Roderick McDonald Earns Guggenheim Fellowship
Dr. Roderick McDonald has spent the entirety of his career researching and teaching Caribbean, Latin American, African American and African history, but if his enthusiasm for the material has flagged one bit, it’s impossible to detect in his manner. A member of Rider’s Department of History since 1981, McDonald gallops through a conversation about his work like a master horseman, experienced and well-attuned to his material. In fact, he’ll punctuate the occasional point by heading directly for a page from one of the thousands of books that literally cover the walls of his office. “I had to leave a space for the light switch,” he conceded.
McDonald’s enthusiasm for his research isn’t his alone. Earlier this month, he became the first faculty member in the history of Rider University to earn a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. A native of Aberdeen, Scotland, McDonald was awarded one of just 180 fellowships for 2009-10 by the Guggenheim Foundation for artists, scholars and scientists in all fields from across the United States and Canada. More than 3,000 applied for the coveted grants.
“It’s about as good as it gets for folks like me,” said McDonald, whose fellowship is in the discipline of the humanities; specifically, Iberian and Latin American history. “When you look at the history of the fellowship and the list of past winners, I’d have to say it’s about as prestigious a thing as I could ever hope to achieve.”
McDonald’s excitement is understandable. In becoming a Guggenheim Fellow, he joins such luminaries as E.E. Cummings, who earned a fellowship in 1933 for creative arts; Richard Wright in 1939 for creative arts; John Updike in 1959 for creative arts; Henry Kissinger in 1965 for political science; Frank Oppenheimer in 1965 for natural sciences; Kurt Vonnegut in 1967 for creative arts/fiction; and Isaac Witkin in 1981 for creative arts.
Perhaps McDonald is most proud to note the inclusion of John Hope Franklin, who received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1950 for his work in the humanities. Franklin, who died in March at the age of 94, was the author of the 1947 book From Slavery to Freedom and is credited by some as having virtually created the discipline of African American Studies. According to McDonald, Franklin’s work provided illumination along a path that had not previously been brightly lit, and helped steer him when he began his own education in Scotland.
McDonald’s studies of imperial Britain at the University of Aberdeen yielded a related interest in the Caribbean and its people, he explained. At the same time, Civil Rights developments were also shifting historical perspectives, creating what he called “an exciting time” to infuse his interest in Caribbean history with that of America. He has spent the time since, which included the completion of his Ph.D. at the University of Kansas in 1981, “trying to understand the world of the slaves,” he said.
“My research is primarily in the enslavement of Africans and African Americans, the world created under the most brutal of conditions,” McDonald explained. “There is so much to teach, and I see myself as someone who is not just in this profession to learn, but to disseminate information – in this case, the history of Africans in the Americas. There is a great deal of social value to the students.”
McDonald was selected for his Guggenheim Fellowship to support his book project, The Ethnography and Pornography of Slavery: Dr. Jonathan Troup’s Journal of Dominica, 1789-1791, which is based on the 18th-century Scottish physician’s chronicle of his sojourn to the West Indies. Troup’s stay there engaged his ethnographic interest in the island’s African and African-Dominican peoples, but also drew him into a world of licentiousness, debauchery and profligate – even predatory – sexuality typical of liaisons between European white men and Dominica’s women of color, whether enslaved or free.
Troup, who collected materials for the Royal Society while in Dominica , was “a compulsive diarist, and an interested observer of all things scientific,” McDonald said. “He was an accomplished musician as well, and he tried to depict the dances of the Africans to explain their music. He wrote extremely seriously and thoroughly about his observations.”
But Troup’s own brutally candid observations and notes expose a man who also “became a sexual predator as he entered this world, and indulged his sexual interests with extraordinary license,” McDonald revealed. “Everyone knows how women, particularly enslaved women, were exploited and raped, but what is unusual is the detail Troup employed to chronicle his own activities, using some incredibly explicit and obscene language.”
The challenge of The Ethnography and Pornography of Slavery, therefore, is the attempt by McDonald to “balance two aspects of this man’s life,” he said. “He was a thoughtful, engaged ethnographer, while, at the same time, a sexual predator – a molester, really. A sensitivity to the recipients of Troup’s violence creates the hardest challenge.”
While Troup exhibited a clear disregard for the African Dominican women, he did go to great lengths to note his cultural findings. “In terms of medical practice, most Europeans were extremely dismissive of these Caribbean folkways, but Troup recorded how African healers would treat illness and injury,” McDonald said. “He also wrote extensively on the way language was shaped by the meeting of Europeans and Africans in the Caribbean in the 18th century; it was a very serious reportage.”
A resident of Philadelphia, McDonald received additional support for The Ethnography and Pornography of Slavery from the National Endowment for the Humanities, which awarded him a 2009-10 NEH Fellowship for research at the Winterthur Museum in Delaware on the material culture of slavery.
He is also the editor of the Journal of the Early Republic, published for the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic and considered to be the premier publication on the history of the United States between 1776 and 1861.
