Fugitive science
Subtitle: empiricism and freedom in early African American culture
By: Britt Rusert
Series: America and the long 19th century; America and the long 19th century
Publisher: New York University Press
Published: 2017
Language: eng
Number of pages: 293
ISBN-13: 9781479885688; 9781479847662
Subjects: Race relations; Sociology of Knowledge; Intellectual life; Civil rights; Racism; Empiricism; Science; African Americans; African American intellectuals; History
Description: "Fugitive Science excavates this story, uncovering the dynamic scientific engagements and experiments of African American writers, performers, and other cultural producers who mobilized natural science and produced alternative knowledges in the quest for and name of freedom. Literary and cultural critics have a particularly important role to play in uncovering the history of fugitive science since these engagements and experiments often happened, not in the laboratory or the university, but in print, on stage, in the garden, church, parlor, and in other cultural spaces and productions. Routinely excluded from the official spaces of scientific learning and training, black cultural actors transformed the spaces of the everyday into laboratories of knowledge and experimentation"--Introduction.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 231-276) and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction; title: The Banneker age : Black afterlives of early national science; title: Comparative anatomies : re-visions of racial science; title: Experiments in freedom : fugitive science in transatlantic performance; title: Delany's comet : Blake, or, The huts of America and the science fictions of slavery; title: Sarah's cabinet : fugitive science in and beyond the parlor; title: Conclusion.