Britt Rusert’s Fugitive Science is situated within the unregulated and wildly fantastical worlds of speculation that were called “science” in the nineteenth century. I am drawn to these worlds, especially the ways we can understand black visions and practices within them. As Rusert says science was “capacious and flexible” (5). The lines between the spirit world and the stars, life and death were porous. The elementals still held metaphysical properties, my personal favorite being electricity, which traverses and links the body, the environment and the cosmos. Allopathic medicine had yet to supersede long histories of curative practices, from herbalism to conjuring. Rusert’s book focuses primarily on the biological sciences, as biology was the ground on which ideas of race were founded, and contested terrain for black people. Natural science could be used to argue for racialized peoples’ inclusion “as liberal subjects,” and as “fully human,” but it was also a place where Enlightenment logics could be challenged. As Rusert says, “Natural science served as a springboard for complex meditations on being, subjectivity, and existence” (5). She refuses to dismiss all science of the time, even though it was so shaped by a deeply racist ethos. Instead she pushes us to think of the ways black people were using its language.

Rusert’s book set my archive-loving heart to fluttering. For us in the un-housed, un-indexed, fugitive world (the undercommons as Fred Moten would put it) the insurgent search for, and use of, surviving material takes agility, endurance and fortitude. Rusert’s book made me aware of the ways archives are mobile, forming and reforming depending on the questions we ask, and what the materials say back to us. In our work we redefine what an archive is. I would like to hear Rusert’s thoughts on her use of the archives.

This is not the direction I would go with this material, I thought when I first began reading. I could just ignore black people’s use of phrenology, thank you. Or dismiss ethnographies as outdated and conservative. I’d rather not have to really consider W. E. B. Du Bois’s eugenical ideas. But Rusert stays with thorny, uncomfortable lines of inquiry. She refuses to reject contemporaneous scientific methodologies, as they were the medium through which black people were thinking, imagining and enacting resistance.

As she tends to recuperative and affirming appraisals, Rusert’s guiding questions ride “a dangerous line” (218). She voices the complexities she faced with this project in her conclusion. She asks of her last chapter: “What would it mean to supplement the Hottentot paradigm with the speculative, fragmented history of black women engaging with natural science in this period, including Douglass who taught black girls about the politics of self care through physiology and anatomy? . . . Is racial science ultimately salvageable?” Rusert is well aware of the violence brought upon black subjects by Western scientific practices. But her question raises the idea that there may indeed be no “outside” of our techno-scientifically mediated world. The hope for me is that science itself can be forced to change its paradigms.

What I love are the sources Rusert examines that register the imaginative quality of that era of science. In her second chapter, Rusert examines Hosea Easton’s Treatise published in 1837. In Treatise, Hosea Easton adapts the “microscopic imaginary,” inspired by the development of new visual technologies, the microscope and telescope. “Easton takes the terms of monstrosity and the grotesque as they were produced through the optical powers of the microscope and uses them to refract the optical bind of black Americans in the North and South . . . trapped between conditions of invisibility and cruel ‘diminishment of corporeality’ under slavery and forms of spectacular hyper-visibility and surveillance in the North” (99). Rusert aptly reads his arguments of the “morphological effects of slavery.”

As Rusert’s focus on Henry Box Brown in her third chapter shows us, the boundaries between scientific practice, performance and ritual were blurred, as in the public staging and performance of medical procedures, including dissections, caesarian sections, and autopsies (the reason we have “operating theaters,” today is due to this gruesome history). Lecture tours and staged demonstrations of wondrous and shocking scientific feats were common entertainment. Rusert directs us to think about Box Brown’s performances in relation to these histories of popular science. She draws us to consider Brown’s career after his move to England, in which he staged himself as the “African biologist” (137), performing acts of mesmerism and animal magnetism, or as it was also called “electro biology” (139).

In her fourth chapter, Martin Delany’s Blake comes alive as speculative fiction, as its character Henry Holland “skips across space and time” (164). Rusert’s chapter inspired me to visit the Weekly Anglo African, in which Blake was serialized. Among other materials she cites, I am drawn to Delany’s “The Attraction of Planets,” in which he argues for “electrical attraction and repulsion in the galaxy of worlds” (162). Delany’s words echo the creative cosmological theories of the eighteenth-century utopian Charles Fourier, who declared the laws of attraction between planets. “All stars copulate,” he wrote, in a chapter suppressed by his followers.1 Delany does not take his argument that far, but I wonder if he had read Fourier’s work or if these ideas had a wider circulation in the United States than I thought. But the interest in the astronomical has a special resonance in black cultural imaginary, as the stars provided a guide to freedom for those in flight from the violent regime of slavery. The infinite is the ultimate escape and the ultimate home.

Rusert’s work is helping me situate parts of my own work. Rusert’s focus on black practitioners helped me place three of Brown’s contemporaries, working within this amorphous field of medical science, who I have been fascinated with for a while. The first is David Ruggles, a black abolitionist whose work as a founder of the Underground Railroad and journalist is relatively well known. But less is known about his work later in his life. In poor health, after years of dangerous and stressful anti-slavery activism, Ruggles underwent hydropathy treatments, and then set up his own clinic in Northampton, Massachusetts, as a “Hydropathic Practitioner” (the first in the nation).2 After being severely ill, David Ruggles had gone blind. Through treatments, he regained some of his sight and developed a heightened sensitivity in his perception. He was able to feel, through touch, the fluxes and flows of electricity through the human body, and developed the theory of what he called “cutaneous electricity.”3 I am interested in how electricity flows throughout black cultural production, religion and science, both literally and as metaphor.

The second is Paschal Beverly Randolph, who LaMonda Horton-Stallings writes about in Funk the Erotic. I discovered him through my interest in black practices of mesmerism. After a life at sea Randolph settled in Utica, New York, in 1852, advertising himself as “Dr. Paschal Beverly Randolph, clairvoyant physician and psycho-phrenologist.”4 Randolph’s specialty was sex and curing sexual ailments. “True Sex-power is God-power,” he wrote.5 Medical disorders had to do with imbalances of energy in the body. In his “medical views, human vital energy and happiness could be increased by mutual sexual fulfillment.”6 How has a politics of respectability shaped our readings of the archive, and caused us to suppress these histories of sexual radicalism? How have alternative forms of medicine and science been kept as secondary or ignored, in the name of legitimizing black intellectual abilities?

The case of Mary Seacole, a free Jamaican woman who worked as a “doctress” in the mid-century, perfectly fits Rusert’s argument.7 Raised by a mother versed in “Creole medicinal art,” Seacole travels to the Isthmus of Panama and sets up a boarding house (Wonderful Adventures, 5). Facing an outbreak of cholera, Seacole begins treating its victims, but is driven by her desire for medical knowledge. Seacole unapologetically describes her midnight “post mortem examination” of a baby who had died of the disease, using the bushes as her operating theater. While she assures readers she would not do the same again, her findings, she argues, were “decidedly useful . . . what every medical man knows” (30).

How does consideration of these black figures help us think differently about this period of scientific development? Does Seacole’s distance from formal training illuminate anything about the necessarily improvisational nature of science? About the unknown and how we face it?

