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"Staging the Amistad collects in print for the first time plays about the Amistad slave revolt by three of Sierra Leone's most influential playwrights of the latter decades of the twentieth century: Charlie Haffner, Yulisa Amadu "Pat" Maddy, and Raymond de'Souza-George. Until the late 1980s, when the first of these plays was performed, the 1839 shipboard slave rebellion and the return of its victors to their homes in what is modern-day Sierra Leone had been an unrecognized chapter in the country's history. The plays recast the tale of heroism, survival, and resistance to tyranny as a distinctly Sierra Leonean story, emphasizing the agency of its African protagonists. For this reason, Haffner, Maddy, and de'Souza-George counterbalance the better-known American representations of the rebellion, which center on American characters and American political and cultural concerns. The first public performances of these plays constituted a watershed moment. Written and staged immediately before and after the start of Sierra Leone's decade-long conflict, they brought the Amistad rebellion to public consciousness. Furthermore, their turn to a uniquely Sierra Leonean history of heroic resistance to tyranny highlights the persistent faith in nation-state nationalism and the dreams of decolonization"--
Slaves --- Sierra Leonean drama (English) --- English drama --- Sierra Leonean literature (English) --- Enslaved persons --- Persons --- Slavery
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From the early 1970s to the mid-1990s, playwrights, novelists, filmmakers, visual artists, and prison writers from Sierra Leone and the United States brought a new attention to the events of the 1839 Amistad shipboard slave rebellion. As a testament of the human will to freedom, the story of the Amistad mutineers also describes the wide arc of the international circuits of capital, commerce, juridical power, and diplomacy that structured and reproduced the Atlantic slave trade for nearly four centuries. In Rebellious Histories, Matthew J. Christensen argues that for creative artists struggling to comprehend—and survive—pernicious manifestations of globalization like Sierra Leone's civil war, the Amistad rebellion's narrative of exploitative resource extraction, transatlantic migrations, armed rebellion, and American judicial intervention offers both a historical antecedent and allegory for contemporary global capitalism's reconfiguration of culture and subjectivity. At the same time, he shows how the mutineers' example provides a model for imagining utopian forms of transnationalism. With its wide-ranging comparative approach, Rebellious Histories brings a unique perspective to the study of the cultural histories of both slave resistance and globalization.
Sierra Leonean literature. --- Antislavery movements --- Influence (Literary, artistic, etc.) --- Slave insurrections --- Underground Railroad --- Slavery --- Sierra Leone literature --- History --- Insurrections, etc. --- Amistad (Schooner). --- Sierra Leone --- History. --- Amistad (Schooner) --- Slave rebellions
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