Identity, Culture, and the Science Performance: From the Lab to the Streets 9781350234062, 9781350234109, 9781350234086

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Identity, Culture, and the Science Performance Volume 1

Performance and Science: Interdisciplinary Dialogues explores the interactions between science and performance, providing readers with a unique guide to current practices and research in this fast-expanding field. Through shared themes and case studies, the series offers rigorous vocabularies and methods for empirical studies of performance, with each volume involving collaboration between performance scholars, practitioners and scientists. The series encompasses the modalities of performance to include drama, dance and music. SERIES EDITORS John Lutterbie Chair of the Department of Art and of Theatre Arts at Stony Brook University, USA Nicola Shaughnessy Professor of Performance at the University of Kent, UK IN THE SAME SERIES Affective Performance and Cognitive Science Edited by Nicola Shaughnessy ISBN 978-1-4081-8398-4 An Introduction to Theatre, Performance and the Cognitive Sciences John Lutterbie ISBN 978-1-4742-5704-6 Collaborative Embodied Performance: Ecologies of Skill Edited by Kath Bicknell and John Sutton ISBN 978-1-3501-9769-5 Performance and the Medical Body Edited by Alex Mermikides and Gianna Bouchard ISBN 978-1-4725-7078-9 Performance, Medicine and the Human Alex Mermikides ISBN 978-1-3500-2215-7 Performing Psychologies Edited by Nicola Shaughnessy and Philip Barnard ISBN 978-1-4742-6085-5 Performing Specimens: Contemporary Performance and Biomedical Display Gianna Bouchard ISBN 978-1-3500-3567-6 Performing the Remembered Present: The Cognition of Memory in Dance, Theatre and Music Edited by Pil Hansen with Bettina Bläsing ISBN 978-1-4742-8471-4 Theatre and Cognitive Neuroscience Edited by Clelia Falletti, Gabriele Sofia and Victor Jacono ISBN 978-1-4725-8478-6 Theatre, Performance and Cognition: Languages, Bodies and Ecologies Edited by Rhonda Blair and Amy Cook ISBN 978-1-4725-9179-1

Identity, Culture, and the Science Performance Volume 1 From the Lab to the Streets

Edited by Vivian Appler and Meredith Conti

METHUEN DRAMA Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, METHUEN DRAMA and the Methuen Drama logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2023 Copyright © Vivian Appler, Meredith Conti, and contributors, 2023 Vivian Appler and Meredith Conti have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. x constitute an extension of this copyright page. Series design by Louise Dugdale Cover image: Festival of science, art and technology “Polytech” in Gorky Park in Moscow, Russia All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any thirdparty websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Appler, Vivian, editor. | Conti, Meredith, editor. Title: Identity, culture, and the science performance. Volume 1, From the lab to the streets / edited by Vivian Appler and Meredith Conti. Other titles: From the lab to the streets Description: London; New York: Methuen Drama, 2022. | Series: Performance and science: interdisciplinary dialogues | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2022007291 (print) | LCCN 2022007292 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350234062 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350234086 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350234079 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Communication in science. | Science–Social aspects. Classification: LCC Q223 .I34 2022 (print) | LCC Q223 (ebook) | DDC 306.4/5–dc23/eng20220517 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022007291 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022007292 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3502-3406-2 ePDF: 978-1-3502-3408-6 eBook: 978-1-3502-3407-9 Series: Performance and Science: Interdisciplinary Dialogues Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www​.bloomsbury​.com and sign up for our newsletters.

For Phyllis, Marge, and Donna and in memory of Ruth Ann Beck For Katherine and Rhian and in memory of Marian Scott Kendall

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CONTENTS

List of Illustrations  ix Acknowledgments  x Introduction: Taking It to the Streets: Performing Science in Public  Vivian Appler and Meredith Conti  1 PART ONE  Building Community and Imagining Worlds through the Science Performance  15 Performance Artists Roundtable  Petra Kuppers and Stephanie Heit of the Olimpias and Lani Fu and Jem Pickard of Superhero Clubhouse  17 1 SF for Many Modernities: Hybridity in the Worlds of Margaret Cavendish and Donna Haraway  Vivian Appler  35 2 Cultivating Ensembles: A Relational Reflection on Creating Cultural Transformation with New Performances of Science  Raquell M. Holmes  54 3 Shadow Ecologies: Shadow Puppets as Science Performance  Alison L. Dell, Stephanie DowdyNava, Armando de la Torre, and Saúl S. Nava  72 Creative Interlude: Science Poetry  Kate Gillespie  93

