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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:Cannibals in the postcolony: Sierra Leone's intersecting hegemonies in Charlie Haffner's slave revolt drama 'Amistad Kata-Kata'
Author:Christensen, Matthew J.ISNI
Year:2005
Periodical:Research in African Literatures
Volume:36
Issue:1
Pages:1-19
Language:English
Geographic term:Sierra Leone
Subjects:slave rebellions
literature
drama
About person:Charlie Haffner
External link:http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/research_in_african_literatures/v036/36.1christensen.pdf
Abstract:Through an examination of publications by Sierra Leone's president, Joseph Saidu Momoh, in 1986, the United States Information Service (1987), and Sierra Leonean playwright Charlie Haffner, this article explores how the narrative of the 1839 'Amistad' slave revolt emerged in the late 1980s as a key modality through which meanings of Sierra Leonean nationalism and claims to State power were contested. The article argues that in its dialogic engagement with the two governmental texts, Haffner's play 'Amistad Kata-Kata' (unpublished, 1988) transforms the fear of cannibalism that sparked the slave rebellion into a politically charged trope whereby it couples cannibalism as a name for the excesses carried out by local authorities with cannibalism as a description of the dehumanizing consumption of enslaved African labour within the Atlantic slave system. The trope thus forms a key for translating the slave revolt into a discrediting, disrupting critique of the complex interrelationships between global capitalism and excessive elite accumulation in the postcolony. Bibliogr., notes, ref., sum. [Journal abstract]
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