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

In Fugitive Science, Brit Rusert investigates a wide variety of scientific activities conducted by African Americans in the long nineteenth century. African Americans, she argues, were not simply objects of study to racial science. Instead, they also participated in and challenged racial science. Whether through performing the role of professional scientist, teaching others about natural history, writing public refutations to racialist tracts, or studying phrenology to undermine craniology's racial conclusions, black enthusiasts and scientists contested a racial order that portrayed them as objects of scientific curiosity rather than as people able to participate in science. By undertaking these activities, Rusert argues, her black subjects engaged in the titular "fugitive science," which she defines as "a dynamic and diverse set of engagements with, critiques of, and responses to racial science, as well as other forms of natural science" (4).

The first two chapters of Fugitive Science consider direct African American critiques of ethnology. In the first chapter, Rusert chronicles African American responses to Thomas Jefferson's racist arguments in Notes on the State of Virginia that blacks lacked the emotional and intellectual capabilities of whites. She contends that these responses constituted a rejection of Jefferson's conclusions even as their authors positioned themselves as Jefferson's scientific heirs. The second chapter takes a methodologically broader scope, including images and ekphrasis (vivid written descriptions) alongside text as examples of African Americans constructing a "counter-archive" to battle racial science.

Fugitive Science then explores how African Americans participated in a variety of science-related practices to validate their personhood or even challenge humanity as a category. Some used performances such as public demonstrations and appearances at scientific conventions to exhibit their command of sciences spanning from statistics to phrenology and counter white images of them as objects or inferior people. Other examples demonstrate the breadth of nineteenth-century fugitive science. Author and scientist Martin Delaney related his fiction to his scientific theories, creating a speculative science fiction that challenged Western divisions between subject and object. Additionally, Sarah Mapps Douglass taught science mainly to African American women in midcentury Philadelphia in schools and public talks. Both Delaney and Douglass demonstrate the pervasiveness of fugitive science in nineteenth-century African American culture.

While Rusert has admirably identified and begun to patch a hole in the history of racial science, the historiography that she builds on, such as Susan Scott Parrish's American Curiosity (2006), explores how European science gained knowledge from Africans and their descendants through a process of translation that stripped that information of its source. Rusert's project of recovering nineteenth-century African American fugitive science is a different one, but the historiographical juxtaposition points to another research question: What impact did (or could) fugitive science have on mainstream science? Rusert hints at this question when describing the geographical proximity of Sarah Mapps Douglass to racial scientist Samuel George Morton in 1840s Philadelphia but leaves it tantalizingly unanswered.

Ultimately, Fugitive Science successfully recovers the scientific practices of nineteenth-century African American writers, performers, and teachers. In doing so, it repositions them as subjects as well as objects of racial science.