In 1852, 400 Chinese laborers in transit to the Americas mutinied against the white ship captain profiting from their transportation. Terrorized by British forces and accused of piracy by British and American courts, the rebels briefly won freedom, but never saw justice. Pairing a short graphic novel with academic essays, The Cargo Rebellion: Those Who Chose Freedom surfaces a buried history of Chinese and South Asian labor exploitation that took place throughout the nineteenth-century colonial world.
Written by academics Jason Chang, Benjamin Barson, and Alexis Dudden and illustrated by Kim Inthavong, The Cargo Rebellion opens with a short comic narrating the historical development of the so-called “coolie trade” that saw Chinese and South Asian indentured laborers transported to the Americas under exploitative conditions that the authors characterize as human trafficking. The Robert Bowne mutiny is briefly recounted, as well as the subsequent international legal battle that pitted American and European systems of imperialism against Chinese efforts to combat trafficking.
The comic provides a clear overview of the political and economic context under which Asian unfree labor proliferated in the nineteenth century. Its text skews academic but is still accessible, elevated by Kim Inthavong’s emotive full-color art. The last pages connect the history of Asian American labor with the contemporary practices of transnational slavery and trafficking. The authors issue a call to action for readers to stand against a system of “racial capitalism” and work toward “a global ethics of de-objectification.”
Following the comic are three academic essays by Dudden, Chang, and Barson: a detailed discussion of the mutiny and its legal aftermath, best practices for teaching Asian indenture in the classroom, and a study of Afro-Asian culture in the United States through the lens of music history. The essays contain valuable information and ideas, but there seems to be a missed opportunity to use the comic format to bring some of this material to life—in particular, details of the mutiny and legal dispute might have added depth to the rebels’ narrative, and historiographical details would help explain why stories like the Robert Bowne mutiny are so hard to reconstruct.
A related pitfall of the essays is that they give the book a scholarly bent that makes it much less accessible to younger readers. High school students are unlikely to persist when they come to the denser academic text. Again, it feels like the graphic novel format is underused, specifically, its potential to draw in a larger audience.
Nevertheless, The Cargo Rebellion stands out as virtually the only publication by a non-academic press about nineteenth-century Asian labor trafficking. Its important subject matter makes this title a good fit for university libraries, as well as general adult nonfiction collections that emphasize Asian and Asian American history and social justice topics.
The Cargo Rebellion: Those Who Chose Freedom
By Jason Chang, Benjamin Barson, Alexis Dudden
Art by Kim Inthavong
PM Press, 2023
ISBN: 9781629639642
NFNT Age Recommendation: Adult (18+)
Creator Representation: East Asian
Character Representation: American, Chinese
