is evoked as a potent counter-metaphor that exposes the economics of exploitation that consumed enslaved African bodies and decimated African communities from which they were stolen (59). In months following 1992 coup against Momoh's regime and twenty-four-year single-party rule of All People's Congress, largely undereducated and underemployed young men launched a public art campaign in which they painted portrait of world-traveling political icon Sengbe Pieh (among others) on walls across city as a reminder of political empowerment of youth. …