MARCUS REDIKER

History Department's 2008 Callahan Lecturer

The Floating Dungeon: A History of the Slave Ship

March 31 at 7:30pm · Mountainlair Gluck Theatre

Marcus Rediker graduated with a bachelor’s degree from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1976. He received a master’s degree and Ph.D. in history from the University of Pennsylvania. He is currently a professor and the chair of the department of history at the University of Pittsburgh.

Rediker’s work focuses on working people and their movements. His work has informed his activism on a variety of social justice issues including movements against the Vietnam War, the interventions of the U.S. government in Central America in the 1980s, apartheid in South Africa, environmental destruction, and all forms of exploitation and oppression based on race, class, and gender. In recent years, he has worked to win a new trial for Pennsylvania death row prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal and to abolish capital punishment in the U.S., and throughout the world.

His latest work, The Slave Ship: A Human History (2007), is garnering international acclaim.

In The Slave Ship, Rediker draws on 30 years of research in maritime archives to create an unprecedented history of these vessels and the human drama acted out on their rolling decks. He reconstructs in chilling detail the lives, deaths, and terrors of captains, sailors, and the enslaved aboard a “floating dungeon” trailed by sharks.

From the young African kidnapped from his village and sold to the slaver by a neighboring tribe; to the would-be priest who takes a job as a sailor on a slave ship only to be horrified by the evil he sees; to the captain who relishes having “a hell of my own,” Rediker illuminates the lives of people who were thought to have left no trace. This is a tale of tragedy and terror, but also an epic of resilience, survival, and the creation of something entirely new, something that could only be called African-American. Marcus Rediker restores the slave ship to its rightful place alongside the plantation as a formative institution of slavery, as a place where a profound and still haunting history of race, class, and modern capitalism was made.

Robin Blackburn, distinguished professor at the New School for Social Research and an author, calls The Slave Ship, “a tour de force” that “enables him [Rediker] to reconstruct the life – and death – of those on the slave trading vessels more vividly and convincingly than any previous historian.”

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker says, “For all Americans, and indeed all those who live in the Western world who have profited by, or suffered from, the endless brutality of the slave trade, during all its centuries and into the present, this book is homework of the most insistent order.”

Rediker holds fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment of the Humanities, and the Andrew P. Mellon Foundation. He resides in Pittsburgh, Pa., with his wife, Wendy Z. Goldman, professor of Russian/Soviet history at Carnegie Mellon University. They have two children, Zeke and Eva, and a bulldog named Jellybean.

This presentation is co-sponsored by the WVU Center for Black Culture.