Sarah’s Cabinet
Sarah’s Cabinet
Fugitive Science in and beyond the Parlor
Chapter 5 moves from the scientific experiments of the black public sphere to the production of science by black women in semi-private spaces like the parlor, the garden, and the classroom. It focuses specifically on Sarah Mapps Douglass, who taught both literature and science at the Institute for Colored Youth in Philadelphia, contributed natural history discourses and paintings to the friendship albums of her friends and students, and lectured on anatomy and physiology to audiences composed of black women. In addition to surveying African American science in antebellum Philadelphia, the chapter places Douglass in a more Atlantic context, connecting her work, and body in performance, to figures like Joice Heth, Sarah Baartman, and other women who were subjected to the violent experiments and spectacles of nineteenth-century race science.
Keywords: Sarah Mapps Douglass, physiology, anatomy, Joice Heth, Baartman, Black women, Philadelphia, natural history, friendship albums, Atlantic
NYU Press Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