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PART TWO  Performing Science in the Public Laboratory  97 4 Lecture on Heads and Lectures with Skulls—Performance Transmutations  Marlis Schweitzer  99 5 Performing Paleontology at the Natural History Museum  Shelby Brewster  121 6 Ether, Acid, Sweat, and Blood: Toward a Dramaturgy of Smells in the Victorian Operating Theatre  Meredith Conti  141 Creative Interlude: Mōrehu & Tītī  David Geary  159 PART THREE  Experimentation, Exhibition, and Ethics  171 7 Anatomical Acts: Minstrelsy and Nineteenth-Century Performances of Popular Anatomy  Mia Levenson  173 8 Staging Science and Humanity in Manjula Padmanabhan’s Harvest  Radhica Ganapathy  193 9 Do Goats Have a Right to Cigarettes?: A Cross-Disciplinary Investigation of the Ethics of Nonhuman Animal Performances  Jennifer A. Kokai and Lauren Kokai  211 Science Communicators Roundtable  Raven Baxter, Katherine Inderbitzen, and Sahana Srinivasan  227 Selected Bibliography  237 List of Contributors  247 Index  252

ILLUSTR ATIONS

Figures 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Tuning into site, CityScape  23 Hugging score  24 Wax scar  26 Tuning into site  31 Biocriaturas en Panamá, Biomuseo, 2019  82 Boston Public School visit, 2019  85 “A Representation of the several humerous Heads, exhibited in the Lecture on Heads: etched in Caricatura.”  100 8 Dr. Gustav Schere lectures on phrenology at the Buchhandlerdorfe, Leipzig  101 9 A satirical caricature depicting a phrenology lecture, “Calves’ Heads and Brains of a Phrenological Lecture,” September 1826  112 10 Visual representation of moral reasoning with regard to Guillermo’s cigarette habit  220

Table 1

Geologic time scale, including the proposed Anthropocene  125

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book and its forthcoming sister volume would not have been possible without the generosity, skill, and ingenuity of our many collaborators. We would like to thank Bloomsbury Publishing and especially Ella Wilson, Mark Dudgeon, and series editors John Lutterbie and Nicola Shaughnessy for their expert guidance. We are grateful to the contributors to this collection, who hail from a range of disciplines in the arts and sciences and whose insightful essays, conversations, and creative works have made our roles as editors all the more rewarding. Many of the scholarly queries, discourses, histories, and objects of study with which this volume engages emerged through a threeyear series of American Society for Theatre Research working groups dedicated to the intersections of science and performance. Thank you to the participants of the 2016, 2017, and 2018 working groups, a number of whom have contributions in this collection, for their bold scholarship and penetrative questions. Thank you to the faculty, staff, and students of the College of Charleston (CofC) and the University at Buffalo, SUNY (UB), our home institutions, including Melissa Hughes and Ashley Pagnotta, who have shared their expertise about women in science, and Narae Kwon, who provided valuable transcribing assistance. Vivian would like to especially thank Sarah Owens and CofC’s First Year Experience program for supporting the class “Untold Stories of Astronomy” and its students, where many of the central concepts of these volumes were rehearsed. Meredith extends her appreciation to UB’s Gender Institute, UB’s Humanities Institute, and the membership of the British Society for Literature and Science. We would also like to acknowledge Susan Kattwinkel, for being ready when we needed her.

