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

Abstract

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.