Cronan on "Give Us Free": The Influences of Steven Spielberg's Amistad on Legal Scholarship and the African Voices Behind United States v. Schooner Amistad @BU_Law

Liam Cronan, Boston University School of Law, is publishing 'Give Us Free': The Influences of Steven Spielberg’s Amistad on Legal Scholarship and the African Voices Behind United States v. Schooner Amistad in volume 56 of the Int'l J. Afr. Hist. Stud. (Nov. 2023). Here is the abstract.

How can a Spielberg film exemplify a historiography and impart legal historians and scholars of African studies alike with an innovative perspective? In Steven Spielberg’s Amistad, Cinqué’s famed exclamation “give us free” reverberated not only into popular culture but also the legal academy. Before the 1990s, legal scholars referenced United States v. Schooner Amistad, if indeed they referenced it at all, in terms of maritime law and property rights, absent an inquiry into the African peoples whose hardships stood at the center of the case. Then came Spielberg’s film, which made clear the brutality and unimaginable violence withstood by Cinqué and others taken captive. As a result, American legal scholarship finally began to wrest with issues of race and the role of the United States Supreme Court in upholding slavery and elevate the African peoples to whom the story of Amistad belongs. In analyzing the film as a source of legal history, this review essay will explore the state of legal scholarship on United States v. Schooner Amistad before the 1997 film, drawing attention to earlier scholarly confusion on how to classify the case. It will then challenge legal history’s boundaries by analyzing forty-two post-1997 journal articles relating to the film, arguing that scholars at last began to recognize themes of race, forced migration, and enslavement, central to the Amistad case, as a direct result of the film’s unique influences on the legal academy. In turn, the yet unexplored intersection of these sources will invite inquiries into whether Amistad was truly an “anti-slavery” case and open space for further scholarship on cases similarly related to transatlantic slavery that never earned the likes of a Spielberg film.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.