Spectacular remains: Black celebrity, death and the aesthetics of autopsy

ABSTRACT

This article analyses two ‘famous’ dissections that go into the Black material interior of Victorian era celebrity: Sarah Baartman’s dissection by French scientist George Cuvier as it is rehearsed by press of the day and artists, biographers and historians in its aftermath and Mary Seacole’s description of her autopsy of a New Grenadian infant, a victim of cholera, in her 1857 Crimean war memoir. Both are infamous events in the spectacle of Black women’s celebrity bodies in the nineteenth century, elucidating how this celebrity is undergirded by cultures of death and, more acutely, dissection that haunt the radical rise in the classificatory scientific ‘order’ of the day. Within a historic culture of public autopsies and the pilfering of Black and poor cadavers from cemeteries to fuel medical education, this essay asks where do these famous dissections and their afterlives fit into the nineteenth-century narratives of race, science and sexuality? What can the fixation on the inside of the body tell us about the intersection of the nineteenth-century cultures of death, racial classification and celebrity? I argue that the racialised, sexualised cadaver and the act of autopsy are objects and authors of nineteenth-century Black women’s celebrity as surely as live, visual and print culture representations of the time.

KEYWORDS:

• race
• gender
• medicine
• nineteenth-century
• history of science

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. And here we might think, too, of the critical distance that Uri McMillan’s Embodied Avatars (McMillan 2015) suggests in its argument about the ways that nineteenth century Black women performers, artists and authors kept their distance and difference even from their ‘live’ flesh through means of fabricated public identities.

2. ‘An investigator can choose between two attitudes towards his subject. First, he can be satisfied only to describe, in the manner of those anatomists who are all surprised when, in the midst of a description of the tibia, they are asked how many fibular depressions they have. That is because in their researches there is never a question of themselves but of others. In the beginning of my medical studies, after several nauseating sessions in the dissection room, I asked an older hand how I could prevent such reactions. “My friend, pretend you’re dissecting a cat, and everything will be all right” . … . Second, once he has described reality, the investigator can make up his mind to change it. In principle, however, the decision to describe seems naturally to imply a critical approach and therefore a need to go farther towards some solution. Both authorised and anecdotal literature have created too many stories about Negroes to be suppressed. But putting them all together does not help us in our real task, which is to disclose their mechanics. What matters for us is not to collect facts and behaviour, but to find their meaning.’ (Fanon 2008, p. 168).

3. See Fred Moten (2003), Jennifer C. Nash (2014); Amber Jamilla Musser (2014); Darieck Scott (2010) et al on Black object-ness.

4. On autopsy and dissection’s moral itineraries/connotations, see Michael A. Sappol (2002), Helen Patricia MacDonald (2006) and Roberta McGrath (2002).

5. See Joseph Addison’s ‘Dissection of a coquette’s heart’ Addison (1711) for instance.

6. There were also, of course, growing debates about the practice of vivisection; see Bates (2017), et al.

7. And, of course, dissection has proven an evergreen subject to revisit the ethics around medicine, race and gender of the period for contemporary culture, from movies on Burke and Hare (1972, 2010) to newer novels such as Sara Collins’ The Confessions of Frannie Langton (2019), which imagines the enslaved medical labour and assistance to racist scientists through autopsy, and Dana Schwartz’s Anatomy: A Love Story (2022), which poses an adolescent girl’s quest for medical knowledge against the sexism of being refused entry into medical schools.

8. Of course Barnum was the architect of not just the live performing spectacle of Joice Heth, who claimed to be an over 160 year old formerly enslaved nurse of George Washington, but also of her 1836 public and publicised autopsy, the results of which promised to reveal the ‘truth’ of her claim. Autopsy, race and celebrity – the genealogy of race – were bound up with each other, and with the commercial markets of the era. Scholar Uri MacMillan writes compellingly about Heth’s performance as an self-knowing ‘avatar’ in Embodied Avatars (McMillan 2015). On Heth’s autopsy and the politics/history of autopsy as performance, see James R. Wright Jr. (Wright 2018), which also speaks of the ‘return’ of dissection as a public performance via exhibits like BodyWorlds (p. 964). See also I. Rutkow (2022) on details of the Heth dissection and how it dovetails with the history of surgery.

9. As only one such example, mid-nineteenth-century US ‘outlaw’ Joaquin Murrieta's severed head was allegedly part of a travelling display promised by various flyers.

10. See also Deborah Willis (2010) and Sadiah Qureshi (2004).

11. I refer to the ongoing debates in Black Studies around the reproduction of Black pain, suffering and death into celebrity spectacle for white liberal education and awareness. The key text for this shift is Saidiya Hartman’s influential call for critical fabulation and against the strictly archival recovery of Black women’s history in ‘Venus in Two Acts’ (2008) as the contemporary watershed text around these stakes.

12. The two written biographies of Baartman (Holmes 2009, Crais and Scully 2010) deploy these frames. The 1997 documentary, The Life and Times of Sarah Baartman, however, does not deploy a metaphoric reframe.

13. See Pinto (2020) and Pinto (2019).

14. Paquet refers to her memoir as ‘an entirely public account of self,’ thinking through the very necessary financial stakes of Black women’s published writing in the period (2002, p. 67).

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Notes on contributors

Samantha Pinto

Samantha Pinto is Professor of English at The University of Texas at Austin. Her book, Difficult Diasporas: The Transnational Feminist Aesthetic of the Black Atlantic (NYU Press, 2013), was the winner of the 2013 William Sanders Scarborough Prize for African American Literature and Culture from the MLA. Her work has been published in journals including Meridians, Signs, Palimpsest, Safundi, Small Axe, and Atlantic Studies, and she has received fellowships from the NEH, the NHC, and the Harry Ransom Center. Her second book, Infamous Bodies: Early Black Women’s Celebrity and the Afterlives of Rights (Duke University Press, 2020) explores the relationship between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century black women celebrities and discourses of race, gender, & human rights. She is currently at work on a third book on race, embodiment, and science in African diaspora culture.