CURATION
-
from this page:
by Matrix
Network Node
-
Name:
Marcus Rediker
-
City/Place:
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
-
Country:
United States
Life & Work
-
Bio:
Marcus Rediker was born in Owensboro, Kentucky, in 1951, to Buford and Faye Rediker, the first of their two sons. His family has roots in the mines and factories of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia; he grew up in Nashville and Richmond. He attended Vanderbilt University, dropped out of school and worked in a factory for three years, and graduated with a B.A. from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1976. He went to the University of Pennsylvania for graduate study, earning an M.A. and Ph.D. in history.
Marcus taught at Georgetown University from 1982 to 1994, lived in Moscow for a year (1984-5), and is currently Distinguished Professor of Atlantic History at the University of Pittsburgh. He has, over the years, been active in a variety of social justice and peace movements, including the worldwide campaign to abolish the death penalty.
He has written, co-written, or edited twelve books, all of them histories “from below”: Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea (1987); Who Built America? (with Herbert Gutman, et al., 1989), volume one; The Many-Headed Hydra (2000, with Peter Linebaugh); Villains of All Nations (2004); The Slave Ship (2007); Many Middle Passages (2007); The Amistad Rebellion (2012); Mutiny and Maritime Radicalism in the Age of Revolution (2013); Outlaws of the Atlantic (2014); The Fearless Benjamin Lay (2017); A Global History of Runaways (2019); and Prophet against Slavery (2021, with David Lester and Paul Buhle). His writings have been translated into Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish. His books have won numerous awards, including the George Washington Book Prize, the American Studies Association’s John Hope Franklin Book Prize, the American Historical Association’s James A. Rawley Prize, and the Organization of American Historians’ Merle Curti Award (twice). He has held fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Andrew P. Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment of the Humanities.
Marcus worked with film-maker Tony Buba to produce a documentary entitled Ghosts of Amistad: In the Footsteps of the Rebels, a chronicle of a trip to Sierra Leone in which he interviewed village elders about local memory of the case and searched for the long-lost ruins of Lomboko, the slave trading factory from which the Amistad Africans were loaded aboard slave ships and sent to the New World. In 2015 the film was given the John E. O’Conner Award by the American Historical Association as the year’s best historical documentary. It has been screened in London, Paris, and Amsterdam and aired multiple times on PBS. You may visit the film’s website and watch the film here.
Marcus is also working with playwright Naomi Wallace to write a stage play entitled “The Return of Benjamin Lay,” which has been workshopped in New York, London, and Paris. He is currently serving as guest curator in the JMW Turner Gallery of Tate Britain in London. His current book project, under contract to Viking-Penguin, is a history of escaping slavery by sea in antebellum Atlantic America.
More
-
Quotes, Notes & Etc.
Haitian Art Collection
Haiti has a profound history of revolutionary self-emancipation, based on the greatest slave revolt in modern history (1791-1804). The small island nation also boasts one of the world’s greatest folk art traditions. It probably has more painters per capita than any other place on earth. Haiti’s artists paint sheer wonder, as André Breton, leader of the surrealist movement in Europe, discovered when he arrived in Haiti in 1945. When he saw the paintings of the vodou houngan Hector Hyppolite, he remarked that by these astonishing works he recognized his own as abject failures.
I have long been fascinated by the history and art of Haiti, more specifically how the struggles of the Haitian people, past and present, have been recorded, remembered, and disseminated in their art. I also have a special interest on the historic fusion of the beliefs, forms, and aesthetics of Haitian vodou with those of French metropolitan surrealism.
Over the last twenty years I have collected Haitian art, concentrating on four main artists: Edouard Duval-Carrié (1954- ); Célestin Faustin (1948-1981); Jacques Enguerrand Gourgue (1930-1996); and Frantz Zéphirin (1968- ).
Works from my collection have been exhibited in the United States and Europe, including nine at “Kafou: Haiti, Art and Vodou” at the Nottingham Contemporary in 2012. Two of my paintings (by Zéphirin) will be exhibited at the Venice Biennale from April to November 2022.
https://www.marcusrediker.com/marcus-redikers-haitian-art-collection/
Clips (more may be added)
"In a small world great things are possible." Mathematics in the Matrix positions creators worldwide within reach of each other, step by step by step...
In this matrix it's not which pill you take, it's which pathways you take, pathways originating in the sprawling cultural matrix of Brazil: Indigenous, African, Sephardic and then Ashkenazic, European, Asian... Ground Zero is the Recôncavo, delineated by the Bay of All Saints, earthly center of gravity for the disembarkation of enslaved human beings — and the sublimity they created — presided over by the ineffable Black Rome of Brazil: Salvador da Bahia.
