Slavery and Science

(4 Credits)

In conversation with recent works that argue that many scientific advancements of the 19th century came at the expense of unnamed black subjects whose bodies were used for experiment, research and study, students in this seminar will consider the relation between the production of scientific knowledge and the institution of slavery. This course centers a history in which the plantation is a site for experimentation and slaves are specimens--their bodies probed and prodded without consent, their corpses used for postmortem dissection and display, their bones appropriated in perpetuity for medical training. While exploitative medical practices loom particularly large in this history, we'll also spend considerable time thinking about how the scientific knowledge produced on the plantation contributed to the business sciences of management, capitalist risk assessment, insurance and accounting. Over the course of the semester, we will individually and collectively reflect on the legacies of this gritty and terrible history and on what it might mean to repair or redress it. In this vein, we explore creative projects of reparation by Carrie Mae Weems, Bettina Judd, M. NourbeSe Philip and countless anonymous others--in which the enslaved reverse Agassiz's scientific gaze, stolen bones are buried, monuments to racist gynecology are pulled down and the names of brutalized black women are spoken, and poetry reassembles documents of "insured loss" in order to restore the humanity of the lost.