In attempting to capture the state of African American life under white supremacy, I often arrive at the descriptors precarious and fraught. At the very moment from which I am writing, I likely will not have a difficult time convincing any reasonable observer of US-based affairs that this is so. Throughout my body of work, I have elected to highlight and examine the inventive ways that African Americans respond to the pernicious and ever-evolving manner in which white supremacy is exerted to control Black mobility and imagination. As African Americans dream about the potential for creating new worlds in their activism and art, there must be an acknowledgment of how the current struggle is connected to the historical project of Black liberation that political leaders, scientists, writers, visual artists, and laypersons have undertaken for centuries. In Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture, Britt Rusert expands our historical understanding of African American speculative thought at a moment in which there are considerable and essential scholarly contemplations on what we can learn from looking back as well as theories about what promises the future might hold for people of African descent in the United States.

To be sure, Rusert tends to utilize the term “speculative” throughout Fugitive Science to denote the experimental qualities of a particular action. The whole of the text, however, most certainly aligns with what I refer to in my own work on imagined and actual flights undertaken by African Americans in reaction to their social alienation as Afro-speculation. In my book, Afro-Atlantic Flight: Speculative Returns and the Black Fantastic, I describe Afro-speculation as a modality for living Black life that

is conjectural and conditional; the evidentiary matters not. Afro-speculation is an investment in the unseen and precarious; it is a gamble. It is the belief in the possibility for the establishment of new, utopic realities outside of dominant society despite the lack of proof that Black social life is conceivable. The humanistic qualities and liberatory nature of the genre renders speculative thought a fantastic, radical epistemological modality through which Afro-Atlantic identity can be lived across time and space.1

African American speculation is a defiant posture and therefore, it is inclusive of the notion of the fugitive that Rusert defines in the introduction. After clarifying that her analyses will extend past that which has been firmly established regarding the particularities of escaped enslaved persons, Rusert details her intervention: she offers an expansive examination of “African American experiments with natural science . . . and the itinerancies of flexibilities of antebellum sciences more broadly” (5). Through a compelling teasing out of the intricacies of how African Americans presented challenges to ethnology; the ways that Native Americans and African Americans countered the visual cultures of racist science through ekphrastic means; the performative aspects used on the international lecture circuit that contested race science’s connection of Blackness to the biological body; the literary proto-science fiction of the era; and Black women’s contribution to natural history discourses through the parlor and the classroom, Rusert compiles an exceptional interdisciplinary archive to demonstrate what it meant for nineteenth-century African Americans to wield a measure of control over the literary and philosophical narratives regarding race and humanity.

I was impressed by Rusert’s description of the sustained manner in which such a collective of disparate African Americans entered conversations across the sciences, disciplines, and formats, earnestly proffering challenges to figures such as Thomas Jefferson whose treatise Notes on the State of Virginia, and in particular Jefferson’s infamous Query XIV, held that African Americans were inferior to whites in reason and that they lacked imagination (37). The renowned African American author and scientist Benjamin Banneker, for instance, responded to Jefferson directly point by point and also sent along his almanac to Jefferson, modeling the forthright posture that future intellectuals would need to assume to face directly the inherent irrationality of ethnological racism. As Rusert so aptly shows in her examination of the early nineteenth century’s “Banneker Age,” Banneker’s influence carried over into the ensuing decades and the next century indeed saw a shift in African American politics in the centering on anti-slavery efforts and a conglomeration of insurgent efforts toward liberation. In the following century, Black nationalist David Walker insisted that Jefferson’s Notes should be given to every son in the African American community to study and therefore to assist them in comprehending the nature of white supremacy, a call for underground study that likely promoted and anticipated the continued, interdisciplinary custom of actively battling with Jeffersonian science and its seemingly perpetual afterlives.

This group of African Americans, then, maintained a stance of persistent refusal in that they did not allow racist postulations to go unchallenged. In fact, their commitment to the production of scientific counternarratives resulted in what Rusert describes in chapter 2 as the project of speculative kinship, connecting works as varied as James W. C. Pennington’s contributions in Black ethnology and his slave narrative to the longing for origins and familial recuperation expressed in the slave accounts penned by Olaudah Equiano and Harriet Jacobs in which they desired to “reconstruct the forms of relation denied and destroyed by polygenesis, which uncannily doubled a history of detachment and alienation that began centuries earlier with the slave trade” (66). At this point in Fugitive Science, I was reminded that Frederick Douglass’s 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, too, details the fact of his disconnection from most of his family and the ways that enslaved people elected to forge a kinship network with others regardless of known biological ties. Near the conclusion of his Narrative, Douglass advocates for a kind of deliberate, tacit fugitive mindset—a positionality requiring that those who are deemed and thus treated as the abject should be mindful as they plan their escapes from and take flight from the plantation. Douglass advances a speculative philosophy that, if enacted properly, would perpetually haunt the slaveholder

to imagine himself surrounded by myriads of invisible tormentors, ever ready to snatch from his infernal grasp his trembling prey. Let him be left to feel his way in the dark; let darkness commensurate with his crime hover over him; and let him feel that at every step he takes, in pursuit of the flying bondman, he is running the frightful risk of having his hot brains dashed out by an invisible agency. Let us render the tyrant no aid; let us not hold the light by which he can trace the footprints of our flying brother.2

Paired with Rusert’s careful reading of Martin Delany’s proto-science fiction novel Blake; or, The Huts of America (1859–1862) in chapter 4 about a transnational slave insurrection, this chapter advances an important argument about how the era’s speculative texts and those who repurposed the function of empirical science served as potent attacks “on Western epistemology, revealing blackness to be an errant, disruptive force that stands at the heart of Western science itself” (153).

Fugitive Science is an exciting cultural history for its focus on the inventive ways that African American intellectuals and artists of what Rusert refers to as early African American culture endeavored to achieve liberation through the speculative enterprise. Though focused on the nineteenth century, Rusert effortlessly maneuvers between centuries in short and relevant asides, connecting her work to a growing body of scholarship on empirical science and speculation. Fugitive Science is a complement to recently published works such as andré carrington’s Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction (University of Minnesota Press, 2016); Alondra Nelson’s The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation After the Genome (Beacon, 2016); and Aimee Bahng’s Migrant Futures: Decolonizing Speculation in Financial Times (Duke University Press, 2017).

As I draft my current book project on Black speculative arts, I marvel at the fact that quite a number of scholars are examining the novel ways in which marginalized and dispossessed populations actively turn the very notion of Western speculation (in all of its terrible manifestations) on its head. The twentieth and twenty-first centuries indeed have seen the emergence of overtly politicized artistic responses to contemporary circumstances that not only include allegorical and narratological inventions, but also the establishment of revolutionary modes for negotiating marginalization in American society, including the exploration of possibilities for creating alternative futures.

Though the necessity of fugitivity in some ways calls into question when it is that we will all get free, so to speak, the longevity of the Black struggle for freedom and the range of imaginings that have propelled the pursuit ought to reassure those of us who are still in what Christina Sharpe refers to as the wake that we must faithfully and resolutely assert our intent to live by proceeding speculatively.

