Objects of Narrative Desire: An Unnatural History of Fossil Collection and Black Women's Sexuality

Abstract

Objects of Narrative Desire:An Unnatural History of Fossil Collection and Black Women's Sexuality Samantha Pinto (bio) Since history is a recorded or remembered event, theatre, for me, is the perfect place to 'make' history—that is, because so much of African-American history has been unrecorded, disremembered, washed out, one of my tasks as a playwright is to—through literature and the special strange relationship between theatre and real-life—locate the ancestral burial ground, dig for bones, find bones, hear the bones sing, write it down. Suzan-Lori Parks, "Possession" In the 2015 book The Sixth Extinction, regarding the current eco-historical moment of great extinction due to manmade climate change, Elizabeth Kolbert mentions in passing an astounding confluence for scholars of race and black feminist theory: the rivalry between Thomas Jefferson and George Cuvier, two of the most infamous historical exploiters of black women's sexuality, for a set of fossils—the bones of a giant mammoth—in the mid-1790s (27–28). Jefferson, then vice president of the United States, had already begun his forty-year sexual entanglement with a woman he enslaved, Sally Hemings. He was also an avid amateur naturalist and collector of fossilized bones unearthed in expeditions of settler colonialism across what was to become America. Cuvier, a young French scientist, would extend his scientific interest in and findings on fossils, eventually positing the first theory of extinction on which the work of Darwin himself is based. Cuvier would also be the person responsible for immortalizing [End Page 351] Sarah Baartman, the early nineteenth-century African performer otherwise known as the Hottentot Venus, in his drawings and racial science claims about her anatomy during her life and, following his 1815 public autopsy of her body, after her death. This seemingly unrelated convergence of the two men who represent the most infamous and intimate links between white supremacy and black women's embodiment reveals the shared material space between the fields of natural history and black feminist theory. Jefferson's and Cuvier's traffic in 'extinct' bones and in black women's bodies was engendered by systems of settler colonialism and chattel slavery, and today both fossilized bones of extinct animals and black women's historical bodies are mobilized to critique these systems in the cultural work of remembrance, knowledge production, and other labors for scientific and historical narratives of progress. This article argues that in analyzing the twinned com-modification of fossils and black women's bodies we might both trace the strange connections between their exploitation in the service of the seemingly opposed narratives of white supremacy and liberal progress and imagine the methodological possibilities of reading objectification not as the end point of our critique of scientific racism and the misogynoir of Western political thought, but as the generative space from which we can reimagine an embodied history of black women. The evidence of the scientific, sexual, and political desires that append to black women's historical bodies animates this piece as a companion object to fossils and as a way to think through the 'fossilization' of race, gender, and sexuality that happens in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as well as in contemporary discourses around black women's history. Fossils stand as objects that are spectacularly rendered into the deep time of 'prehistory,' a temporal category that, as Dana Luciano reminds us, often serves to obscure and provide an alibi for contemporary practices of racialized and gendered violence and violation ("Tracking Prehistory" 174). This article excavates these unnatural narratives of natural history and black women's objectification through three sites. First, I read the convergence between Jefferson and Cuvier, Baartman and Hemings, and the circulation and display of fossils and black women's bodies through their shared participation in eighteenth-century collection as a performance and a narrative of progress. Second, I turn to an investigation of the scientific and public cultures formed in the wake of this earlier era, including [End Page 352] the institutionalization of racial science in the spaces of the museum and the expedition in the late nineteenth century, to imagine how collection and objectification were re-narrativized in these spaces. Here, I focus on...