Dr. Britt Rusert’s new book, Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture sheds a contemporary light on the Black artists, scientists, clergy and activists working to critique and challenge the racist sciences of the 19th century.
Through an interdisciplinary lens, the University of Massachusetts Amherst professor hones in on the relationship between Black freedom movements and their organizers’ engagements with science as a field for social and intellectual mobilization.
Rusert shares that the premise for Fugitive Science began as “an inversion of her dissertation” about the emergence of plantations as experimental sites in the antebellum period in the United States. “When I defended my dissertation, I started to do some research into how those forms of science and experiments were covered in Black newspapers in the north,” she says.
After defending her dissertation for her Ph.D. in English, Rusert also began to look into how Black activists of the period attempted to use their art and other forms of writing as activism. The Black print culture that she unearthed included critiques of racist science that were emerging to support slavery and exposés condemning brutal forms of medical and scientific experimentation.
However, one surprising thing that Rusert found was a “pretty robust discourse on science beyond disciplines of racist science.” In the book, she includes critical figures like Martin Delany, Sarah Mapps Douglass and James McCune Smith who emerged as influential Black scientists writing in the field.
In another chapter, Rusert writes on the Black intellectuals who challenged Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia in which he describes people of African descent as inferior to Whites intellectually. Figures including David Walker, James W.C. Pennington and Hosea Easton “through their shared hatred of Jefferson,” began to write to and among one another creating a body of Black scientific writing and work throughout the mid-nineteenth century.
“It’s actually the first time in the tradition of African-American literature that Black writers are really writing to one another in this particular way,” Rusert tells Diverse. “But they are also writing to each other and citing each other and it becomes its own kind of scientific network in Black New England, and I thought that was really fascinating.”