The most disturbing scene in Kaitlyn Greenidge’s novel, We Love You, Charlie Freeman, is not, perhaps, the most obvious one. It is true (spoiler) that Laurel Freeman, mother of two teenage girls, is discovered to be breastfeeding the chimpanzee, Charlie Freeman, in a bid to win his affection, to soothe him, to bond with him as she and her children and husband attempt to teach him sign language. This is their mission during a period of residence at the Toneybee Institute, a scientific research campus with an unseemly past. It is also true that Callie Freeman, a young girl displaced from Boston, who finds herself in the midst of an ill-conceived socio-biological experiment in the woods of New England, develops an insatiable taste for raw ground beef, which she scoops into her mouth by the handful from the Institute’s cafeteria kitchen in some of the most shudder-inducing pages I’ve read in a long time. Far more unsettling than these latter-day horrors, though, is the scene in which the novel’s historical figure, Nymphadora, finds herself the willing subject of a comparative anatomist’s pencil—knows what danger of abuse, of exploitation, of prurient desire she is putting herself in—and stays.1 Because, she says, she likes the feeling of being “looked at.” And to be looked at as an object, a “specimen” of potential derision and “empirical” claims to racial science, this scrutiny is better than not being seen at all.

Greenidge’s novel is too nuanced and too humane to allow Nymphadora’s story to stand solely as an example of the erstwhile evils of racial science. She is neither an unwilling nor even an unwitting participant in her bid to enter the archive of human study and comparative anatomy. When Dr. Gardener (Greenidge is so good with names) asks her to undress, to pose on her stomach with her bottom facing his easel, he also promises her that along with her likeness, he will tell the world of her history, her erudition, her character, her impressive intellect and wit. He tells her the drawing will be a “great monument,” a credit to her race. He appeals to her history as well as her vanity. As a child, the novel tells us, she was photographed by W. E. B. Du Bois, her picture appearing in the Paris exhibition of 1900. This is a wonderful, sly reference to the often-overlooked fact of Du Bois’s upbringing in the Berkshires; but it’s also a moment of speculative history that connects the novel’s imaginative present to a vibrant and important past of black empiricism that spoke back explicitly to nineteenth-century codifications of race and pernicious social science.

We Love You, Charlie Freeman was very much on my mind as I read Britt Rusert’s enormously satisfying Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture. I see these two books as intimate companions: Greenidge’s fiction shot through with the radical empiricism Rusert uncovers, Rusert’s “fugitive” history laced with fictional thrills and a refusal to let the extant archive have the last, racist word. Beyond this elemental connection, Greenidge’s and Rusert’s books share a kind of perverse pleasure in acknowledging, clear-eyed, the horrors of past racism, and refusing to let this be the entire story.

In Greenidge’s hands, this refusal is staged as a tense meeting between the archive and its inheritors. Encountering the nude sketches of Nymphadora some seventy years later—placed, inevitably, next to images of primates in Dr. Gardener’s album—Charlotte Freeman, the protagonist, sees nothing in them but hatred, abuse, and denigration. She isn’t wrong. But the frame of her encounter is instructive. It is a scholarly book called Man or Beast? written by a historian fond of using words like “subaltern,” “hegemony,” and “appropriation.” The book reconstructs the history and decries the injustices of the Toneybee Institute, particularly its founder Julia Toneybee-Leroy. Greenidge’s send-up of academic self-righteousness is a canny move. It puts some distance between Charlotte’s horrified, indignant reaction and the other story the novel tells about black women’s agency and the grounds on which they perceive themselves to be staging resistance to their own prejudices, as well as those of their families and communities, by way of radical social experiments including friendship with a white man and adoptive motherhood to a chimpanzee. In the novel, this is true for Laurel Freeman as much as it is for Nymphadora, whose very name becomes indexical of the undecidability of the archive. Its origin is not the gutter imagination of Dr. Gardener, but rather a secret naming ceremony for the Stars of the Morning, a fictional sororal organization to which she belongs and from which, with her irrepressible desire to taste and feel life, she feels cast out.2 Nymphadora, whose given name is Ellen Jericho, yields her secret name to Dr. Gardener with some hesitation, and he, predictably, exploits her trust. Her narrative thus renders plausible that which appears in the record as an unalloyed violence, namely the pseudonymous hypersexualization of her person suggested by the horrific single name under her portrait. In this way, We Love You, Charlie Freeman asks us to consider whether every transaction upon which racist science was built contains more than a simple desire to harm on the one hand, and more than an equally simple beguilement toward victimhood on the other.

Greenidge extends this question into the proximate present, our nominally post-racist scientific future, where once again institutional structures exert downward pressure on black people, especially women, and once again their own compromises, thoroughly considered decisions, radical experiments, and unlikely bravery, are all but illegible to everyone around them. Laurel Freeman’s commitment to the Charlie experiment is deeply fraught, dancing dangerously on the line of the Institute’s racist past and flirting with monstrous forms of self-abnegation, even dehumanization. She loses her marriage in the process, is the subject of public consternation if not outright shaming, a condition made worse by the almost totally homogenous white population of the town they’ve moved to. She alienates her daughters, too, and ultimately Charlie, who becomes a depressed adult chimp, or maybe, as their father likes to believe, just is and always was an asshole. For the science, for all that that might mean and encompass—pride, expertise, curiosity, mastery, persistence, awe at the universe and its laws—Laurel wagers everything.

Rusert’s sense of what science means is equally capacious: science is an affect, a praxis, an orientation, a path, as much as a codified system. It is a tool for opening, as much as for closing. Like most students of enlightenment projects and their historical relationship to race, I have taken a rather dimmer view of empiricism’s false promises. It is with equal parts envy and admiration, then, that I devoured Fugitive Science’s deep archive of literary, political, scientific, and ephemeral texts and a special brand of anxiety that I grappled with Rusert’s insistence on recovering a history that departs from the usual litany of power and ugliness in American race relations and nineteenth century imperialist empiricisms. Rusert’s is through and through a black optimist project, and it shares in this school’s exhilarations, artistry and infectious attitude.

Although race science provides the clearest frame for thinking Rusert’s “radical empiricism,” I was especially interested in the parts of this book that depart from race science; these chapters free readers more fully to imagine the ways in which investigative praxis “could be used to enact a radical concept of freedom” (7). The last chapter, on the parlour science of Sarah Mapps Douglass and other women scientists—a term Rusert uses in a deliberately generous way in order to unsettle the bourgeois valorization of professional credentials and institutional recognition—points up the incredible care with which Rusert approaches her subject. Sculpting from scant but compelling archival sources, the four surviving “friendship albums” of African American women, Rusert offers her most speculative claims about those likeliest to be written out of the archive and of history. These are the black women scientists involved in the study and teaching of natural history, both in and beyond traditional learning venues. In reading what she calls the “ornamental sciences” of feminine investigation, Rusert brilliantly renders into evidence the most sentimental, easily dismissed ephemera that are at the heart of her counter-archival practice.

