University Times

Natalie Zemon Davis, Henry Charles Lea Professor of History at Princeton University, will deliver this year's Edward P. Thompson Memorial Lecture today, April 11, at 7:30 p.m. in the Kurtzman Room of the William Pitt Union.

Davis will lecture on cultural hybridity, the linking of history and literature, the past and the present. The title of her talk is "Braided Histories: Suriname and England, Stedman and Joanna." A follow-up discussion of Davis's lecture will be held tomorrow, April 12, at 10 a.m. in the history department lounge, 3P11 Forbes Quadrangle.

A past president of the American Historical Association, Davis is the author of several books, including "Women on the Margin: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives," "The Return of Martin Guerre" and "Society and Culture in Early Modern France." "Natalie is a very powerful and important figure in what we broadly call cultural history," said Marcus Rediker, a faculty member in Pitt's history department and coordinator of the Thompson lecture series. "She's one of the people who in the mid-1970s began to investigate cultural questions in history, which has really grown into one of the most creative areas of contemporary historical research." According to Rediker, the roots of Davis's work go back to the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and the demand for new areas of historical study that arose out of them, such as African American, working class and women's histories. "Out of that grew a new concern with the dynamics of culture and history," said Rediker. "And that tendency has become more and more important as the cultural wars going on in America these days have become more important. This is a time when there is a very broad sensitivity to questions of culture." Davis's lecture will explore the linking of history and literature in the guise of two people who were not only from different cultures but different races who lived in the 1770s and fell in love.

John Stedman was a mercenary soldier from England who was hired to help put down a revolt of African slaves known as the "Saramaka Maroons" in 1772 on the Dutch island of Suriname off the South American coast.

The Saramakas were mostly people who had escaped from plantations and hid in the jungle interior of Suriname, where they established their own communities. Maroon was a word used at the time to describe people who had fled from slavery and created a separate community.

"The Maroon communities of America became a very important symbol of the possibility of freedom for all slaves," Rediker noted.

Stedman and the other mercenaries were never able to defeat the Saramakas. During the time he spent on the island, though, Stedman fell in love with an African slave, Joanna. Back in England in the 1790s, Stedman published an account of the revolt, "Narrative of a Five Years Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Suriname." The work was lavishly illustrated by the English artist William Blake and has fascinated people ever since. Most recently, the Stedman and Joanna story was used by Caribbean writer Beryl Gilroy in her 1991 novel "Stedman and Joanna, A Love in Bondage." Davis will discuss the meeting of European, African and American cultures in the Stedman and Joanna relationship, and the ways that different cultures encounter each other.

"It's a wonderful story," Rediker said. "And Natalie is not only going to talk about this relationship, but also about how various people have written about it. She is interested in the way in which this love story has been treated through the years." Rediker compares Davis's approach to cultural history to that of a painter. He said she "has a real knack for human portraiture" and "is exquisite in her ability to evoke individual lives and cultural interactions. That is a very strong quality in all of her work." Davis's popularity is reflected by the fact that this year's Thompson lecture has attracted the largest group of sponsors to date.

University departments and programs sponsoring this year's lecture include Africana studies, anthropology, communication, English, history, political science, religious studies, sociology, cultural studies, Western European studies, women's studies and the Honors College.

Other sponsors are the history department and College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University, and the history department at Duquesne University.

Inaugurated three years ago, the Thompson lecture series honors the late social historian Edward Thompson, who died in 1993. Thompson was considered by many to be one of the most influential historians of the modern era. He taught at Pitt in 1975.

–Mike Sajna