Dinosaur Bones and Uncivil Histories of Black Women's Embodiment

Over the course of the 1790s, a rivalry emerged between Thomas Jefferson and George Cuvier for possession of a set of fossils, the bones of a giant mammoth. This convergence of two of the most infamous and intimate links... [ view full abstract ]

Over the course of the 1790s, a rivalry emerged between Thomas Jefferson and George Cuvier for possession of a set of fossils, the bones of a giant mammoth. This convergence of two of the most infamous and intimate links between white supremacy and black women’s embodiment over the fossilized bones of extinct creatures begs us to imagine the shared material space between the fields of natural and black feminist history, both founded on the systems of settler colonialism and chattel slavery. Both dinosaur bones and black women’s bodies become public spectacles across the nineteenth century; both are made into “draws” through their proximity to narratives of the “progress of Western civilization” that museum spaces and the disciplinary formations of anthropology and natural history engender. From debates about the historical place and return of Saartjie Baartman’s bones from the Musée de l'Homme in France to South Africa, to the reconstruction of Sally Hemings’s supposed room in Monticello, black women’s 19C bodies are still being deployed in narratives of corrective civility; but they also inform works like Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood (1903). Hopkins’s complicated recasting of black women’s cultural objectification imagines fantastic collaborations between science, race, and gender through both the “civil” spaces of natural, national, and cultural history, as well as the uncivil space of the material body. This paper then reads the unnatural historical connection between fossils and black women’s bodies as a way to generatively disrupt the boundaries of history, science, and the body that undergird civil society.