he East Side Freedom Library invites you to our December Labor History Film Screening: Ghosts of Amistad with an introductory conversation with historian Marcus Rediker.
The uprising this past summer against institutional racism raised debate and action about historical monuments and historical memory. These debates and actions are far from over, and there remains much to learn not only from history, but from struggles over “history.” The play Hamilton ends with the haunting question, “Who will tell your story?”
This documentary film chronicles the journey of historian Marcus Rediker as he retraces the path of the enslaved Africans who rebelled against their captors and seized the slave schooner Amistad in 1839, leading to a watershed US Supreme Court decision that sparked Abolitionist action leading to the Civil War. Based on Rediker’s ground-breaking book The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom, the film travels to present day Sierra Leone to visit the home villages of Sengbe Pieh (Joseph Cinqué) and the other captives who were held on the Amistad, interviewing elders about local memory of the case and searching for the long-lost ruins of Lomboko, the slave trading factory where their cruel transatlantic voyage began.
The film uses the knowledge of villagers, fishermen, and truck drivers to recover the lost history of the Amistad, told from a seldom-voiced perspective in the historical struggle against slavery. Marcus Rediker is the Distinguished Professor of Atlantic History at the University of Pittsburgh. He has written and edited ten books, including The Many-Headed Hydra (2000, with Peter Linebaugh); two books about mutinies and pirates, Villains of All Nations (2004) and Outlaws of the Atlantic (2014); and two books about the transatlantic slave trade and resistance within it, The Slave Ship (2007) and The Amistad Rebellion (2012), which prompted this film project. His most recent book, The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist (2017), reconstructs the life story of one man as a way to interrogate political traditions and movements. Marcus’ pathbreaking writings have won numerous awards and have been published in fourteen languages. Not only will he join us for a conversation about the making of Ghosts of Amistad, but on Tuesday evening, December 15, he will be joining ESFL’s monthly Labor History Reading Group for a discussion of his essay, “The Poetics of History From Below.”
View the video: https://youtu.be/KZsgAT28924