Particularly moving are Rusert’s readings of the two paintings by Sarah Mapps Douglass that grace the front and back covers of her smartly designed book. The painting of fuchsia flowers, copied from James Andrews’s Lessons in Flower Painting, demonstrates for Rusert a kind of quiet inhabiting of the world of science—a confident borrowing through which a claim is exerted on botanical knowledge. The painting is both token of participation in the broader world of natural history and taxonomy as well as a gift in the form of a humble copy, beautifully rendered in Douglass’s former student’s friendship album. To the painting, Douglass appends a citation from a floral dictionary pointing to the flower’s “modest bending of the head” which hides its calyx. Rusert reads this detail as constituting a lesson in modesty as much as in botany, one that points up Douglass’s unique admixture of “self-care” and disciplinary hygiene.

More inspiring, but also agitating, is Rusert’s take on the painting of a butterfly (the book’s front cover) as a trans-species embodiment of black femininity “about to take flight” (216). It is the kind of reading that one wants ferociously to work, because if she is right that there is much in the archive of black science in the United States that overturns, disrupts, and challenges the cooptation of empiricism that more often works to consolidate brutal suppression and injustice, then this is just the kind of stunning image one wants to embody them. Partly because Rusert is so unwaveringly responsible to her subject in the rest of the book, and so precise in her description of what Sarah Mapps Douglass borrowed from the natural history textbooks at the Institute for Colored Youth where she taught (the butterfly’s segmented abdomen and clubbed antennae) the wager that this painting obliquely inherits a tradition of “common cultural analogies made between women and flowers” feels like a bit of a stretch. Rusert likens the drawing to the silhouette of an enslaved woman styled “Flora” on a 1796 bill of sale, pointing to Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw’s reading of the image as a kind of pressed floral specimen, underscored by the woman’s name. Rusert also cites Jasmine Nicole Cobb on the absence of representations of black women’s bodies in friendship albums, an absence Cobb posits is filled by “flowers and other natural history objects bec[oming] figures for black women’s bodies within the space of the album” (215). In light of this, Rusert suggests, the blackness of the butterfly is “resignified as another ‘camouflaged’ representation of black women’s embodiment and beauty, forged in response to degrading representations of black womanhood in transatlantic popular science and visual culture” (215). That the butterfly is “fixed on a branch, perhaps about to take flight . . . also subtly represents black women in Philadelphia and the Southern United States, and in various spaces across the Atlantic” (216).

I linger with this moment in Rusert’s expansive book not to point to something wrong or fuss over a minor difference in interpretation (the butterfly looks to my eye like it has just landed, suggesting a different itinerary of fugitivity headed for empiricism’s elusive but stable forms of freedom, but this is immaterial, really). I linger with this image because I am somewhat dispositionally resistant to Rusert’s beautifully optimistic reading of the archive of what she calls, after Deleuze and Guattari, “minor science” (17–18). This feeling lingered with me throughout my reading, but emerged most strongly when I felt the stakes were the highest, when I overwhelmingly wanted the speculative, counter-hegemonic history to be as true, as real, as stable, and as powerful as the ordinary one. Perhaps I just wished for the speculative aspects of speculative historicism, or Rusert’s compelling phrase “speculative fugitive science” (18) to go away, so that what scholars like Rusert have built can root down, can be landed upon and launched from. Rusert insists that speculation is not just a subject of her research, but also an important methodological tool. With this I agree, but in the end I could have used some further elucidation of the difference between, say, Sutton Griggs’s speculative science fiction and fictionalization of Benjamin Banneker in Imperium in Imperio, or of Delaney’s brand of anti-humanism that imprints the radical experiment and astronomical form of Blake, and the speculation Rusert herself is undertaking as a scholar of these materials.

Some of this has to do with the challenges of deeply interdisciplinary scholarship, and the question of what Fugitive Science ultimately wants to say about the materials it so deftly assembles and reads. I confess that it was only as I was beginning the third chapter (on performance, rather than written documents) that it occurred to me that despite Rusert’s training, the book is at least as interested in what happened, who was doing what when, and under what circumstances, as it is in representation, form, and poetics. For Rusert, science is a kind of fiction, and writing and performance, in all their forms, have the potential to be empirical, scientific. This insight allows her to recuperate the range of epistemologies encompassed within the broad rubric of scientific investigation without having to continually concede the unbearable brutalities undertaken and defended in its name. It is a refreshing, useful, and utterly compelling way for a humanist to approach the history and philosophy of science—a deeply Kantian impulse that recognizes the fugitive, disruptive capacities of empirical inquiry and systematic thinking.

At its best, the speculative aspect of Rusert’s thinking points toward utopian futures by reconstructing pasts that might have come to be—I have in mind the sketch she conjures of Philadelphia’s Arch Street in the 1850s, where Sarah Maps Douglass might have encountered Samuel George Morton, author of the infamous Crania Americana, who in turn might have noticed that Henry Box Brown delivered himself to freedom by way of the Anti-Slavery Office on the same street. This speculative mode also allows for an acrobatic and impressive approach to the archive, which structures the way Fugitive Science reads absence and suggestion, as in chapter 1, which posits a robust conversation among black scientists against Jefferson’s despicable race theory in Notes on the State of Virginia. Rusert does truly impressive work in building out a sense of what she calls “the Banneker Age” from small but important evidence—the many documents she groups together as “supplements” and “surrogates” to the scientific rebuttal of Jefferson written by Banneker himself. It’s a scholarly act of devotion that is entirely convincing, and makes good on the promise of the introduction: that empiricism, science, even race science, can be and, indeed, has been, a means to combat subjugation. As Rusert puts it, we don’t need to think that science was “nothing other than a hegemonic tool of the state” (13).

For my part, and in my research, I am committed to the belief that there is still a lot we don’t know about the relationship between empiricism and hegemony, but Fugitive Science neither denies nor obscures this work and this history. The conclusion, in particular, reminds readers of the ongoing injustices stretching across the twentieth century and well into the present that continue to tether empiricism and especially the human sciences to the history of racial subjugation in the United States. In this way and more, Rusert’s book is a paragon of ethical scholarship from beginning, where she explains her refusal to reproduce the sickeningly familiar exploitative “scientific” images of black bodies (26–27), to end, where in considering the radical potential of empiricisms wrested from the violence of profit, nationalism, and racism, she reminds us of the important scholarship that has been and has yet to be done on the other side of things. This scholarship, Rusert’s parting thoughts remind us, make it possible to speculate responsibly, to follow the vector of a forgotten empiricism—a disassembled itinerary of black study—toward freedom, instead of away from it.

Yet even in these most heart-quickening, optimistic moments, Rusert is careful not to conflate empiricism’s promise of freedom with bourgeois norms of professionalization or tired, class-driven narratives of racial uplift. I have rarely read an academic book whose heart was so much and so consistently in the right place. Fugitive Science is no less a feat of intellection, assiduous research, and creativity. If there were a radically-oriented comparative anatomy of scholarly writing, Fugitive Science would be a perfect specimen.

