Enfleshing Science: Narrating Slavery’s Archive in the History of Science and Medicine through African-American Literature

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the formalization of scientific and medical practice as established institutions was well underway in both the U.S. and Europe. These developments, however, were not separable from the infrastructures of racial capitalism and formal colonialism that organized the Atlantic world. Political and cultural discourses that sought to legitimate and uphold transnational systems of chattel slavery and formal colonialism also structured how science was mobilized by national powers in the nineteenth century. These projects, in turn, left an extensive record cataloging the black lives that came into contact with scientific and medical institutions as experimental subjects and bodies of study. I argue that this archive presents a conceptual and methodological “problem” in the history of science and medicine, as the written record left in slavery’s wake is structured by both the disappearance and reappearance of black life. My project begins with the question: What are the narrative and aesthetic forms best suited to narrate the history of chattel slavery alongside its repeated entanglements with medical and scientific knowledge in the Atlantic world? How do we recover the specificity of black life in these settings of knowledge production and experimentation, when the scientific and cultural apparatus behind such machinations would insist on withholding access to those stories?

I focus on the case study of Sarah Baartman – a South African Khoikhoi woman who was toured by her captors from 1810 to 1815 in England and France as the subject of theatrical and eventually scientific spectacle. This thesis attempts to develop – through a multilayered consideration of literary texts, archival records, historiographic method, aesthetics, and performance around the figure of Sarah Baartman – a narrative theory that accounts for the disappearances of black life in the history of science and medicine. I argue that the written record of her life Baartman pre-structures and limits explorations of her story due to its form and constitution – the archive’s specific materiality and conditions of recovery produce a normative story that scholars can tell about her life. I propose to “read against the grain” of this archive by focusing on Baartman’s presence in the scientific archive and instead scrutinizing how cultural and scientific discourses collaborated to construct her racialized representation in the written record. I then move to discuss how Suzan-Lori Parks’ 1996 play Venus embodies this methodology of “reading against the grain” at the literary and aesthetic level by denaturalizing the visual and discursive economy of racial slavery and scientific empiricism that surrounded Baartman in her life and death. This discussion concludes with a proposed framework for narrating the constraints of slavery’s archive in the history of science and medicine, generalizing Parks’ treatment of Baartman’s life through a study of Toni Morrison’s 2012 novel Home and Gayl Jones’ 1975 novel Corregidora.