Fugitive Science

Abstract

This book offers a new history of race and science in the nineteenth century through the lens of early African American literature, visual culture, and performance. Across five chapters, the book traces the experiments of black writers, artists, performers, and largely self-taught scientists who crafted sophisticated critiques of antebellum racial science and its effects on society. Far from rejecting science, these figures linked natural science to both on-the-ground activism and more speculative forms of worldmaking. 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, the book seeks to make natural science central to how we understand the origins and development of African American literature.

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