At the heart of Britt Rusert’s Fugitive Science lies a generative, if complicated, tension: how could the natural sciences, in the nineteenth century, possibly provide useful fodder for Black practices of freedom when these very same sciences were not only implicated in, but were often in fact both animated by and driving, the promulgation of anti-Black racism and violence? Differently put, how might we imagine Black philosophers such as Benjamin Banneker taking inspiration from, or finding potential in, the established science of natural history or the burgeoning science of ethnology, given that each of these disciplines was explicitly invested in and used toward the project of justifying racial hierarchies that identified African Americans, Native Americans, and other non-European races as inferior to white Europeans? Can scientific racism be conscripted by practices of Black freedom without the inadvertent validation of its ugliest conceits?

As it turns out—and as Rusert very ably illustrates—it can, and, in fact, it was. Fugitive Science tracks the way that a number of the most cherished of nineteenth-century African American writers and thinkers—from Benjamin Banneker to David Walker, Frederick Douglass to Martin Delany—extensively engaged contemporary natural sciences in their work. From natural history to ethnology, phrenology to astronomy, physiognomy to anatomy, African Americans were no less immune to the popular excitement or even fervor surrounding new developments in scientific knowledge and experimentation than were their white nineteenth-century peers. Yet, what Rusert demonstrates in Fugitive Science is that African American contributions to nineteenth-century science took two forms, both of which have been underexamined in studies of literature and science in nineteenth-century America. The first set of contributions that Rusert documents is a rather traditional one: through the process of careful archival research, she demonstrates that African American print publications were important sites for discussions, expositions, and debates surrounding contemporary science. The Anglo-African Magazine, for example, which was published in New York City from 1859–1860, “was deeply engaged in contemporary scientific debates and promoted itself as a premier venue for black science” (160). In this journal, writers “presented substantial and weighty empirical evidence in opposition to the tenuous claims of antebellum racial science, as well as making contributions to scientific debates with no explicit connection to the science of race” (162). Indeed, one of the many contributions of Rusert’s book is the way that it effectively works to “fill out” the archives of writers such as Martin Delany, detailing the way that Delany’s interest in astronomy in fact informed the narrative he crafted in his landmark Blake; or, The Huts of America (1859–62). By drawing our attention to these writers’ longstanding and extensive engagements with scientific theories and experimentation, Rusert is able to convincingly demonstrate the centrality of science to some of the most read and taught works of nineteenth-century African American literature. Furthermore, she is able to insist on the importance of science as a site of inspiration, experimentation, and practice for Black Americans who were working hard to both make art and imagine freedom under social, legal, and economic conditions of slavery and unfreedom. Thus, in Fugitive Science, Rusert both uncovers new histories of Black engagement with contemporary science as well as collates extant scholarly understandings of nineteenth-century Black scientific culture in order to craft a new, and more nuanced narrative of the relationship that Black scholarly and non-scholarly thinkers cultivated to new science during this period.

The more provocative—and very exciting—second contribution of Rusert’s book is to demand a reexamination of the framework through which we understand empiricism. Unlike contemporary philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, scholars in eighteenth-century studies—my scholarly home—have not extensively explored or theorized what has always seemed to me to be the innately queer and sensual aspects of empiricism, as a method for the production of knowledge. As one of the most storied terms in histories of science, histories of the liberal subject (and thus histories of citizenship more broadly), and histories of knowledge, empiricism is a strange, energetic understanding of the way that the relationship between the body and the world shapes perception. Thus, one of the aspects of Rusert’s book that I most appreciate is her effort to redefine scientific empiricism as a practice constitutively informed by—at least among Black scientists and thinkers—fugitivity. Her use of fugitivity will be more or less familiar to anyone engaged with recent African American cultural studies, and performance studies in particular, but I define it here in order to name with precision the broad assemblage of ideas that Rusert collects under the auspices of this term. Fugitivity “challenges grand emancipation narratives, showing the many similarities between the age of slavery and the age of emancipation”; it constitutes a “practical, philosophical, and artistic method deployed both before and after Emancipation by people enslaved, fugitive, and nominally free”; it “unhinges black escape from the grip of criminality, transforming ‘the fugitive’ from solely a criminal or legal category to a kind of radical comportment to the world . . . that does not necessarily end when one successfully escapes from slavery or when slavery is legally abolished,” and finally, it provides a methodology. Fugitivity, for Rusert, is a “critical method,” and one that she shares with the figures at the heart of her study; as a method, fugitivity provides “a particular mode of study that experiments with new ways of reading and analyzing texts and contexts from the nineteenth century to the contemporary moment” (17). Fugitive science, then, names both a method and a practice, and one that Rusert argues characterizes the way that nineteenth-century Black American thinkers and writers engaged contemporary science and its often insidiously racist aims. “As critical genealogy and as method,” Rusert argues, fugitive science

turns our view to a concept of experimentation that traverses African American science, art, and physical expressivity. This, then, is finally an appeal for new, transdisciplinary, and perhaps also undisciplined approaches to the study of black literature and culture, approaches traversing traditional divides between the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities in order to excavate neglected genealogies of experimentation across the Black Atlantic. By taking science more seriously in African American studies, and by recognized the dynamism of natural science in the antebellum period, new light may be shed on the origins and contours of early African American cultural production, particularly the permeable boundaries of and surprising cross-fertilizations between what we today rigidly categorize as “art” and “science.” (21)

Empiricism necessarily takes new shape when understood through the lens of fugitivity, although Rusert argues that fugitivity is and has demonstrably always been at the heart of empiricism, anyway; “as a method that depends on sense perception, continual observations, and a mobile, searching orientation toward the world, there is indeed something fugitive about empiricism itself” (20). But, she suggests, science itself might be understood differently when we understand empiricism as a fugitive practice, or when we understand empiricism as a method animated by a fugitive ethics. First, theorizing empiricism in fugitive terms allows us to see scientific practice where we once might not have: for example, Rusert’s discussion of Henry Box Brown’s incorporation of mesmerism, animal magnetism, and biology—putative “pseudosciences” that were in fact taken quite seriously during the nineteenth century—into his series of performances for working-class British audiences emphasizes the way that popular science worked to “reinforce the growing divisions between the working class and the bourgeoisie under industrialization” (138). Brown’s use of the power of popular science to unite working class audiences around a shared relationship to the transatlantic exploitation of labor both belies a popular interest in and understanding of the science of, for example, mechanics itself, while also revealing that interest in science to be a potentially effective site for unexpected solidarities. As Rusert puts it, “Rather than viewing science as a nonpolitical domain, or as an escape from politics, we might consider how science as experiment and practice helped to link mesmerism and electro-biology both to Brown’s ongoing project of self-transformation and emancipation, as well as to the political and scientific movements of the British working class” (142).

