Indigenous social work

“Long an advocate of incorporating traditional Indigenous knowledge into social work, Jeannine Carriere (at left) has co-edited a book of essays about addressing this urgent need.FULL STORY

 

Enslaved insurrection, 1741

October 22nd, 2024

Vancouver’s David Lester (at right) is set to release his latest graphic novel, Revolution by Fire: New York’s Afro-Irish Uprising of 1741 (Beacon Press $24.95) co-written by Lester and Marcus Rediker, illustrated by Lester, and edited by Paul Buhle, due out November 12.

This is the real life, but little known story of a “slave insurrection” that took place in New York City in the 1700s, led by a group of African-American, Irish, and mixed-race Hispanic sailors, soldiers and renegades. Lester and Rediker use creative non fiction to conceive of the inner workings of this rebellion, following the masterminds of the plot.

One of the leading rebels was fugitive John Gwin, introduced in Lester’s previous graphic novel, Under the Banner of King Death: Pirates of the Atlantic  (Beacon Press, 2023) also co-written by Lester and Rediker and edited by Paul Buhle. Gwin and his band are determined to capture New York City in their own names and fight the higher class “wigs-and-ruffles-wearing” white people. Unfortunately for the conspirators, suspicions about an uprising were already in the minds of the Governor and his fellow elites, and the events that followed change the course of everyone’s lives forever.

Based on the chapter “Outcasts of the Nations of the Earth” in Rediker’s and Peter Linebaugh’s The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Beacon Press, 2013), this new graphic novel provides a fly-on-the-wall view of a historical event reimagined, highlighting cooperation among races and classes that transcends the social order of its time—and seeks to inspire us today. 9780807012550

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