Indigenous and Black Fridays Lecture: Race and Robinson Crusoe History Dept. lecture
When: Tuesday, Nov. 12, 4:30 p.m.
Where: Switzler Hall, Room 101
History Lecture: November 12
History Lecture: November 12
Lecture Info
Sometimes considered the first English-language novel, and perhaps the most widely imitated one, Robinson Crusoe sizzled after the entry of Friday into its plot. He came to be one of the most famous characters of color in British and U.S. popular culture. But of what color and of what race? In Daniel Defoe’s original account, Friday was created as an Indigenous character. But over the next 200 years, he became, especially in theatre and dance, an African American figure, though usually portrayed by a white actor in blackface. David Roediger considers the circumstances and limits of this transformation and what it says about the history of race.
Speaker's Bio
David Roediger teaches American Studies and History at University of Kansas. He was born in southern Illinois and educated in public schools in that state, with a B.S. in Education from Northern Illinois University. He holds a PhD from Northwestern, where he studied under Sterling Stuckey. Roediger has taught labor, immigrant, and Black history at University of Missouri, University of Illinois, and University of Minnesota. He worked as an editor of the Frederick Douglass Papers at Yale University. His books include Seizing Freedom, The Sinking Middle Class, The Wages of Whiteness, How Race Survived U.S. History, and Working toward Whiteness. Roediger’s The Production of Difference (with Elizabeth Esch) won the International Labor History Association Book Prize. Roediger also has received Merle Curti Prize from the Organization of American Historians, the C.L.R. James Prize from the Working Class Studies Association, and the lifetime achievement award from the Society for the Study of Multiethnic Literature of the US. He is past president of the American Studies Association. Roediger’s autobiography, An Ordinary White: My Antiracist Education, appears next March from Fordham University Press.