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

In a 2016 essay entitled "Disappointment in the Archives of Black Freedom" (Social Text 33.4 [2016]: 19-33), Britt Rusert attempts to come to terms with antebellum black women' s absorption in sentimentalism. Rusert describes her encounter with these women' s friendship albums from the 1830s to the 1880s as one wracked with disappointment since some of these materials

are not immediately recognizable as black cultural objects. They share many formal and thematic similarities with white women' s friendship albums, and the flowery rhetoric and emphasis on love and friendship do not immediately lend themselves to an understanding of the machinations of racism, state power, resistance, and other master narratives that structure our understanding of the black past.

(quotation on 23)

Rather than strive to "excavate some oblique point of agency or subversion" from such objects, Rusert proposes that twenty-first-century scholars embrace disappointment as an affective relation to the archive as well as a way to conceptualize the "frustration[s] that surely shaped the expressions of free women of color" from the period ("Disappointment" 22, 27). Notwithstanding the arrogant presentism one must have to reproach antebellum African Americans for producing ways and means of living that "do not live up to what [a contemporary scholar has] in mind," it' s curious one would be "disappointed" in African Americans' participation in dominant mores such as sentimentalism: all evidence demonstrates social belonging in the American polity was the prevailing ethos of free black people' s cultural and intellectual productions. Nevertheless, how disappointment shapes Rusert' s Fugitive Science—a study of antebellum African Americans' "engagements with, critiques of, and responses to racial science [e.g., ethnology and phrenology], as well as other forms of natural science [e.g., astronomy]" (4)—remains an essential question in determining the book' s contributions. Indeed, Rusert refers to what would become Fugitive Science in "Disappointment," hence the connection is hers, not mine.

In short, the forms of disappointment that essay describes play no role in Fugitive Science' s methodology or analyses; two interrelated reasons account for their absence. The first concerns an underlying conceptual fixation: to map ideologies and politics from the mid-twentieth century to the present onto every nineteenth-century act, figure, and strategy that Rusert considers. As she writes in the book' s final two sentences,

From Frederick Douglass' radical repurposing of scientific texts to Sarah Mapps Douglass' s health activism in Philadelphia, the literary, cultural, and performative histories of fugitive science reveal that the twentieth- and twenty-first century struggle against racist science, medical exploitation, and health disparities has roots in the long nineteenth century. Fugitive science thus anticipates negotiations of science in the contemporary moment, even as its legacy refuses to be captured and contained in the present.

(229-30)

Early black thinkers and cultural producers don' t disappoint if they "anticipate" better politics, which is to say, one' s own politics. Such "anticipations" emerge in Fugitive Science from ideology rather historiographical reasoning. For instance, in a chapter that centers on the pedagogical work of reformer Sarah Mapps Douglass, Rusert argues that in Mapps Douglass' s offering of "medical and health education to black women of different social status and class in Philadelphia," thus serving "a community that was often barred from access to city hospitals and doctors," "we see Douglass engaging in something like the Black Panther Party' s health activism" (200). The leap from an elite, bourgeois free person of color of antebellum Philadelphia like Mapps Douglass to the Black Panther Party will strike many readers as jarring. Why wouldn' t Mapps Douglass "anticipate," say, the groundbreaking medical practice and scholarship of Rebecca Lee Crumpler, the first African American woman to become a physician in the United States and author of A Book of Medical Discourses in Two Parts (1883)? Crumpler, who does not appear in Fugitive Science, will not do because she was too nineteenth century and therefore does not...