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EPILOGUE Martin R. Delany and the Politics of Ethnology I desire to dare do, what white men have ever dared and done.—Martin R.Delany In chapter 7 I suggest that Harriet Jacobs's dual strategy for negotiating the precarious bodypolitics that dominated her agewas to carve a literary space for her transcendent, disembodied will and to reverse the gaze of spectatorship, to become a "peeper" who unmasks the men of science and law and theiroppressive discourses. Frances E. W.Harper similarly reverses the politics of the gaze, but perhapsgoesa step further, directing her readers to spectate upon the intemperate , unruly bodies of Caucasian characters. As I argue in chapter 3, this rhetorical strategy enabled her to question the physiological basis for citizenship , a power explicitly reserved prior to Reconstruction for those whose bodies were white and male and, many would argue, implicitly reserved for them thereafter. I also proposedthat Harperwas able to forge figurativelya reversalof power through her representations of corporeality. Yet one might ask how far removed Harper's strategy is from that of Margaret Fuller, whose tendency to transfer unwanted corporeal associations onto the bodies of Native Americans, as I suggest in chapter 5, could be considered a regrettable rhetorical and political gesture. Don't both strategies, in effect, flirt dangerously with reconfirming the polarization that the authors presumably want to transcend? Or does the question of which race they draw attention to (or deflect it from) influence our assessment of their textual body politics? Can we call Harper's strategy, for example, a move toward deconstruction, a reversal of body politics that splinters the corporealnarratives ofher day? Can we then juxtapose this with Fuller's strategy, which seems to replicate in a conventional manner the trope of the "fated" Indian? Does it matter that one author was embodied white and one black? Or do both strategies—and those of the other authors in this study— suggest that scientists and medical experts of the era dominate the discourseof E P I L O G U E 227 the body in a way that, if not totalizing, nonetheless defines the terms of the debate? These questions lead us back to the queries I pose in my introduction. There I ask: Can the new politics of the bodybe liberating or useful? How can authors engage in a critique of nineteenth-century sciences if those very discourses define them as incapable of participating in the debate? When and why do authors decide to deploy "strategic essentialism" and speak the knowledge that comes from their body or from their embodied experiences? How do authors negotiate the dynamics of spectatorship either in relation to their own bodies or the bodies of those they represent? The previous chapters explore these concerns in relation to particular texts and specific authors. Yet I also suggest in my introduction that these inquires lead to the one that dominates this book: Can we combat the disturbingly divisive nature ofthe politics of the body through the imaginary space that literature provides? As I indicate above in relation to Fuller and Harper, such a question may lead us to the uncomfortable conclusion that an author's corporeality matters in terms of the politicsof the work. It may lead us, for example, to consider a claim to an "essential" feminine nature—such as the "genius of woman"—liberational when voiced by Fuller but oppressive when suggested by Emerson, or to suggest that proposing specific traits of the English/American/Saxon smacks of racial superiority when voiced by Emerson, Fuller, or Whitman (or any number of nineteenthcentury writers) but somehow sounds different when proposed by African American authors. To consider this dilemma further, it seems natural to turn to the work of Martin R. Delany, a man who, perhaps more than any other African American in the nineteenth century, confronted and interrogated the science of race, forging a theoretical/scientific basis for what he believed to be the destiny of colored people throughout the world. By briefly considering three pivotal texts by Delany—The Condition, Elevation , Emigration and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States (1852), "The Political Destiny of the Colored Race" (1854), and Principia of Ethnology (1879)—in relation to the issues this study has explored, we can understand better how theories of the body, bolstered by science, cannot be conceived solely as a discourse defining women and people of color in a strictly hierarchal manner. Rather, as the previous chapters suggest, despite the disadvantage at which...

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