Britt Rusert – författare

In The Afric-American Picture Gallery, Britt Rusert examines a work of periodical fiction by educator and activist William J. Wilson, an episodic series of experimental prose and biting satire that was published in 1859. It tells the tale of a flaneur character who takes readers on a virtual tour through an imagined gallery of Black art, long before any such museum existed in the United States. Rusert uses Wilson’s series as groundwork to formulate a theory and practice of Black aesthetics and politics, considering the construction of autonomous zones of Black expression and vanguardism within the context of the late Antebellum period. Connecting Wilson’s writings to later emergences of the avant-garde and counter-cultural and analyzing ekphrastic methods of vividly describing visual art, Rusert brings a little-circulated piece of writing to the fore as an inflection point in the history of Black publics and imagination.

In The Afric-American Picture Gallery, Britt Rusert examines a work of periodical fiction by educator and activist William J. Wilson, an episodic series of experimental prose and biting satire that was published in 1859. It tells the tale of a flaneur character who takes readers on a virtual tour through an imagined gallery of Black art, long before any such museum existed in the United States. Rusert uses Wilson’s series as groundwork to formulate a theory and practice of Black aesthetics and politics, considering the construction of autonomous zones of Black expression and vanguardism within the context of the late Antebellum period. Connecting Wilson’s writings to later emergences of the avant-garde and counter-cultural and analyzing ekphrastic methods of vividly describing visual art, Rusert brings a little-circulated piece of writing to the fore as an inflection point in the history of Black publics and imagination.

Honorable Mention, 2019 MLA Prize for a First Book Sole Finalist Mention for the 2018 Lora Romero First Book Prize, presented by the American Studies AssociationExposes the influential work of a group of black artists to confront and refute scientific racism. Traversing the archives of early African American literature, performance, and visual culture, Britt Rusert uncovers the dynamic experiments of a group of black writers, artists, and performers. Fugitive Science chronicles a little-known story about race and science in America. While the history of scientific racism in the nineteenth century has been well-documented, there was also a counter-movement of African Americans who worked to refute its claims. Far from rejecting science, these figures were careful readers of antebellum science who linked diverse fields—from astronomy to physiology—to both on-the-ground activism and more speculative forms of knowledge creation. Routinely excluded from institutions of scientific learning and training, they transformed cultural spaces like the page, the stage, the parlor, and even the pulpit into laboratories of knowledge and experimentation. From the recovery of neglected figures like Robert Benjamin Lewis, Hosea Easton, and Sarah Mapps Douglass, to new accounts of Martin Delany, Henry Box Brown, and Frederick Douglass, Fugitive Science makes natural science central to how we understand the origins and development of African American literature and culture. This distinct and pioneering book will spark interest from anyone wishing to learn more on race and society.

Honorable Mention, 2019 MLA Prize for a First Book Sole Finalist Mention for the 2018 Lora Romero First Book Prize, presented by the American Studies AssociationExposes the influential work of a group of black artists to confront and refute scientific racism. Traversing the archives of early African American literature, performance, and visual culture, Britt Rusert uncovers the dynamic experiments of a group of black writers, artists, and performers. Fugitive Science chronicles a little-known story about race and science in America. While the history of scientific racism in the nineteenth century has been well-documented, there was also a counter-movement of African Americans who worked to refute its claims. Far from rejecting science, these figures were careful readers of antebellum science who linked diverse fields—from astronomy to physiology—to both on-the-ground activism and more speculative forms of knowledge creation. Routinely excluded from institutions of scientific learning and training, they transformed cultural spaces like the page, the stage, the parlor, and even the pulpit into laboratories of knowledge and experimentation. From the recovery of neglected figures like Robert Benjamin Lewis, Hosea Easton, and Sarah Mapps Douglass, to new accounts of Martin Delany, Henry Box Brown, and Frederick Douglass, Fugitive Science makes natural science central to how we understand the origins and development of African American literature and culture. This distinct and pioneering book will spark interest from anyone wishing to learn more on race and society.

The colorful charts, graphs, and maps presented at the 1900 Paris Exposition by famed sociologist and black rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois offered a view into the lives of black Americans, conveying a literal and figurative representation of "the color line." From advances in education to the lingering effects of slavery, these prophetic infographics —beautiful in design and powerful in content—make visible a wide spectrum of black experience.W. E. B. Du Bois''s Data Portraits collects the complete set of graphics in full color for the first time, making their insights and innovations available to a contemporary imagination. As Maria Popova wrote, these data portraits shaped how "Du Bois himself thought about sociology, informing the ideas with which he set the world ablaze three years later in The Souls of Black Folk."

This book tells the fascinating history of mutual aid organizing before the twentieth century, showing how its origins intersect with abolitionist and anti-carceral movements in the United States. Mutual aid has gone mainstream over the past couple of years, but few people know how far back it reaches. Dramatic and inspiring, the stories told describe people banding together, often against all odds, in the face of disaster, crisis, violence, and repression, to change the forces of history. From anti-slavery vigilance committees working tirelessly on the frontlines to rescue and protect those vulnerable to kidnapping, incarceration, and violence, to subcultural experiments in communal living and healthcare, nineteenth-century abolitionists, free lovers, feminists, queers, fugitives, and workers came up with a number of collective solutions to racial capitalism's biopolitical imperatives.

This handbook illustrates the evolution of literature and science, in collaboration and contestation, across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The essays it gathers question the charged rhetoric that pits science against the humanities while also demonstrating the ways in which the convergence of literary and scientific approaches strengthens cultural analyses of colonialism, race, sex, labor, state formation, and environmental destruction.The broad scope of this collection explores the shifting relations between literature and science that have shaped our own cultural moment, sometimes in ways that create a problematic hierarchy of knowledge and other times in ways that encourage fruitful interdisciplinary investigations, innovative modes of knowledge production, and politically charged calls for social justice.  Across units focused on epistemologies, techniques and methods, ethics and politics, and forms and genres, the chapters address problems rangingacross epidemiology and global health, genomics and biotechnology, environmental and energy sciences, behaviorism and psychology, physics, and computational and surveillance technologies.Chapter 19 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

This handbook illustrates the evolution of literature and science, in collaboration and contestation, across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The essays it gathers question the charged rhetoric that pits science against the humanities while also demonstrating the ways in which the convergence of literary and scientific approaches strengthens cultural analyses of colonialism, race, sex, labor, state formation, and environmental destruction.The broad scope of this collection explores the shifting relations between literature and science that have shaped our own cultural moment, sometimes in ways that create a problematic hierarchy of knowledge and other times in ways that encourage fruitful interdisciplinary investigations, innovative modes of knowledge production, and politically charged calls for social justice.  Across units focused on epistemologies, techniques and methods, ethics and politics, and forms and genres, the chapters address problems rangingacross epidemiology and global health, genomics and biotechnology, environmental and energy sciences, behaviorism and psychology, physics, and computational and surveillance technologies.Chapter 19 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.