About the Author

IYUNOLU FOLAYAN OSAGIE is an associate professor of English at Pennsylvania State University.

Reviews

Using the Amistad revolt and the vast body of intellectual and artistic production that it has generated as point of departure, The Amistad Revolt explores such diverse disciplines as history, fiction, drama and film to stage a comparative exploration of the production of identity in Africa and the U.S. African-American diaspora.
*Cornell University*

Osagie refutes certain preconceived notions and theories about the Amistad revolt. . . . and explores specific connections between the United States and what she has seen in her native Sierra Leone.
*West Africa*

Stephen Spielberg's 1997 movie Amistad, a 'colonialist reenactment,' stands at the intellectual center of this extended essay on the cultural impact of the 1839 revolt by Mende slaves on a Cuban ship. . . . Osagie is Sierra Leonean and only learned of this heroic event of the slave era in 1993. Because Africans have known so little of this story, he sees its 're-memory' as a vital part of contemporary nation building on the continent.
*Choice*

Broadens the scope of the Amistad story and re-examines its significance on both sides of the Atlantic . . . Its enormous contribution to African Diaspora and African Studies will prove invaluable to those seeking to come to terms with these still largely understudied areas. In all cases, Osagie's work forces its readers to confront African humanity and to dialogue with its myriad internal and external contradictions and possibilities.
*African American Review*

The achievement of Osagie's pivotal work is its contribution to filling the divide of ignorance between Continental and Diaspora academics with information about the ravages perpetrated on Sierra Leone, and the reconstruction of identity undertaken there, while the descendants of Africa's other dispersed captives have attempted rebellion, survival, and self-definition in the face of their own accumulations of genocidal levels of trauma.
*The Griot*