Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture by Britt Rusert (review)

Britt Rusert argues that African Americans in the nineteenth century practiced a "fugitive science" that resisted white supremacy and meditated on profound philosophical questions (p. 4). In an era before the complete professionalization of science, Rusert locates science not just in the university and the laboratory but also in the parlor and on the stage. Rusert's broad conception of science, which "veers closer to 'praxis' and 'experiment' than to the specialized study of the natural world in institutional and academic contexts," enables her to examine science in a variety of African American cultural productions (p. 5). Accordingly, she draws her sources from print materials, such as Anglo-African Magazine, manuscripts, records of stage performances, and friendship albums.

Rusert presents her analysis of fugitive science in five chapters, organized thematically. Chapter 1 considers African American responses to Thomas Jefferson's arguments for black inferiority in Notes on the State of Virginia(1785), "the ur-text against which fugitive science defined itself" (p. 33). In a letter to Jefferson, Benjamin Banneker, the African American writer and polymath, put forward himself and his almanac to refute Jefferson's denigration of black intelligence. A number of African American writers followed Banneker in striking back against Jefferson, including James W. C. Pennington, James McCune Smith, and David Walker in Appeal to Coloured Citizens of the World(1829). Chapter 2 reviews ethnologies that African American authors constructed in response to advocates of polygenesis. Polygenetic theory held that black people and white people were different species that were created separately. Robert Benjamin Lewis and Hosea Easton produced accounts of the history and anatomy of black people that argued for the shared origin of all human beings and detailed a glorious African past that African Americans could claim as their own. This chapter also analyzes the visual images produced by African American artists that provided a counternarrative to the racist caricatures of black people in the antebellum press. Chapter 3 turns to African American stage performers who practiced fugitive science for a variety of audiences. Rusert takes Frederick Douglass and Henry Box Brown as her major examples in this chapter. Brown, who successfully escaped slavery by mailing himself to the North in a crate, incorporated "experiments in mesmerism, animal magnetism, and biology into" his stage performances (p. 137). Chapter 4 focuses on Blake; or, The Huts of America(1859–1862), a "proto–science fiction" novel by Martin Delany, the African American physician and explorer of Africa (p. 153). Rusert reads Blakeas an experiment in transnational black liberation, as the title character travels around the Atlantic world and utilizes his scientific knowledge to fight slavery and oppression. Finally, chapter 5 creatively investigates the career of Sarah Mapps Douglass, an African American teacher and lecturer who worked in New York City and Philadelphia. Drawing on an eclectic collection of sources, including drawings of insects and plants that Douglass contributed to her friends' friendship albums, Rusert views Douglass as a practitioner of fugitive science who worked in spaces not usually associated with science.

Rusert's concept of fugitive science provides an intriguing framework for understanding science in the early United States. As Rusert rightly points out, written archives have not preserved much of the scientific practices of non-elite actors. For example, slaves surely developed agricultural knowledge that contributed to the everyday workings of southern plantations, but evidence of their expertise usually did not appear in written records. These hidden, fugitive scientific practices nonetheless deserve scholarly attention because they can reveal the dynamics of knowledge and skill in everyday life in the early United States. Rusert has produced a compelling initial foray into fugitive science that will prove useful for scholars studying science in the United States and beyond.