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.

摘要

本文分析了维多利亚时代名人的黑色物质内部结构的两个“著名”解剖：莎拉·巴特曼 (Sarah Baartman) 对法国科学家乔治·居维叶 (George Cuvier) 的解剖，当时的媒体以及艺术家、传记作家和历史学家对其进行了排练，以及玛丽·西科尔 (Mary Seacole) 的描述在她 1857 年的克里米亚战争回忆录中，她对一名霍乱患者新格林纳达婴儿进行了尸检。两者都是 19 世纪黑人女性名人身体奇观中的臭名昭著的事件，阐明了这个名人如何受到死亡文化的支持，更尖锐的是，解剖困扰着当今分类科学“秩序”的激进崛起。在公共尸检和从墓地偷走黑人和穷人尸体以推动医学教育的历史文化中，这篇文章询问这些著名的解剖和他们的来世在什么地方适合 19 世纪的种族、科学和性的叙述？关于 19 世纪死亡、种族分类和名人文化的交集，对身体内部的固定能告诉我们什么？我认为种族化、性化的尸体和尸检行为是 19 世纪黑人女性名人的对象和作者，就像当时的现场、视觉和印刷文化表现一样。