Undisciplinarity and fugitivity are the controlling conceits through which these books imagine the sciences in the long nineteenth century of the Americas and in the antebellum period of African America, respectively. The authors trace the scientific yearnings, failings, and rewritings of anthropology, ethnography, craniology, phrenology, and electrobiology, to name a few, with race at the center of their studies. Combined, these books interrogate a transdisciplinary archive of materials such as field notebooks, letters, fiction, performances, cabinets, and friendship albums. Undisciplined demonstrates how white European, Afro-Caribbean, and African American scientists decoupled long-nineteenth-century theories and practices from the fixity of racial and other categories on which their sciences relied. Fugitive Science understands African American scientists’ responses to such theories and practices as producing disciplinary innovations that fled into new, if similarly unfixed, territories of knowledge. Both books join a growing body of scholarship that enacts the crucial work literary studies can do...

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