Introduction Taking It to the Streets: Performing Science in Public Vivian Appler and Meredith Conti

On October 11, 2021, a 4,800-square-foot portrait of American astronaut Stephanie Wilson debuted in Atlanta, Georgia’s Woodruff Park.1 Imagined by Purpose Entertainment’s Christina Korp (a selfdescribed astronaut manager and space adviser) and created by land artist Stan Herd, the earthwork commemorated both the United Nations’ International Day of the Girl Child and World Space Week, which in 2021 was themed “Women in Space.”2 With support from the Atlanta Parks and Recreation department, the Hines Family Foundation, the Georgia Space Grant Consortium, and Morehouse College (a historically Black college in the United States), among other institutions and agencies, the earthwork engaged locals in a collaborative public arts project. In addition to volunteers who helped install the art piece, children from Atlanta public schools and area hospitals created “1,500 space-themed tiles” to border Wilson’s portrait and spell out #AIMHIGHER above its frame, a message the creators hoped would empower Black women and girls to “reach for more advantageous goals.”3 Made of sand, clay, pecan shell mulch, and other compostable materials, the portrait was intended to fade with time and exposure; as its natural materials drift, fade, and decompose, Wilson’s portrait will eventually cease to exist. Designed to increase awareness of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Artemis Program, which will

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land people of color and women on the Moon for the first time, Herd’s “eco-friendly” earthwork invites us to contemplate Wilson’s larger-than-life representation in Atlanta.4 An engineer and veteran astronaut of three shuttle missions who is slated for Artemis III’s mission in 2024,5 Wilson is often labeled a “pioneer” by journalists and media outlets.6 While the colonizing language deployed to describe space travel remains problematic (particularly when applied to scientists of color),7 it is true that Wilson’s vanguardism as a Black woman astronaut bound for the Moon matters to NASA’s viability as a world science authority as well as to the nation’s (insufficient) progress toward an equitable and inclusive workforce. That Herd, Korp, and their collaborators selected Wilson as the inspirational face of an #AIMHIGHER earthwork is both understandable and commendable. How might we, then, interpret the cultural work of Herd’s Wilson portrait and the public performance of science it manifested? Herd is himself a monumental figure in US American art history, having devoted his career to cultivating the land art movement through massive agricultural installations. With a resume that includes inscribing farm fields with portraits of Amelia Earhart and Kiowa war chief Satanta, artworks like Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers, and advertisements for Shock Top Beer and Absolut Vodka, Herd foregrounds his belief that the “effort to make the art is as important as the final image.”8 The artist is not alone, however, in his efforts; he seeks out and relies upon volunteer laborers to help execute—that is, to physically perform— his elaborate designs. Because Herd often creates earthworks that celebrate the histories of marginalized peoples through portraiture, his body of work poses weighty questions about representation, agency, and appropriation in contemporary art. As with his Atlanta collaboration with Morehouse College, Herd has a history of partnering with institutions whose constituencies identify with his artistic subjects, suggesting that the artist seeks to move his “community driven art form” beyond the boundaries of performative allyship and into the realm of what educational activist Bettina Love might call the work of a “co-conspirator.”9 Like many of the subjects studied within this collection, Herd’s work is exceptional and contradictory. While Herd brings together communities in the empowering act of creating art—often raising awareness of key social and environmental issues—his artistic

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process carries with it a comparatively large carbon footprint: Herd flies over his earthworks in order to refine his vision. Moreover, most of the artist’s earthworks are “so big that they are best viewed from the sky,” meaning his aesthetics tend to benefit those who fly or occupy the upper floors of skyscrapers (though the creators of Wilson’s Atlanta portrait claim that earthbound visitors to the park will still be able to enjoy it).10 That Herd originally imagined crop art as a suitable medium for a “nation of people who fly” suggests that he conceived of the American public as both hypermobile and economically advantaged.11 Perhaps it is the community-building initiated through Herd’s large earthworks that matters most; people from diverse backgrounds labor together outdoors to create an ephemeral and visually spectacular object and in doing so invest in local communities and planetary ecologies. Nevertheless, Herd’s career suggests that weighing the positive effects of a large-scale, socially progressive arts practice with its negative environmental impacts is an ongoing and precarious business. In its hypervisibility, Wilson’s park portrait materially counteracts the historic invisibility of women and Black, Indigenous, and people of color in science. While it is encouraging that NASA’s 2013 and 2017 astronaut classes have had the “highest percentage of women in history,”12 the fields of physics and engineering (central to NASA’s project) struggle to recruit and retain scientists from underrepresented groups. According to the latest National Science Foundation’s Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities in Science and Engineering report, men continue to outpace women in earning advanced science and engineering (S&E) degrees and are paid more than their women counterparts. Black, Latine, and Indigenous scientists and engineers “had a lower share . . . of S&E occupations than did Whites, Asians, and other racial groups,” though their share of employed workers was roughly similar to other groups within health-related occupations. “[S]cientists and engineers with one or more disabilities,” the study reveals, “had an unemployment rate greater than that of the U.S. labor force.”13 In the US American theatre industry, demographic landscapes are similarly disheartening. Organizations dedicated to tracking shifts in the industry’s hiring practices, including The Count and the Performers with Disabilities Watchdog Report, have marked the unequal distribution of positions of creative authority in theatres