("Black Rome" is an appellation per Caetano Veloso, son of the Recôncavo, via Mãe Aninha of Ilê Axé Opô Afonjá.)
Caetano Veloso
THE MATRIX MISSION: What do Jimmy Cliff, Jimmy Page, and Dionne Warwick all have in common? They've all lived in Bahia and Dionne is moving back (visitors include Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Spike Lee, Michael Jackson, Beyoncé, David Byrne and Sting, among others). But so have lived and now live untold numbers of Bahian creators whose magisterial work has never had the major media means to reach beyond limited surroundings. In order that the creators of Bahia might have global reach, ALL creators must have global reach.
QED: 'mātriks / "source" / from "mater", Latin for "mother". We're real mothers for ya! (thank you Johnny "Guitar" Watson)
Susan Rogers
"Dear Sparrow: I am thrilled to receive your email! Thank you for including me in this wonderful matrix."
—Susan Rogers: Personal recording engineer for Prince, inc. "Purple Rain", "Sign o' the Times", "Around the World in a Day"... Director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory
"Thanks! It looks great!....I didn't write 'Cantaloupe Island' though...Herbie Hancock did! Great Page though, well done! best, Randy"
"We appreciate you including Kamasi in the matrix, Sparrow."
—Banch Abegaze: manager, Kamasi Washington
"This is super impressive work ! Congratulations ! Thanks for including me :)))"
—Clarice Assad: Pianist and composer with works performed by Yo Yo Ma and orchestras around the world
"Dear Sparrow, Many thanks for this – I am touched!"
—Julian Lloyd-Webber: UK's premier cellist; brother of Andrew Lloyd Webber (Evita, Jesus Christ Superstar, Cats, Phantom of the Opera...)
"Thanks, this is a brilliant idea!!"
—Alicia Svigals: World's premier klezmer violinist
Developed here in the Historic Center of Salvador da Bahia ↓ .
Bule Bule (Assis Valente)
"♫ The time has come for these bronzed people to show their value..."
Recommend somebody and you will appear on that person's page. Somebody recommends you and they will appear on your page.
Both pulled by the inexorable mathematical gravity of the small world phenomenon to within range of everybody inside.
And by logical extension, to within range of all humanity outside as well.
8 billion human beings tend to within six degrees of connection to each other.
In a small world great things are possible.
I'm Pardal here in Brazil (that's "Sparrow" in English). The deep roots of this project are in Manhattan, where Allen Klein (managed the Beatles and The Rolling Stones) called me about royalties for the estate of Sam Cooke... where Jerry Ragovoy (co-wrote Time is On My Side, sung by the Stones; Piece of My Heart, Janis Joplin of course; and Pata Pata, sung by the great Miriam Makeba) called me looking for unpaid royalties... where I did contract and licensing for Carlinhos Brown's participation on Bahia Black with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock...
...where I rescued unpaid royalties for Aretha Franklin (from Atlantic Records), Barbra Streisand (from CBS Records), Led Zeppelin, Mongo Santamaria, Gilberto Gil, Astrud Gilberto, Airto Moreira, Jim Hall, Wah Wah Watson (Melvin Ragin), Ray Barretto, Philip Glass, Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd for his interest in Bob Marley compositions, Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam and others...
...where I worked with Earl "Speedo" Carroll of the Cadillacs (who went from doo-wopping as a kid on Harlem streetcorners to top of the charts to working as a janitor at P.S. 87 in Manhattan without ever losing what it was that made him special in the first place), and with Jake and Zeke Carey of The Flamingos (I Only Have Eyes for You)... stuff like that.
Yeah this is Bob's first record contract, made with Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd of Studio One and co-signed by his aunt because he was under 21. I took it to Black Rock to argue with CBS' lawyers about the royalties they didn't want to pay (they paid).
I built the Matrix below (I'm below left, with David Dye & Kim Junod for U.S. National Public Radio) among some of the world's most powerfully moving music, some of it made by people barely known beyond village borders. Or in the case of Sodré, his anthem A MASSA — a paean to Brazil's poor ("our pain is the pain of a timid boy, a calf stepped on...") — having blasted from every radio between the Amazon and Brazil's industrial south, before he was silenced. The Matrix started with Sodré, with João do Boi, with Roberto Mendes, with Bule Bule, with Roque Ferreira... music rooted in the sugarcane plantations of Bahia. Hence our logo (a cane cutter).
Matrix founding creators are behind "one of 10 of the best (radios) around the world", per The Guardian. If you create too, join them in the Matrix.
This list is random, and incomplete. Reload the page for another list.