HAIG Lecture

Shannon Reed, associate professor of English, will speak this Thursday Feb 10th about “Crusoe’s Friday” with respect to the famous novel of Defoe and its later adaptations, such as NBC’s 2008 television series “Crusoe.” When adaptations of Defoe’s novel attempt to revise its racial politics, the biggest changes occur in the character Friday, whereas Robinson Crusoe remains relatively stable across a variety of adaptations: an entrepreneur or adventurer, he is shipwrecked, alone at first, on an uninhabited (or at least infrequently inhabited) island; often there are goats, sometimes there are pirates or mutineers. And usually there is Friday. But in these adaptations, even those that change or confront the issue of race, Friday is constant only in being a cipher, a blank space that can be re-written, re-raced, or even erased.