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across the United States, where “our stages continue to be dominated by white male-identified writers,” and designers, directors, and actors of diverse identities struggle to be hired.14 These critical imbalances continue to shape whose stories are told through performance, by whom, and how. Although the demographics above pertain to the United States, the inequitable inclusion and treatment of minoritized individuals and groups across the sciences and arts are enduring, global trends. For example, as veteran taikonaut Wang Yaping prepared to become the first Chinese woman to perform a spacewalk in late 2021,15 a barrage of sexist coverage by the media as well as Yaping’s own employer, the China National Space Administration, foregrounded her roles as mother, menstruator, and makeup-wearer.16 Mainstream performances of scientific authority by women, underrepresented racial and ethnic groups, those in the LGBTQ+ community, and people with disabilities continue to be exceptions, not the rule. The two complementary volumes that comprise Identity, Culture, and the Science Performance move from an understanding that identity-based disparities in representation, access, and authority in the arts and sciences are related (if not at times reciprocal) crises. Science has never operated independently of culture. Indeed, despite their extensive and protracted siloing by academic institutions, governmental agencies, and private and nonprofit sectors, science and culture have played in the same physical and metaphorical sandboxes for as long as humans have contemplated their relationship to the natural world. Performance, as a ubiquitous vehicle for human thought and action, has proven itself to be gleefully inattentive to the socially imposed boundaries of science and other cultural fora. Like the clinical laboratory and astronomical observatory, performance serves as a reflexive and generative site of transformations, of penetrating barriers, and testing innovative ideas, approaches, and praxes. Theatre, dance, and other forms of human performance, then, operate as viable laboratories for community conversations, ethical debates, and knowledge generation about and within contested socio-scientific structures. They also help to place identity center stage in ways that are variously provocative, problematic, nuanced, and recuperative. This edited collection and its forthcoming sister volume together interrogate science performances as they intersect with notions of identity and culture. Here, the “science performance”

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is broadly defined as an event or process that straddles scientific and theatrical realms; the term applies to theatrical treatments of science content (plays, live art, public history, performance art, outreach programming) and to considerations of scientific events qua performance. The series’ contributors engage a broad range of scientific disciplines in their research, including ecology, medicine, psychology, physics, geology, astronomy, climatology, bioethics, and the pseudoscience of phrenology. Identity, Culture, and the Science Performance contemplates the ways in which identity categories and cultural constructs are formed and reformed through science performances, including those of gender, race, ability, class, sexuality, age, and ethnicity, as well as social differences pertaining to political affiliation, education status, and religion. Together, the volumes critique the oppressive and prejudiced ideologies prevalent across the history of science while highlighting science performances that challenge and redress these ideologies. As a number of the books’ contributors make clear, while performance has itself sustained racially, culturally, and financially exclusive systems and practices, it is also an instrument for intervention and revolution; opportunities for increased diversity, inclusion, access, and equity can and do manifest at the intersections of science and performance. Identity, Culture, and the Science Performance offers a potential model by which interdisciplinary scholars might deeply engage performance as a method for knowing the world, and in so doing uncover social concerns traditionally hidden within scientific discourses and their related cultural dialogues. This series joins a burgeoning catalogue of scholarship that affiliates science with theatre and performance studies. Foundational to this area of inquiry is the ongoing work of Kirsten E. ShepherdBarr, whose Science on Stage: From Doctor Faustus to Copenhagen (2006) and Theatre and Evolution from Ibsen to Beckett (2015) together reveal the modern dramatic canon’s enduring and complicated engagement with the theories, methods, and people of science.17 Among the most studied science performances are the medical spectacles and embodiments that materialize within theatres, lecture halls, health facilities, and private sickrooms. Diverse projects written and edited by Stanton B. Garner, Jr., Danielle Bainbridge, Roberta Barker, Meredith Conti, and Alex Mermikides and Gianna Bouchard seek to uncover and reckon with performances of illness and the medical(ized) body in theatrical and

