Prodigious Births: U.S. Population and the Medical Discourses of Black Birth

Prodigy has historically been a double-edged term that joins the marvelous and the monstrous together to name a category of the unpredictable and unprecedented. Redeployed during the Atlantic slave trade to classify young... [ view full abstract ]

Prodigy has historically been a double-edged term that joins the marvelous and the monstrous together to name a category of the unpredictable and unprecedented. Redeployed during the Atlantic slave trade to classify young black genius together with spectacles of black disabled bodies, however, the dual nature of the concept of prodigy came to pathologize and exclude black childhood from genealogy and assert the instability of black populations. Tracking early American medical journals’ use of black infancy to mark a failure of inheritance, as in cases of superfoetation and congenital disability, I argue that this figure of the black prodigy not only shaped medical theories of racialized disability but also translated into more popular literature of the period. These uses of prodigy not only reveals the erasure of black populations, but also how fundamentally dependent white models of population were on this omission.

I particularly link this medical trope to two literary texts: Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) and Susan Paul’s Memoir of James Jackson (1835). While Melville trades on the anti-genealogy associations of the prodigy to imagine a community outside of straight genealogy, but which excludes the black children enabling it, Paul offers a more radical and specifically anti-medical transformation of the prodigy into a sign of transcendent kinship and of population outside of the nation.