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B ritt R usert . Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture .

2018; Oxford University Press; Volume: 123; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/ahr/rhy318

1937-5239

Gregory D. Smithers,

Vietnamese History and Culture Studies

Britt Rusert’s Fugitive Science adds to a growing body of scholarship that examines African American responses to racial “science” during the long nineteenth century. Rusert’s analysis is divided among five chapters, in addition to her useful introductory and concluding statements. While her main focus is on African American critiques of “racist science” and the mobilization of “scientific knowledge in anti-slavery activism,” Rusert also reminds literary and cultural studies scholars just how important it is for them to engage with this “scientific history,” while upbraiding historians for the inadequacies of their analysis (4). Rusert begins with a useful introduction that defines “science” broadly, pinpoints the emergence of racial ideologies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and deploys the metaphors of excavation and laboratories to demonstrate how “black actors transformed the spaces of the everyday into laboratories of knowledge and experimentation” (4). This framework guides the analysis of the book. We see this in chapter 1, for example, when Rusert dissects the antiracist writings of Benjamin Banneker, David Walker, James W. C. Pennington, and James McCune Smith. These writers responded specifically to the racist writings of Thomas Jefferson and the “Jeffersonian school” inspired by his work. Starting with Banneker, who used monogenesis to rebut Jeffersonian ideas about African inferiority, and concluding with McCune Smith, who labeled notions of racial purity as little more than “negro hate,” Rusert provides us with a timely reminder of the increasingly hostile and intolerant cultural environment in which these authors published their works (37, 54).