“More Approximate to the Animal”: Africana Resistance and the Scientific War Against Black Humanity in Mid-Nineteenth Century America (2006)
Cornelius-Diallo, Alexandra (Author)
Washington University in St. Louis
Physical Details: 286
Language: English
This dissertation examines the ways in which African American men and women shaped the development of scientific theories of racial differences during the mid-nineteenth century. I argue that African American thinkers and enslaved men and women had a heretofore underestimated impact on scientists of race and anti-black pamphleteers. I trace African Americans' efforts between 1830 and 1861 to combat in pen and in person, scientifically informed theorists of permanent "Negro" inferiority. I offer a close reading of ethnological texts published during this period in order to show the extent to which black men and women were subjected to scientific dehumanization and bestialization in theory as well as in practice. In doing so, I use a gendered analysis of the ways in which African Americans---enslaved and free, lettered and illiterate---via their scholarly and literary efforts as well as through violent acts of insurgency were able to influence discussions about race. Through analyses of newspaper accounts, slave narratives, novels, proslavery and abolitionist pamphlets, and scientific texts, this project serves to locate the ideological and physical spaces where the physical and sexualized abuse of enslaved persons and the development of scientific theories of permanent Africana inferiority met. In response to African American insurgency, scientific racists, in turn, became even more relentless in their efforts to deny Africana humanity. This study demonstrates that their scientific observations have been undervalued as a resource through which scholars may gain a thorough understanding of slavery as a completely dehumanizing project. In its articulation as well as its application, the science of race was quite bloody.
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