Description:

This event will feature two documentary film screenings about historical memory of resistance to colonialism among descendants of Africans and Native Americans. There will be a reception with light food and drink at 5pm, followed by the screenings at 5:30pm.

One of the films is Ghosts of Amistad - a film by Tony Buba and Marcus Rediker, chronicles a trip to Sierra Leone in May 2013 to interview village elders about local memory of the Amistad rebellion (1839), to search for the long-lost ruins of the slave trading factory Lomboko, and to recover a lost history from below in the struggle against slavery.

Marcus Rediker is Distinguished Professor of Atlantic History at the University of Pittsburgh. He has written or edited nine books, including The Many-Headed Hydra (2000, with Peter Linebaugh); Villains of All Nations (2004); The Slave Ship (2007); The Amistad Rebellion (2012); and, most recently, Outlaws of the Atlantic (2014). He is currently writing a biography of the radical abolitionist dwarf, Benjamin Lay (1682-1759). His writings have won numerous awards and been published in fourteen languages. Over the years he has been active in a variety of social justice and peace movements, especially the worldwide campaign to abolish the death penalty. Ghosts of Amistad is his first film. For more information, visit www.marcusrediker.com. 

The second film, Espiritus Guerreros, is produced by Lina Britto, Assistant Professor History & Forrest Hylton, Visiting Assistant Professor History. This film is about Native Americans in Caribbean Colombia/Venezuela. Between 1769 and 1776, the Wayuu clans of the Guajira peninsula (Colombia) repelled the Spanish armies that tried to invade their lands. In search of the sacred ground where those wars were waged, indigenous authorities and jurists Sergio Kohen Epieyú and Germán Aguilar Epieyú undertook a trip through the desert to the ancestral cemetery. There they will offer a ritual sacrifice to their ancestors for the spirits to authorize them to make public this history. Searching for traces of warriors, they find histories guarded like treasures by the descendants of other clans.

Q&A will follow. Please RSVP to Sarah at lacs@northwestern.edu 

This event is sponsored by the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program, Center for African American History, the History Department, and the Chabraja Center for Historical Studies.