The Banneker Age

This chapter identifies Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (1785, 1787) as a “founding text” for a vibrant genealogy of black scientific discourse in the early national and antebellum periods, from Benjamin Banneker’s 1791 correspondence with Jefferson to David Walker’s 1829 Appeal, James Pennington’s 1844 ethnology, and James McCune Smith’s essays on Notes, written in 1859, on the cusp of the Civil War. It also examines the widespread memorialization of Benjamin Banneker by African Americans in the antebellum period, an act that, among other things, used Banneker to imagine the beginning of a new scientific age, marked by anti-racism and emancipatory politics.

Delany’s Comet

Turning to the publication of Martin Delany’s serial novel, Blake; or the Huts of America, in the Anglo-African Magazine in 1859, this chapter argues that black experiments with natural science helped to produce early works of black speculative fiction. This chapter casts Blake as a work of proto–science fiction that challenged the impoverished conception of the human found in both racial science and mainstream abolitionism. It is especially interested in a cosmic and existential model of fugitivity that Delany develops in both Blake and in his writings on astronomy in the Anglo-African.

Comparative Anatomies

This chapter examines how Black and Afro-Native ethnologies published in the 1830s and early 1840s resisted the racist visual cultures of comparative anatomy, including craniology and ethnology. The ethnologies of Robert Benjamin Lewis, Hosea Easton, and James W. C. Pennington challenged the tethering of the black body to visual representations of pathology in both science and popular culture through the production of a counter-archive of visual culture, as well as through ekphrastic re-visions of the Black, Native American, and Afro-Native body.

Conclusion

The conclusion reviews the various ways that African American writers, artists, and performers responded to racial science in the age of comparative anatomy, from critiquing and deconstructing it, to parodying it and even, at times, flirting with it. Next, it turns to a genealogy of black craniology evident not only in the writings of James McCune Smith but also in anthropology work by Zora Neale Hurston to consider fugitive science’s postbellum migration from the natural sciences to the social sciences, as theories of race became increasingly tied to theories of culture rather than biology. The conclusion uses Ann Petry’s 1947 short story, “The Bones of Louella Brown,” to map the shifting relationship between black science and black literature at midcentury, a period that was witnessing the professionalization of both science and literary authorship. Finally, it turns to science in the age of neoliberalism and globalization to think about fugitive science as a model of resistance to contemporary forms of racial science, especially in genomics.

Sarah’s Cabinet

Chapter 5 moves from the scientific experiments of the black public sphere to the production of science by black women in semi-private spaces like the parlor, the garden, and the classroom. It focuses specifically on Sarah Mapps Douglass, who taught both literature and science at the Institute for Colored Youth in Philadelphia, contributed natural history discourses and paintings to the friendship albums of her friends and students, and lectured on anatomy and physiology to audiences composed of black women. In addition to surveying African American science in antebellum Philadelphia, the chapter places Douglass in a more Atlantic context, connecting her work, and body in performance, to figures like Joice Heth, Sarah Baartman, and other women who were subjected to the violent experiments and spectacles of nineteenth-century race science.

Experiments in Freedom

This chapter turns to the history of racist and anti-racist science as it was expressed in transatlantic performance from the 1830s through the 1850s. It maps a genealogy of overlap and exchange between popular scientific lecture circuits and early black performance in both the United States and Great Britain and chronicles how Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, William and Ellen Craft, and Henry Box Brown countered the widespread circulation of racist science in popular culture through dynamic performances of fugitive science in transatlantic spaces.

Introduction

The introduction lays out the historical and conceptual dimensions of fugitive science, a concept that emerges out of scholarship on fugitivity in African American studies as well as the theorization of empiricism and minor science in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. It also chronicles the embeddedness of US racial science in networks of travel, writing, and scientific exchange across the Atlantic world. Finally, it illuminates the centrality of science writing in the antebellum black print sphere, while gesturing toward those forms of vernacular science that largely eluded the print archive.