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Lindfors, Bernth Early African Entertainments Abroad: From the Hottentot Venus to Africa's First Olympians Madison: University of Wisconsin Press 248 pp., $29.95 ISBN 978-029930164 Publication Date: November 2014

although some references might puzzle undergraduates (“Thermidor” appears twice, without explanation, in an account of the American Revolution’s conservative turn). The first chapter, “The Sailor’s Yarn,” serves as a helpful overview of Rediker’s quest for the elusive voice of the seagoing proletarian, whether free or enslaved. In his close investigation of storytelling aboard ship, Rediker adds some more practical questions of his own to Bertolt Brecht’s classic question, “Who built the seven gates of Thebes?” (1). How did workers educate and socialize each other? What sorts of information was passed among them? How did the sailor’s (or the slave’s) yarn teach resistance? An intellectual history from below suggests a radical underside to early globalization in the Atlantic world and elsewhere. The following chapters flesh out this picture, guiding us through sailor-slave alliances, maritime rebellions, pirate networks, and antinomian conspiracies hatched in port-town taverns. The concluding chapter, set in the United States in the 1830s, has more in common with Judith Walkowitz than with E. P. Thompson. Rediker examines why “newspaper writers and their readers . . . had specific historical reasons to see the Amistad rebels as ‘black pirates’” (150). He offers a close reading of a play, The Long, Low, Black Schooner, which was put on in New York City, and contrasts it with other popular melodramas of the time. Was Cinqu e, the mutiny’s leader, interpreted by the public as a heroic pirate, as an updated version of Othello, or as a Barbary corsair? This is an intriguing essay, but a disconcerting poststructuralist turn after so many chapters in a Thompsonian or Brechtian mode. No reckoning of Rediker’s career would be complete without engaging with the diverse strands of path-breaking scholarship that he inspired, as well as the rejoinders that he has provoked over the years. Many of his favorite themes have migrated from the margins to the mainstream of the profession. However, this volume reprints material from the 1980s and 1990s as “historical documents” of their time, standing in relation to “the scholarship with which they were engaged at their moment of publication” (181). To balance this approach, Outlaws of the Atlantic might have included at least one thickly footnoted chapter about the state of the field today. Engaging with a wide range of historiography would have been especially helpful for beginners in the field. It would also have offered Rediker a chance to respond to the critics and quibblers and to reassert his priorities where he feels they may have been misconstrued or passed over. As it stands, readers already familiar with Rediker’s work will not need to make any special effort to seek out this volume, but it may serve to introduce a new generation to his main themes, and it offers a synthetic overview of his long career in a compact format.