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extra-theatrical venues.18 Historicizing, troubling, and rejecting the medical model of disability in their feminist and queer disability studies research, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Carrie Sandahl, and Petra Kuppers advance essential social frameworks and languages for interrogating disability art and performance.19 The recent cognitive turn in theatre studies, precipitated by the innovative research of Bruce McConachie, Amy Cook, John Lutterbie, Rhonda Blair, Nicola Shaughnessy, Evelyn Tribble, and others, evaluates theatrical spaces, audiences, and practices (including but not limited to acting, design, playwriting, and casting) through the application of cognitive science’s studies and methods.20 Science technologies, technics, and “techno-performances” have inspired a wealth of scholarly inquiries, from the cyborg imaginings and social robot dramaturgies of Jon McKenzie, Kara Reilly, and Michael Chemers to the media technologies research of Sarah Bay-Cheng, Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, and David Saltz.21 Una Chaudhuri, Gayatri Spivak, Kim Marra, and Rosi Braidotti consider the rich history and ongoing importance of animals and other alt/post-human bodies in performance.22 The breadth and depth of these distinctive subfields bespeak a flourishing of science-integrative performance scholarship in the twenty-first century. As theatre and performance studies scholars increasingly regard the sciences as subjects within their direct purview, they draw on the work of philosophers of science to theoretically ground their interdisciplinary research. In 1959, C. P. Snow famously identified the problematic boundary between the arts and sciences, and subsequent decades of thinkers have borne out Snow’s provocation toward interdisciplinary thought.23 Bruno Latour’s notions of the actant object and assemblage, for example, make possible the perspectival shift necessary for much science-oriented theatre and performance studies scholarship.24 Several contributors to this collection achieve novel viewpoints on science and culture via Donna Haraway’s intersectional feminist science philosophy,25 demonstrating the power of interdisciplinary critique to achieve what Sandra Harding has long called for in her articulation of a “strong objectivity” for scientific process.26 By centralizing subjects and objects from the Global South, the Iberian Peninsula, and the African diaspora in their science histories, Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Walter Mignolo, and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson forcefully intervene in the colonialist whitewashing of science-oriented narratives.27

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Identity, Culture, and the Science Performance expands upon the extant scholarship in several key ways. The scholarship, poetry, conversations, and play-texts featured here call for identityoriented reparative actions within cultures of science as well as performance. Our contributors refigure individuals and subjugated groups as historiographical subjects rather than historical objects of scientific inquiry. Likewise, the authors and artists featured here challenge popular assumptions of scientific authority attributed to originators and inheritors of white supremacist science traditions. Identity, Culture, and the Science Performance embraces the collaborative, actional philosophy proposed by Harding and Haraway. Indeed, these volumes celebrate the cross-disciplinary endeavors of academics, artists, scientists, and activists, which together coalesce around how science performances reinforce, reject, or reimagine human identities and cultures. The first volume in this series, From the Lab to the Streets, takes as its subject public-facing science performances that operate within and for specialist and nonspecialist populations. The book’s chapters, roundtable conversations, and creative works variously trace the theatrical and ethical contours of live science events, reenact historical stagings of scientific expertise, and demonstrate the pedagogical and activist potentials in performing science in community settings. The second volume, From the Curious to the Quantum, pursues the inward-facing, enigmatic, or hidden aspects of science performances, asserting that theatrical performance matters in how we imagine and explore the natural world’s many mysteries. Complementing From the Lab to the Streets’ focus on the public, the contributors to From the Curious to the Quantum identify science performances in their intimate and inscrutable forms—from theatricalizing the BRCA (BReast CAncer) gene on the contemporary stage to performing space exploration and Moon colonization—engaging with identity and culture as motifs, analytical lenses, and positionalities. It is our hope that these volumes suggest potential pathways for future science-integrative performance work and the cultural transformations it provokes. From the Lab to the Streets explores the science performance as a vital but flawed method of public engagement, one that is necessarily entangled with the troubling histories (and complicated presents) of both science and performance. In their research or creative work, our contributors variously confront the