Second, fugitive empiricism allows us to see versions of scientific practice—some of which, Rusert suggests, were specific to nineteenth-century African American cultural production—that built on well-documented forms of science but that we might not otherwise have understood or recognized as such. Think, for example, of what Rusert terms the “anti-humanism” of Delany’s Blake, “which refuses to settle on an impoverished notion of the human as the final horizon for black politics” (176). Tracking the complicated representation of the “immeasurable, vital force of blackness” through Delany’s novel, Rusert argues that in Blake we see Delany both refusing natural historical or ethnological theories of human history and ontology that circulated during his lifetime, as well as envisioning a new, speculative form of Black animacy in which Blackness cannot be limited to the human form. Rusert argues that

in addition to the standard narrative of a slave becoming “man” (becoming-human), Blake is composed of a series of other becomings (becoming panther, becoming-woman, becoming-black, becoming comet), all of which strain against the purposefully inadequate and narrow conception of the human offered by polygenesis, which sought to reserve this status for a small, select group of people. Indeed, Delany’s fugitive science posed a serious challenge to the anthropomorphism of both antebellum racial science and liberal abolitionism. The anti-humanism of Blake, which refuses to settle on an impoverished notion of the human as the final horizon for black politics, offered important challenges in its own moment as it does in ours, given the novel’s rejection of traditional categories of personhood, and of the human itself, as the horizon of political, and no doubt, artistic creativity. (176)

Here, we see Rusert bringing two bodies of thinking—one more traditional, one slightly more recent—into conversation, productively exploiting their intersections in order to demonstrate the importance of fugitive science to both nineteenth-century American studies and twenty-first-century African American cultural studies. Bringing together careful archival work that reads Blake through Delany’s slightly lesser-known career as a writer, thinker, and scientific ambassador, alongside Black feminist critiques of the human that have themselves rejected traditional empiricism, Rusert compellingly situates Blake in an African American philosophical tradition while simultaneously insisting on the importance of that largely twentieth-century tradition to nineteenth-century African American studies. In general, this type of approach—what we might term a strategic presentism, that troubles precisely the kinds of conservative empiricism at the heart of the kinds of bad historiography that addle early American studies—is broadly characteristic of Rusert’s approach to the texts at the center of Fugitive Science, and is in general one that I think early American studies across the board (both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) could employ more often to our benefit.

Indeed, many of the questions that drive Rusert’s work are animated by twenty-first-century critical inquiries, an approach that I employ in my own work. Too often, concerns about historical accuracy mask (or call into being . . .) a fallacious sense that historical certitude or truthfulness is possible, a notion that some histories are actually true. While I believe in the potential of research and of study, as a scholar of the eighteenth-century world—and furthermore, as a scholar who works on the history of sexuality, and the history of race—I believe accuracy to be, at best, a fraught endeavor. For anyone working on pre-1900 materials of any kind—and especially for scholars who work on the histories and cultures of disenfranchised, unfree, or nominally free peoples—our twenty-first-century efforts to produce knowledge never feel very far or very disaggregated from many spectacularly clear examples of the ways that certain forms of knowledges were and continue to be repressed, destroyed, and intentionally stricken from the record. At times in Fugitive Science, Rusert addresses these concerns head on, pointing to the way that much of the archive at the center of her project “exists under a triple erasure: archival, historiographical, and conceptual” (183), that leaves us with far fewer details pertaining to the life and work of Benjamin Banneker or Sarah Mapps Douglass than it has of the natural historical efforts of Thomas Jefferson or the feminist eugenic writings of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. To address these concerns, Rusert engages in a process that she calls “speculation,” a method that draws in equal parts from recovery historiography, archival work, and intellectual creativity in order to offer an account of (as she does in chapter 5) Sarah Mapps Douglass’s work that Rusert styles as a beginning, rather than a definitive or conclusive reading, of the highly limited archive of Douglass’s life’s work as a teacher and scientist.

Alongside questions pertaining to the impossibility of the fullness or sufficiency of nineteenth-century African American archives stride questions pertaining to what might be termed the political ontology of nineteenth-century science. It is in this set of questions that I hear some of the most complex and undecided strivings of Rusert’s thinking, questions that pertain not only to the nineteenth century but to how we do politics, today. Fugitive Science is broadly concerned with the relationship between “science”—a word that has perhaps never borne more cultural power than it does in our moment, in which many of our institutions are defunding the humanities to fund the STEM fields—and race, in both the nineteenth century as well as today. Indeed, Rusert’s provocative conclusion says as much, carefully detailing the way that the questions that she explores at such length within her book persist into our times, and calling for something that we have also heard from the feminist movement: a practice of science performed by and for the people it serves. We don’t need Foucault to teach us that science has long been conscripted toward the aims of oppressing women and people with vaginas, people of color, poor people, transgender people, disabled people, and colonized peoples here and abroad; for many of us, that is the most empirical of truths, knowledge we have gained through our own experiences.

Yet, scientific study has also been used, at times, to the most felicitous of ends, and Rusert’s call for science and scientists who consider the effects of the particularities of, for example, social and structural experiences of embodiment that many Black people share, echoes recent Black feminist thinking, such as Britney Cooper’s “Pussy Don’t Fail Me Now: The Place of Vaginas in Black Feminist Theory and Organizing.”1

But what distinguishes racially-sensitive science from race science? Is it possible for such a distinction to hold? One of the true strengths of Rusert’s project is her willingness to really tarry in an archive that, then and now, we understand to have brought harm to the world; Rusert herself refuses to reproduce oft-cited nineteenth-century racist anatomical images (of Sarah Baartman, for example) in the book, while simultaneously taking seriously the idea that racist science might have been (and, as she demonstrates, was) repurposed toward anti-racist ends, put to work in the service of experiments in freedom. In this explicitly vexed relationship to this archive, however, I hear a larger question than the one to which Rusert returns at the very end of the book: “is racial science ultimately salvageable?” (217). Here, I hear a larger question about the ethics of engagement with politically harmful materials and archives, one that is intimately relevant to our own time.

We are living through a moment in which there seems, at times, to be remarkably little room for complexity. Call-out culture (which I am distinguishing here from what Ngọc Loan Trần has termed “calling in”) often offers little more than a “with-us-or-against-us” vision of politics in which asking questions is tantamount to a form of refusal, and in which achieving homogeneity of perspective is more important than building political perspective characterized by nuance or texture of understanding.2 The ugliest versions of this particular political culture take the form of a sweeping refusal to engage: to read books, watch movies, or even talk to people who are deemed offensive or problematic. It also implicitly traffics in a logic of political purity that I think is fundamentally at odds with everything we know about neoliberal capitalism, and the insidious ways that this structure relies on economic and discursive hybridity and overlap to proliferate. This is not to suggest, of course, that refusal is never an effective political strategy. Refusing to engage—in the form of everything from boycotts to quitting a bad job—can be a very powerful form of intervention. But as a scholar and teacher, and especially as a scholar and teacher of early American culture, this politics of wholesale refusal worries me, in part because it can work so horrifically in step with the project of erasing histories of racist and settler violence when it comes to the study of American history. Of course, refusals land differently, coming from different people, and in different political moments; with Rusert, I also heed Sadiya Hartman’s and Christina Sharpe’s concerns about “the reproduction of scenes of black suffering and misery, scenes that reproduce racialized violences of the past, but also feed into (neo)liberal logics that traffic in the spectacle of black suffering subjects” (26). What strikes me as so promising about these questions about the impact of refusal politics that move quietly through Fugitive Science, then, is that they model a different form of refusal, one no less rigid than the one that styles itself as the politics of our moment, but much more informed. And we see this practice in Rusert’s nineteenth-century archive itself, but also in her own method (25–26).

