Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture

America and the Long 19th Century Series

by Britt Rusert

Exposes the influential work of a group of black artists to confront and refute scientific racism.

Traversing the archives of early African American literature, performance, and visual culture, Britt Rusert uncovers the dynamic experiments of a group of black writers, artists, and performers. Fugitive Science chronicles a little-known story about race and science in America. While the history of scientific racism in the nineteenth century has been well-documented, there was also a counter-movement of African Americans who worked to refute its claims.

Far from rejecting science, these figures were careful readers of antebellum science who linked diverse fields—from astronomy to physiology—to both on-the-ground activism and more speculative forms of knowledge creation. Routinely excluded from institutions of scientific learning and training, they transformed cultural spaces like the page, the stage, the parlor, and even the pulpit into laboratories of knowledge and experimentation. From the recovery of neglected figures like Robert Benjamin Lewis, Hosea Easton, and Sarah Mapps Douglass, to new accounts of Martin Delany, Henry Box Brown, and Frederick Douglass, Fugitive Science makes natural science central to how we understand the origins and development of African American literature and culture.

This distinct and pioneering book will spark interest from anyone wishing to learn more on race and society.

Genres: Science, History, American History, Race, Nonfiction, Environment, 19th Century

320 pages, Hardcover

First published April 18, 2017

About the author

Britt Rusert is an assistant professor in the W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at University of Massachusetts Amherst and author of Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture.

Reviews

[Jamieanna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Question/Problem: How did Early African American writers respond to 18th and 19th century discourses of racial science?
The Answer: In Chapter 1, Rusert close reads the anti-racist writings of Benjamin Banneker, David Walker, James W.C. Pennington and James McCune to illuminate how they responded to and rebutted the racist writings, and monogenism, of Thomas Jefferson (Notes on the State of Virginia, 1785, 1787) and other similar thinkers of the time. In Chapter 2, Rusert focuses on the writings of Robert Benjamin Lewis (Light and Truth, 1844) and Hosea Easton, and reads these authors’ use of biblical stories to disrupt the racist ideology that was used to justify slavery. In Chapter 3, Rusert builds ideas about the “politics of visibility” by investigating Henry “Box” Frown’s theatrical performativity. Chapter 4 provides Rusert’s most engaging and unique readings: she examines Martin Delany’s Blake ((1859, 1861–1862) and his use of “extraplanetary bodies” to critique racism and slavery. Rusert demonstrates how “the immeasurable, vital force of blackness challenges the scientific imperative to separate and classify the ‘races of mankind'” (176). In Chapter 5, Rusert focuses on the African American educator/activist Sarah Mapps Douglass, who was known in the antebellum parlors/classrooms of Philadelphia. Douglass was an important figure of “Black respectability” (198). Rusert describes how Douglass worked to provide discourses of respectability that then gave Black women access to “medical authority that was increasingly being denied to them in the home by mid-century amid the beginnings of medicine’s professionalization” (199-200). Throughout these readings, Rusert identifies three kinds of “fugitive science”: 1) oppositional, or work to explicitly intervene in scientific discourse, 2) practical, or work that helps instrumentalize science and technology in ways that advance emancipation, and 3) speculative, or the science that imagines the unimaginable and pushes scientific inquiry beyond possibility.
Method: Rusert describes an archive of the shadows, of “African American science writing in the antebellum period” (8) that is often overlooked; this is the archive of fugitive science. Fugitive science is amalgamate, innovative, subversive, “dynamic and diverse archive of engagements with, critiques of, and responses to” (4) the antiblack racial science of the long nineteenth century. Theoretically, Rusert bolsters her methodology with Foucault’s The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1966). Fugitive science is a counter-science, propelled by a “subterranean politics and furtive insurgency” (17) that confronts the “scientific” racist ideologies. Thus, Rusert reminds us that science, and knowledge, is an “assemblage of difference fields and practices that could be dismantled, reassembled, and redirected” (132).
Principles and Assumptions: Rusert defines “science” broadly, in order to point to the emergence of racial ideologies as early as the 1600s that were then used to deploy metaphors of excavation and laboratories. In this way, Rusert, demonstrates how “black actors transformed the spaces of the everyday into laboratories of knowledge and experimentation” (4). Ruserts expansion of “science” includes conjuring, performance, astrology, mysticism, mesmerism, and imaginative speculation: “The term pseudoscience routinely works to exclude both nonprofessional and non-white practitioners from the field of knowledge production while discrediting valuable knowledge systems of the indigenous and the enslaved, including conjuring, astrology, and other forms of mysticism…I consider a number of fields, from phrenology and mesmerism to conjuring and astrology, as legitimate knowledge systems since they were valued and taken seriously by the writers, intellectuals, and performers under discussion. Early African American practitioners repeatedly questioned the very definition of science, radically expanding its boards while presenting themselves as vital scientific agents who had the power to manipulate and experiment with the objects of the natural world” (6-7).
Dialogics. Sharpe, C. In the Wake. (2016); after Susan Scott Parrishs’s examination of the significant role that enslaved and indigenous peoples played in the production of British metropolitan scientific knowledge. // too many to list
Purpose: We must rethink the ways we define, recognize and engage with science and knowledge. How do we delimit these categories, as well as the categories of our own intellectual activity? “By taking science more seriously in African American studies, and by recognizing the dynamism of natural science in the antebellum period, new light may be shed on the origins and contours of early African American cultural production, particularly the permeable boundaries of and surprising cross-fertilizations between what we today rigidly\ categorize as “art” and “science” (21).

[Brianna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Academic engagement that proves as worthwhile and creative as the figures discussed. Analysis that goes toe-to-toe in gusto.

[Justin · Rating 3 out of 5]

⁹I really like that this book attempts to grant agency to African Americans by asserting that race science was not merely something done to them, but something which they attempted to subvert and overturn. However, Rusert also seems far too comfortable with the idea of race science in general. It's as if the book is saying that race sciencr can be a force for good as long as progressive people are practicing it, despite that Rusert acknowledges as various points that race is not real, meaning that race science is always going to be a destructive force inherently. By the end I'm left confused as to what the book is saying about our present moment.

[Erica · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such an important addition to the literature on early national and antebellum science! Lucid enough to use in an upper-level undergraduate classroom (and incredibly important alongside Jefferson's -Notes on the State of Virginia- and other major early national texts). I hope Rusert is opening up a whole new wing of study in the history and cultures of science.

[ػᶈᶏϾӗ]

Not what I was expecting, but really good in its own way.

[Mills College Library]

323.1196 R951 2017