Staging the Amistad

Staging the Amistad PDF Author: Charlie Haffner
Publisher: Ohio University Press
ISBN: 0821446681
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 156

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Book Description
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 E. D. 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.

Staging the Amistad

Staging the Amistad PDF Author: Charlie Haffner
Publisher: Ohio University Press
ISBN: 0821446681
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 156

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Book Description
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 E. D. 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.

The Amistad Revolt

The Amistad Revolt PDF Author: Iyunolu Folayan Osagie
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820324655
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
From journalism and lectures to drama, visual art, and the Spielberg film, this study ranges across the varied cultural reactions--in America and Sierra Leone--engendered by the 1839 Amistad slave ship revolt. Iyunolu Folayan Osagie is a native of Sierra Leone, from where the Amistad's cargo of slaves originated. She digs deeply into the Amistad story to show the historical and contemporary relevance of the incident and its subsequent trials. At the same time, she shows how the incident has contributed to the construction of national and cultural identity both in Africa and the African diasporo in America--though in intriguingly different ways. This pioneering work of comparative African and American cultural criticism shows how creative arts have both confirmed and fostered the significance of the Amistad revolt in contemporary racial discourse and in the collective memories of both countries.

The Amistad Rebellion

The Amistad Rebellion PDF Author: Marcus Rediker
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 014312398X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
"Vividly drawn . . . this stunning book honors the achievement of the captive Africans who fought for—and won—their freedom.”—The Philadelphia Tribune A unique account of the most successful slave rebellion in American history, now updated with a new epilogue—from the award-winning author of The Slave Ship In this powerful and highly original account, Marcus Rediker reclaims the Amistad rebellion for its true proponents: the enslaved Africans who risked death to stake a claim for freedom. Using newly discovered evidence and featuring vividly drawn portraits of the rebels, their captors, and their abolitionist allies, Rediker reframes the story to show how a small group of courageous men fought and won an epic battle against Spanish and American slaveholders and their governments. The successful Amistad rebellion changed the very nature of the struggle against slavery. As a handful of self-emancipated Africans steered their own course for freedom, they opened a way for millions to follow. This edition includes a new epilogue about the author's trip to Sierra Leona to search for Lomboko, the slave-trading factory where the Amistad Africans were incarcerated, and other relics and connections to the Amistad rebellion, especially living local memory of the uprising and the people who made it.

United States V. Amistad

United States V. Amistad PDF Author: Suzanne Freedman
Publisher: Enslow Publishing
ISBN: 9780766013377
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 118

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Book Description
-- A library of the most important United States Supreme Court cases.-- Examines the issues leading up to the case, the people involved in the case, and the present-day effects of the Court's decision.

Mutiny on the Amistad

Mutiny on the Amistad PDF Author: Howard Jones
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190281324
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
This volume presents the first full-scale treatment of the only instance in history where African blacks, seized by slave dealers, won their freedom and returned home. Jones describes how, in 1839, Joseph Cinqué led a revolt on the Spanish slave ship, the Amistad, in the Caribbean. The seizure of the ship by an American naval vessel near Montauk, Long Island, the arrest of the Africans in Connecticut, and the Spanish protest against the violation of their property rights created an international controversy. The Amistad affair united Lewis Tappan and other abolitionists who put the "law of nature" on trial in the United States by their refusal to accept a legal system that claimed to dispense justice while permitting artificial distinctions based on race or color. The mutiny resulted in a trial before the U.S. Supreme Court that pitted former President John Quincy Adams against the federal government. Jones vividly recaptures this compelling drama--the most famous slavery case before Dred Scott--that climaxed in the court's ruling to free the captives and allow them to return to Africa.

Echo of Lions

Echo of Lions PDF Author: Barbara Chase-Riboud
Publisher: William Morrow
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
Epic saga of slavery in America based on the controversial historical figure - Joseph Cinque.

United States V. the Amistad

United States V. the Amistad PDF Author: David Hulm
Publisher: Rosen Young Adult
ISBN: 9780823940134
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 64

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Book Description
Explores the Supreme Court's ruling of a case that put Africans on trial for staging a revolt aboard a slave ship, discussing the results and repercussions of the case.

The First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar 1966

The First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar 1966 PDF Author: David Murphy
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 1781383162
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
In April 1966, thousands of artists, musicians, performers and writers from across Africa and its diaspora gathered in the Senegalese capital, Dakar, to take part in the First World Festival of Negro Arts (Premier Festival Mondial des arts nègres). The international forum provided by the Dakar Festival showcased a wide array of arts and was attended by such celebrated luminaries as Duke Ellington, Josephine Baker, Aimé Césaire, André Malraux and Wole Soyinka. Described by Senegalese President Léopold Sédar Senghor, as 'the elaboration of a new humanism which this time will include all of humanity on the whole of our planet earth', the festival constituted a highly symbolic moment in the era of decolonization and the push for civil rights for black people in the United States. In essence, the festival sought to perform an emerging Pan-African culture, that is, to give concrete cultural expression to the ties that would bind the newly liberated African 'homeland' to black people in the diaspora. This volume is the first sustained attempt to provide not only an overview of the festival itself but also of its multiple legacies, which will help us better to understand the 'festivalization' of Africa that has occurred in recent decades with most African countries now hosting a number of festivals as part of a national tourism and cultural development strategy.

Rebellious Passage

Rebellious Passage PDF Author: Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108476244
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
Examines the successful slave revolt aboard the US slave ship Creole during the early 1840s and its consequences.

Ardency

Ardency PDF Author: Kevin Young
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0375711619
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
Now in paperback, a haunting chorus of voices that tells the story of the captivity, education, language, hopes, dreams, and fight for freedom, of the African Americans abducted in the Amistad rebellion. Based on the 1840 mutiny on board the slave ship Amistad, Ardency begins with "Buzzard," a sequence of poems told in the voice of the interpreter for the captive rebels, who were jailed in New Haven. In "Correspondence," we encounter the remarkable letters to John Quincy Adams and others that the captives wrote from jail. The book culminates in "Witness," a libretto chanted by Cinque, the rebel leader, who yearns for his family and freedom while eloquently evoking the Amistads' conversion and life in America. As Young conjures this array of characters, interweaving the liberation cry of Negro spirituals and the indoctrinating wordplay of American primers, he delivers his signature songlike immediacy at the service of an epic built on the ironies, violence, and virtues of American history.