面对种族:战前美国的大众科学与黑人知识分子思想

IF 0.2 Q2 HISTORY
R. Walker
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引用次数: 4

摘要

这篇文章展示了19世纪中期美国黑人如何回应和挑战科学种族主义。具体来说,它关注的是他们是如何接受和采用面相学和颅相学这两门科学的,这两门科学的基础是人们的头和脸揭示了他们的道德和精神能力。正如最近的学术研究表明的那样,像面相学和颅相学这样的学科为后来的科学种族主义提供了意识形态框架。这篇文章讲述了一个不同的故事。通过关注非裔美国知识分子如何战略性地分析头部和面部,它揭示了有色人种如何参与内战前的种族理论,以独特的方式和为自己的目的重新制定它。尽管白人依靠面相学的“证据”来论证非裔美国人在精神上和身体上都不如黑人,但美国黑人却采纳了那些支持种族本质主义兴起的话语,创造了一种替代的面部分析科学来论证种族平等。在黑人手中,面相学和颅相学并没有巩固白人至上主义;相反,它们成了证明有色人种心智能力的工具。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
Facing Race: Popular Science and Black Intellectual Thought in Antebellum America
abstract:This essay shows how Black Americans responded to and challenged scientific racism in the mid-nineteenth century. Specifically, it focuses on how they adopted and coopted the disciplines of physiognomy and phrenology—two sciences based on the notion that people's heads and faces revealed their moral and mental capacity. As recent scholarship has demonstrated, disciplines like physiognomy and phrenology provided the ideological scaffolding for later versions of scientific racism. This article tells a different story. By focusing on how African American intellectuals strategically analyzed heads and faces, it exposes how people of color engaged with antebellum race theory, reformulating it in unique ways and for their own purposes. Although white people relied on physiognomic "evidence" to argue that African Americans were mentally and physically inferior beings, Black Americans coopted the very discourses that undergirded the rise of racial essentialism, crafting an alternative science of facial analysis to argue for racial equality. When wielded by Black hands, physiognomy and phrenology did not solidify white supremacy; they instead became tools for vindicating the mental capacities of people of color.
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来源期刊
CiteScore
0.30
自引率
0.00%
发文量
18
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