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inhumane treatment of people with disabilities, the exploitation of nonconsenting human subjects, animal exhibitions, bigoted scientific theories, and antiquated theatrical styles and medical practices. These topics have informed the praxes and prejudices of present-day science performances and must be grappled with if meaningful interventions are to occur in both fields. We encourage our readers to approach these potentially triggering topics with us as part of a thoughtful, collective effort to spark critical dialogues and acknowledge uncomfortable truths. The entries of Part One, “Building Community and Imagining Worlds through the Science Performance,” together illuminate the ways in which performance—its methods, aesthetics, technologies, and collaborative values—can render the traditionally closed processes of science more accessible and inviting to a diverse range of practitioners. Part One begins with a roundtable featuring the founding members of the Olimpias, an artists’ collective engaged in social change and disability work, and Superhero Clubhouse, an eco-theatre ensemble dedicated to climate and environmental justice, who together discuss the stakes of making performances in the face of crises both global and local. In the transhistorical comparison “SF for Many Modernities: Hybridity in the Worlds of Margaret Cavendish and Donna Haraway,” Vivian Appler considers performative aspects of both authors’ science philosophies to prompt visions for activist intervention that might disrupt inequitable and unsustainable cultural habits. She suggests that the pre-disciplinary boundarilessness of early modern science philosophy offers useful tools for negotiating sustainable, hybrid praxes for the twenty-first century. In Chapter 2, Raquell M. Holmes narrates her personal journey from science to activism and back again. Holmes traces the evolution of the explicitly intersectional Cultivating Ensembles conference and argues for the use of theatre games, improvisations, and other performance techniques within science communities to foster cultures of equity and belonging. “Shadow Ecologies: Shadow Puppets as Science Performance,” coauthored by ART±BIO Collaborative members Alison L. Dell, Stephanie Dowdy-Nava, Armando de la Torre, and Saúl S. Nava, details the group’s biology and ecology outreach initiatives using shadow puppets with young learners from displaced or vulnerable populations, contextualizing these programs within US-Mexico border art traditions. The authors assert that through creating and manipulating their own shadow

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puppets, participants become acquainted with ecological concepts while exploring their identities and worldviews. Three scienceintegrative poems by Kate Gillespie, elegant in their contemplations of body systems, biomedical processes, and the natural world, provide a creative interlude between Parts One and Two. In Part Two, “Performing Science in the Public Laboratory,” essayists examine public stagings of authoritative science for historic and present-day audiences. Marlis Schweitzer’s “Lecture on Heads and Lectures with Skulls—Performance Transmutations” detects in nineteenth-century phrenological lectures the dramaturgical influences of an eighteenth-century satirical performance entitled Lecture on Heads. Schweitzer’s comparative analysis helps to chronicle theatre’s role in popularizing scientific racism. Shelby Brewster’s essay takes as its focus the paleontological performances of natural history museums, which the author contends create the fossil imaginary of the prehistoric past. Brewster juxtaposes traditional and contemporary paleontological performances in order to assess how scientific authority is staged (and restaged) within the neoliberal museum. Nosing her way around the operating theatres of 1800s Britain and the United States, Meredith Conti proposes that smells and olfaction crucially contribute to a dramaturgy of Victorian-era surgical performance. A historiographical attention to smells, Conti argues, helps to situate performed surgeries in their time and place, enhance our readings of the space’s medical acts, and productively decenter the white male surgeon within the theatre’s dramatis personae. Acting as a bridge between Parts Two and Three is playwright David Geary’s Mōrehu & Tītī, written and produced as part of Climate Change Theatre Action. A small play about monumental topics, Mōrehu & Tītī stages an interspecies dialogue about the effects of global warming and biodiversity loss, complete with a celebrity cameo. The chapters in Part Three, “Experimentation, Exhibition, and Ethics,” attend to the ways in which science performances establish, maintain, and challenge notions of scientific and cultural authority. Mia Levenson analyzes the anatomized Black body as a site of race, gender, and class-based anxieties within a set of nineteenth-century “anatomical minstrels.” Levenson considers these satirical blackface sketches as reflective of the century’s booming cadaver trade (which profited off of the commodified Black body), public interest in anatomical discourses as entertainment, and the promotion of a