As Rusert illustrates, the very ugliest parts of early American culture were both consensually and nonconsensually shared experiences. Citing Hosea Easton’s Treatise on the Intellectual Character, and Civil and Political Condition of the Colored People of the United States (1837), Rusert details the incredible proliferation of racist imagery throughout the everyday lives of residents of the early United States. In Easton’s Treatise, he notes that urban barrooms, shop windows, and even the ceilings of public spaces were regularly papered with degrading images of Black people draw from racist visual culture. Part of Easton’s refusal of this scientized narrative of Black inferiority thus took the shape of writing back to this tradition in its own language and form. Perhaps more notably, one facet of David Walker’s refusal of Thomas Jefferson’s now very famous work of natural history, Notes on the State of Virginia, took the form of exhorting every Black man in the United States to “buy a copy . . . and put it in the hand[s] of his son” (quoted by Rusert, 42). Rusert is careful to specify why Walker was so interested in Notes: “Far from seeing it as a rarified Enlightenment vanity project,” she writes, Walker understood Notes as “an extremely dangerous text” (41) and for this reason encouraged all Black people to read it. Refusal, in Walker’s case, took a highly engaged form of what Foucault would later call a “genealogical” or antiscientific approach to racial science, producing responses that offered “a combination of erudite knowledge and what people know.”3 As Rusert makes clear, scientific engagement was not exclusively or even primarily the idiom in which the writers at the center of Fugitive Science spoke back to nineteenth-century anti-Black racism, but their tactic of engaged refusal speaks to their transhistorical, shared understanding of the cultural power of science. It is worth noting that, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the difference between scientific fields and non-scientific fields was in no way as stark as it is today; as I tell my students every semester, science is just the Latin word for knowledge. And knowledge is, as Foucault put it so pithily in 1984, “not made for understanding; it is made for cutting.”4 With experience at being on the wrong end of the knife of scientia—at times both literally and figuratively—writers and thinkers such as Benjamin Banneker, David Walker, James McCune Smith, Hosea Easton, Edmonia Lewis, Sarah Mapps Douglass, and Henry Box Brown refused racist science by reconfiguring it in fugitive terms, finding in its racist weaponization a tool for experimentation, and weaponizing it in turn toward anti-racist ends.

Concluding her important new book, Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture, Britt Rusert summarizes its central claim: “The history of fugitive science unsettles narratives that presume the unquestioned hegemony of racist science in the nineteenth century” (219). Rusert assumes that scholars of African American and Atlantic history are already very familiar with the thinking about and performance of race by the likes of Thomas Jefferson in Query XIV of his Notes on the State of Virginia; Samuel George Morton in Crania Americana; and Georges Cuvier in his dissection of the much-staged body of South African Sarah Baartman. Rusert thus sets out not to detail again that story but rather to trace, from the “Banneker Age” of the early national United States to the time of the Civil War, the frequent and varied responses on the part of African Americans to the dominant practices of ethnology which alleged European supremacy. Many others have studied how black Americans in the nineteenth century countered the persistent allegation of their inhumanity, for example by entering the print public sphere or leveraging the radical aspects of Protestant theology. Rusert, by contrast, shows African American writers, performers, doctors and educators, in local, national and transatlantic circuits, combatting racist science on its own terms and in its own venues. Thus we see figures as well known as Frederick Douglass and as obscure as Sarah Mapps Douglass entering into the practices of physiology, physiognomy, phrenology, anatomy, statistics, world history and astrology, and drawing from those fields the means of recovering stature and legitimacy for Africa and its descendants.

I admired so many aspects of Rusert’s study: how resourceful she was in bringing to our attention the likes of Sarah Douglass, Hosea Easton, James W. C. Pennington and others; her re-situation of classic texts (like Martin Delany’s Blake) in their original serial publication alongside scientific articles; her theoretical stretching of key terms like “fugitive” and “empiricism”; and her overall aim of bringing science studies and African American studies productively together.

As I was reading her book, what got me wondering—and wanting to hear more from Rusert about—is the relative emphases she gives to the differing branches of the sciences as practiced and understood in the nineteenth century by her subjects. She explains early on that because the racist sciences overlapped with popular entertainment (from lecture circuits to minstrelsy to freak shows to museums), she would trace her subjects’ anti-racist science in the same spaces and media. This is a convincing defense of the book’s interdisciplinary inclusion of not only ethnological tracts and science classrooms but also novels and performances. Brava.

What I wondered, though, was: what about the nonhuman sciences? I started to keep track of tantalizing references by Rusert to a host of activities along these lines on the part of African Americans: Benjamin Banneker’s mathematics (38–39), James McCune Smith on “nonhuman species” (58), Henry Box Brown as the “African Biologist” (137), Martin Delany on cholera (149), scientific entries in the Weekly Anglo-African (162) and Robert Forten’s nine-foot telescope (191). These were often mentioned just glancingly though, en route back to her main discussion of the figures’ apparently more important or persistent work in the human-based sciences and humanistic arts. I wondered why. What were we missing by not hearing more?

Now, in her chapters on Martin Delany and Sarah Douglass, Rusert does analyze their work in astrology and botany/entomological illustration, respectively. She gives us a wonderful reading of Douglass’s anatomically exact watercolor of a black butterfly alighting from a flowering branch, arguing (on 210–15) that the image does cultural work at many levels: it demonstrate Douglass’s skills of minute observation of nonhuman species, down to the clubbed antennae and segmented abdomen of the butterfly; given as a gift, it links together a coterie of curious black women in Philadelphia; it reverses the way black women were reified as specimens; and it does powerful metaphorical work as an image of natural black fugitivity. Likewise with Delany. When Rusert analyzes his novel Blake; or, The Huts of America, she makes some use of Delany’s interest in comets and planetary attraction to understand Delany’s “opening up the category of human agency to include nonhuman bodies and inhuman forces” (173). Rusert goes on, then, to bring up the point that is at the heart of my question. She says: “Delany’s fugitive science posed a serious challenge to the anthropomorphism of both antebellum racial science and liberal abolitionism. The anti-humanism of Blake, which refuses to settle on an impoverished notion of the human as the final horizon for black politics, offered important challenges in its own moment as it does in ours, given the novel’s rejection of traditional categories of personhood, and of the human itself, as the horizon of political, and no doubt, artistic activity” (176).

