Recent debates surrounding the new materialism, as well
emerging interest in race and materialism, find a fascinating precursor in the
pages of antebellum African American newspapers and periodicals. The sciences
of the second scientific revolution, or the “new sciences,” were embraced by
some contributors as possible tools for emancipation and rejected by others for
their forwarding of a gross materialism that besmirched sacred understandings
of nature and the divine ordering of the natural world. Early black newspapers show a broad array of
responses to the new sciences, offering a glimpse onto the robust theorizations
of race, nature, and materiality that were actively being constructed—and
contested—by writers and readers of the early black press.
In addition to offering a brief overview to this robust
discourse on materialism, I want to discuss the widespread coverage of
microscopes in early African American newspapers, especially in Frederick
Douglass’s three papers. The beginnings of the industrial manufacturing of microscopes
in the 1840s in the U.S. allowed an increasing number of non-scientists and non-elites
to catch glimpses of dazzlingly spectacular, previously unknown worlds through
the optical powers of the microscope. The illumination of invisible beings and invisible
worlds fostered a critical speculative imaginary for black freedom struggles, which
were oriented toward the active (re)construction of a new world, or worlds,
long before the official abolition of slavery. From the scales of fish to the surface of
human skin, the microscope also offered a strikingly defamiliarized view of both
the body and the objects of the natural world, opening up a space for rich theorizations
of race, subjectivity, and nature. Finally,
I am interested in how the microscope enabled a surprising set of
identifications with microorganisms and other bodies invisible to the naked eye
– what I want to call the microscopic imaginary of black abolition. And I’m
wondering how these identifications with the microscopic challenge how we
understand both the intelligibility and scale of anti-slavery struggles (macro- vs. micro- acts
of resistance and escape) and the politics of fugitivity (as a terrain of
strategic visibility and invisibility).
Thanks for your reading suggestions, Britt! This project sounds fascinating and I'm looking forward to learning about antebellum microscopy! I once taught a course on nineteenth-century visual technologies (silhouette, stereoscope, panorama, photography) and how they inflect literary experiments with point of view, often around issues of race and embodiment. I never thought to include the microscope--but it would be really interesting to think through how it compares to other visual media and their particular framings of "empiricism."
ReplyDeletethis is really interesting, Hsuan and hope we can talk more about it at ASLE!
ReplyDeleteHi Britt--I really enjoyed reading this and look forward to meeting you at ASLE.
ReplyDeleteYour focus on the microscope and visuality got me thinking about the section in Karen Barad's book "Meeting the Universe Halfway" about electron and scanning tunneling microscopes. Barad explains how these microscopes don't simply reflect upon or magnify an object but actively intervene, using current to "feel" the surface of subatomic particles. These microscopes are thus apparatuses that actively reshape the object being "viewed" and thus reveal how observation is not simply a passive process predicated upon distance and distinction but instead an active engagement. Her larger point is that both theorizing and experimenting are intertwined material practices which upset the traditional paradigm that sees theorizing as the space of pure ideas. While the technology that Barad is working with is certainly distinct from that which you're addressing here, it got me thinking about how both C19 and contemporary microscopes fundamentally reshape how individuals "see" the world and, by extension, how individuals, not to mention the object that is being observed, are actively reshaped by observation.
So I'd be curious to hear more about the material effects, if those are apparent in the texts you've been examining, of the microscopic imaginary, particularly in terms of what you call "identifications with microorganisms." What did those identifications look like and what were their effects? Were there any dis-identifications?
Also, do you have a sense as to how the microscope changed understandings of plantation slavery's degradation of soil and the pathogens related to rice-cultivation (I'm thinking of Charles Ball's 1836 slave narrative here, for Ball's explanation for the unhealthy soil and the horrific diseases that affected enslaved people was a providential punishment)? Peter McCandles's 2011 book "Slavery, Disease, and Suffering in the Southern Lowcountry" makes no mention of the microscope.
Britt, your project is really fascinating, and I'm always looking forward to hearing more about this!
ReplyDeleteI'm interested in your discussion of microscopes here, and (like James gets at above) I'm wondering what this use of microorganisms and the microscopic might mean with relation to c19 discourses of contagion and its racialization. Benjamin Rush's earlier work on blackness-as-disease comes to mind here, as well as later associations of variously-raced populations with illness and disease. Your project interests me particularly because it points to a different conversation about race, materiality, and scale.