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white, middle-class identity through popular anatomy. Bodies, and their constitutive parts, are also the focus of Radhica Ganapathy’s essay, “Staging Science and Humanity in Manjula Padmanabhan’s Harvest.” After establishing a context of the subaltern in the midst of the Covid-19 global health crisis, Ganapathy assesses Padmanabhan’s dystopic, bioengineered landscape in light of India’s colonial history. The play, Ganapathy suggests, constructs the brown body as a site of subaltern resistance. In Part Three’s final essay, Jennifer A. Kokai and Lauren Kokai draw from the fields of performance studies and biomedicine to evaluate the case of Guillermo the Goat, a popular 1960s attraction at the Aquarena Springs amusement park, who was encouraged by his handler and the wider public to eat what he most craved: cigarettes. The volume closes with a roundtable featuring three science communicators: Raven “The Science Maven” Baxter, science outreach educator and marine geologist Katherine Inderbitzen, and host of the Netflix children’s science show Brainchild Sahana Srinivasan. Baxter, Inderbitzen, and Srinivasan together regard effective science communication as a way to empower girls, children from marginalized communities, and other young people to pursue their curiosities in spite of the discouragements or bullying that often come with being a science-minded kid. In culminating the first volume of Identity, Culture, and the Science Performance with a roundtable of interdisciplinary science communicators, we gesture toward the science performance’s capacity to engender a childlike and playful sense of curiosity toward the natural world (for adults as well as children) in spite of harmful histories and uncertain futures. This volume invites readers to discover what embodied and creatively critical science performances might mean for individuals, communities, and our shared potential.

Notes 1 Jennifer Nalewicki, “A Monumental Portrait of NASA Astronaut Stephanie Wilson Crops Up in Atlanta,” Smithsonian Magazine, October 11, 2021, www​.smithsonianmag​.com. 2 “Celebrating Women in Space this October 4-10,” World Space Week October 4-10, www​.worldspaceweek​.org.

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3 Nalewicki and “International Day of the Girl Earthwork Installation Honoring Astronaut Stephanie Wilson,” Woodruff Park ATL, www.atlantadowntown​.com. 4 Woodruff Park ATL. NASA’s first Moon program to include women pays deliberate homage to Apollo’s twin sister Artemis, the Greek goddess of the Moon. For more on the Artemis Program and its astronaut-selection process, visit “Artemis,” NASA, https://www​ .nasa​.gov​/specials​/artemis/; “They’re Going to the Moon! Artemis Astronauts Announced,” Space Center: Houston, December 15, 2020, https://spacecenter​.org; and Chelsea Gohd, “Why Is NASA Sending a Woman to the Moon?” SPACE, April 21, 2021, www​.space​.com. 5 All of Wilson’s previous shuttle missions have been to the International Space Station. For a detailed account of her experience, see Stephanie Wilson, “Stephanie D. Wilson NASA Astronaut,” NASA, www​.nasa​.gov. 6 Nina Kravinsky, “Landscape Artist Unveils a Giant Portrait of NASA Pioneer Stephanie Wilson,” National Public Radio, www​.npr​.org. 7 For more on space travel’s colonial legacies, see Vivian Appler, “Titan’s ‘Goodbye Kiss’: Legacy Rockets and the Conquest of Space,” Global Performance Studies 2, no. 2 (2019); and Felipe Cervera, “Astroaesthetics: Performance and the Rise of Interplanetary Culture,” Theatre Research International 41, no. 3 (2016): 258–75. 8 Stan Herd in Jim Robbins, “A Tractor Instead of a Brush; Seeds Instead of Paint,” Smithsonian 25, no. 4 (1994): 70. 9 Ibid. Haskell Indian Nations University professor of art Leslie Evans codesigned the Circle, “a large medicine wheel,” and Haskell art students helped to install it in the farmlands outside of Lawrence, Kansas. In the 1990s, at great personal expense, Herd installed “Countryside” in a section of the old Penn Central railyard, then owned by Donald Trump. “As it evolved, the work of art became a handy supermarket for the needy. The homeless workers picked and ate the vegetables in the landscape, as did other homeless people occupying the tunnels” (N. R. Kleinfield, “Not Just in Kansas Anymore; A Crop Artist Debuts on Manhattan’s Unlikely Terrain,” The New York Times, November 10, 1994, www​.nytimes​.com). Love calls upon people interested in creating social change to go beyond allyship, to “take a risk for someone else” as co-conspirators (Love in Terra Dankowski, “Calling on Co-Conspirators,” American Libraries, February 28, 2020, https://ame​rica​nlib​rari​esma​gazine​.org). For more on her educational philosophy, see Bettina Love, We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom (Boston: Beacon Press, 2019).

