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

Sengbe Pieh, often known in the US as Joseph Cinqué, was one of fifty-three captives who staged a successful revolt aboard the slave ship Amistad in 1839. He was an outspoken advocate for the rights of the captives when they fought in the US courts for their return to Africa. More than 150 years later, Pieh is probably most widely known in the United States as the heroic protagonist of the 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 the agency and courage of captive Africans. In the 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 the 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 the same time, for political activists, Pieh is an icon of Black transnationalism and the centuries-long struggle against global capital’s exploitation of people of African descent around the world.

Matthew Christensen investigates this powerfully elastic trope of the revolutionary-who-would-not-be-enslaved in his new book Rebellious Histories: The Amistad Slave Revolt and the Cultures of Late Twentieth-Century Black Transnationalism. As Christensen illustrates, Sengbe Pieh and the Amistad revolt are mobilized as symbols by people of African descent to critique “contemporary patterns of racialized, global inequality” and emblematize the “complex dynamics of black transnational subject formation within global networks of capitalist production, past and present” (10). Ironically, however, the image of slave revolt is also appropriated as a rhetorical tool of neoliberal propagandists, who perniciously utilize the language of freedom and equality to justify development and other political schemes (such as the structural adjustment programs of the 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 the life of the Amistad narrative reveals that, by the twentieth century, the slave revolt was largely forgotten in Sierra Leone by everyone except a few academics. In 1987, the narrative resurfaced through two complementary documents, one published by the Sierra Leonean government at the request of then president Joseph Saidu Momoh and the other produced a few months later by the United States Information Service for distribution through its Sierra Leone ambassador. Both documents celebrated the heroes of Sierra Leone in attempts to “bolster each office’s hegemonic power over the state and the 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 the totalizing narrative produced by the governments. As Christensen deftly argues, the 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 the African communities from which they were stolen” (59). In the months following the 1992 coup against Momoh’s regime and the twenty-four-year single-party rule of the All People’s Congress, largely undereducated and underemployed young men launched a public art campaign in which they painted the portrait of world-traveling political icon Sengbe Pieh (among others) on walls across the city as a reminder of the political empowerment of youth. Raymond De’Souza-George’s The Broken Handcuff (1994), performed in the midst of civil war, explicitly linked the slave trade to postcolonial politics by indicting, in Christensen’s words, the...