And yet, other than this ten pages in which Rusert is reading either Blake or the black butterfly, the book itself remains in a largely anthropomorphic space, suggesting that it was not just “racial science and liberal abolitionism” that were thus confined, but also the vast majority of her subjects’ anti-racist science as well. So, my question, briefly put, is: other than these two moments, is fugitive science exclusively preoccupied with the human? Did the rest of the black scientists believe or find that the most effective way to combat and undermine the allegations of African racial inferiority was through, and exclusively through, the category of the human? I couldn’t help but wonder if, in those many other moments in which Rusert briefly mentions but doesn’t describe black practitioners studying mathematics, zoology, astrology, contagious disease and so on, there were other, non-anthropomorphic strains of fugitive science? And if so, do these remain to be further explored and theorized? Did Rusert find a much greater preponderance of the human sciences within fugitive science, or was she simply more drawn to these areas in the archive because there was a more discernible tie there to black claims for “freedom,” another key term in her study? To put it a different way, was it clearer—as a humanistic investigator—to know what to do with Banneker’s refutation of Jefferson’s racism than with Banneker’s mathematics, or with the tidal and planetary calculations of his almanac? Are the claims to, or ideas about, humanity in the nonhuman sciences too circuitous or allegorical?

My caution in Rusert representing fugitive science as largely restricted to the human sciences is that it implies a restrictively defined—because human-bound—sense of affiliation and concern on the part of black knowledge-makers and observers. What of curiosity about and working knowledge of animals, metals or plants? Certainly work as farriers and other tenders of domesticated animals, blacksmiths, agricultural field laborers, or testers of sugar crystallization made African Americans deeply aware of animals’ bodies, illnesses and breeding patterns; the pliability of different metals and the hardening of different liquids under heat; or the behavior of plants interacting with insects, sun, temperature and soils. When writing an essay a few years ago on Zora Neale Hurston’s environmental experience and representation, I came upon an interview, conducted by Benjamin Botkin, a friend and colleague of Hurston’s at both the Federal Writers’ Project and the Library of Congress, and a fellow Columbia-trained ethnographer. In his Lay My Burden Down: A Folk History of Slavery, Botkin quotes a formerly enslaved man from Texas named John Love, who is reflecting about the boll weevil’s arrival in cotton country. It bespeaks what must have been a commonplace, but nonetheless remarkable, kind of ecological awareness on the part of agricultural laborers during and after slavery.

I knows why that boll weevil done come. They say he come from Mexico, but I think he always been here. Away back yonder a spider live in the country, ’specially in the bottoms. He live on the cotton leaves and stalks, but he don’t hurt it. These spiders kept the insects eat up. They don’t plow deep then, and plants cotton in February, so it made [produced fiber] ’fore the insects git bad.

Then they gets to plowing deep, and it am colder ’cause the trees all cut, and they plows up all the spiders and the cold kill them. They plants later, and there ain’t no spiders left to eat up the boll weevil.1

What this conjecture about the etiology of insect infestation shows is Love’s long temporal and varied topographical awareness of multiple, mutually impacting factors: deforestation, microclimate change, vulnerable plant-insect symbiosis, and technological practice. Moreover, multiple actors influence these events: spiders, boll weevils, cotton plants, plows, humans, weather. Love thinks in terms of a complex network of human and nonhuman agents. He thinks like a member of a biotic (and abiotic) community. How do models that Rusert develops in Fugitive Science help us account for Love’s ecological way of knowing? Or is Rusert’s model workable with ecological knowledge that isn’t about human freedom as such?

In her book Ariel’s Ecology: Plantations, Personhood, and Colonialism in the American Tropics (2013), Monique Allewaert likewise addresses issues of black knowledge-making in a time of slavery, albeit focusing mainly on the Caribbean. Allewaert argues that the strange and newly disturbed environments of America made all people feel a bodily susceptibility to metamorphosis within this milieu of changing and “enmeshing life-forms.” Euro-Americans tactically shifted the threatening aspects of American ecological embodiment onto persons of African descent and thus intensified black physical experiences of fragmentation. Allewaert looks to oral tales and spirituo-physical fetishes to argue that enslaved African Americans dealt with this self-dispersion, alongside their less-than-human legal status, as they assembled a horizontal network of “proximate life-forms as actual support.” She calls this flexible ecological personhood “the parahuman,” a mode of living that perpetually keeps open and negotiates “a number of identificatory possibilities,” alliances and sites of origin. I am wondering whether Rusert likewise found instances—other than in Delany’s Blake—of such parahumanity?2

I have one other, related query. In an article that Rusert wrote for the journal Social Text in 2015, “Disappointment in the Archives of Black Freedom,” she discusses her own trouble working with the highly sentimental friendship albums of Sarah Mapps Douglass and other members of her female, Philadelphia coterie: “These friendship albums may be stunning, but they are also difficult . . . to fit into models of scholarship that privilege black resistance, subversion, and agency.” And later she asks: “Must recovery always entail recuperative narratives of resistance and reparation, what [Saidiya] Hartman calls the ‘romance of resistance’”?3 This was an ongoing question I had while reading Fugitive Science, whether Rusert herself felt a kind of insistence on casting virtually all of African American nineteenth-century science as being expressions of or tactics in “black resistance [and] subversion.” In other words, though Rusert wrangles, in her Social Text piece, with finding friendship albums which didn’t attest to “subversion” (but rather bespoke disappointment), in her book, there seemed less possibility of getting outside the everything-is-subversion model of fugitive science. All who “mobilized natural science” did so “in the quest for and name of freedom” (4).

It made me wonder: were there black sciences which fell outside this definition? I suppose this question sounds like I am asking: can curiosity allow one to put aside race? Said that way, it would be a naïve question in all kinds of ways, assuming “curiosity” itself to be universally accessible (a fundamental faculty more than a culturally and historically shaped epistemic practice), or presuming racial categorization to be as easy to slough off for brown bodies as for white ones. It’s more that I worry that if we try to fit all instances of black Americans being curious into simultaneous acts of subversion, it deprives those subjects of any mental and imaginative space outside of the all-consuming one involving racially defined struggle. It risks limiting black expertise to matters of racial embodiment. Maybe that is historical necessity staring us in the face. Or maybe it is our moment of historiography.

In eighteenth-century European metropoles, “curiosity” and scientific aptitude were linked with the condition of disinterestedness. Champions of the “New Science” at organizations like the Royal Society of London reasoned that only male affluent gentleman were free enough from material and social dependence (and hence “interest”) to allow their minds to be pure conduits of matter. “Interest” of any kind created, according to this tenet, epistemic friction or static. And yet in practice, as I argued in my book American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World (2006), places like the Royal Society actively sought out—in the Americas at least—transplanted and non-aristocratic Europeans, Africans and Native Americans. They did so because empiricism (the direct investigation of nature with hands, eyes and instruments) as opposed to scholasticism (nature known through logical argumentation and conveyed in books) was the founding and central episteme of Baconian science. So, in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, physical proximity to and experience in environments could qualify one for an ability to make scientific knowledge about these environments. All of which brings me to this question: is there any merit in locating not only black freedom-fighting empiricism but also a black version of “disinterest,” which we could define as scientific inquiry in which human benefit is temporarily suspended? Or is disinterest a strange white fiction, and hence an exclusively white privilege? Or, do we resolve this question by remembering Bacon’s “knowledge is power” dictum, and then see Europeans’ imperial science and African Americans’ freedom-gaining science as both being about negotiations of economic and political power?

I look forward to hearing Britt Rusert take up any of these questions which seem productive.