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10 Kravinsky, “Landscape Artist Unveils a Giant Portrait of NASA Pioneer Stephanie Wilson.” 11 Herd in Robbins, “A Tractor Instead of a Brush; Seeds Instead of Paint.” Certainly, elite passengers on private rocket flights—such as William Shatner, who flew on the Blue Origins expedition of October 13, 2021—qualify as privileged land art audiences. On October 13, 2021, William Shatner, who played Captain James T. Kirk on television and film’s Star Trek series, flew into space on a Blue Earth rocket ship. Blue Earth is the private spaceflight company owned by American billionaire Jeff Bezos. For more on this trip, and Shatner’s environmentalist processing of the experience, see Susanna Schrobsdorff, “How William Shatner Turned a Flight of Fancy into a Lyrical Pitch for the Planet,” TIME, October 18, 2021, https://time​.com. For more discussion about the American culture of flight in performance, see Scott Magelssen, Performing Flight: From the Barnstormers to Space Tourism (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2020). 12 Vanessa Wyche, deputy director of NASA’s Johnson Space Center, in Gohd. According to NASA astronaut Nicole Mann, “the reality is, the Astronaut Office is incredibly diverse these days, and that includes women. . . . We recognize that with different backgrounds, different genders, different religions, different experiences, it all comes together . . . to make us a more capable agency.” 13 Read the full report: National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (NCSES), Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities in Science and Engineering (Alexandria, VA: National Science Foundation, 2021), www​.ncses​.nsf​.gov​/pubs​/nsf21321/. 14 Julia Jordan, “THE COUNT 3.0, a Program of the Dramatists Guild and the Lillys Foundation,” Counting Together, https:// countingtogether​.org. See also Porsche McGovern, “Who Designs and Directs in LORT Theatres by Pronoun: 2020,” HowlRoundTheatreCommons, December 22, 2020, 3. Other studies of note include regional studies such as the Bay Area Theater Accountability Workgroup; identity-specific studies like the Asian American Performers Action Coalition’s “Visibility Report: Racial Representation on New York City Stages”; and genre-specific studies like the Center for Scholars and Storytellers’ “Exploring the Landscape of Live Theatre for Young Audiences in the U.S.” These demographic studies are collated and updated together in the coalitional Counting Together group (Counting Together, https:// countingtogether​.org). 15 The term “astronaut” is not universal. Russian space travelers are referred to as cosmonauts. “Taikonaut” is the Western term to refer to

INTRODUCTION

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Chinese people whose job it is to travel to outer space. The Chinese term is yuhangyuang. 16 Steven Lee Myers, “She Is Breaking Glass Ceilings in Space, but Facing Sexism on Earth,” New York Times, October 23, 2021. An analysis of the Soviet-American Cold War-era space race through the lens of gender, which elucidates similar themes for late twentiethcentury cosmonauts and astronauts, is offered in Bettyann Holtzmann Kevles, Almost Heaven: The Story of Women in Space (New York: Basic Books, 2003). 17 Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr, Science on Stage: From Doctor Faustus to Copenhagen (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006) and Theatre and Evolution from Ibsen to Beckett (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). See also Shepherd-Barr’s collection The Cambridge Companion to Theatre and Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). 18 See Stanton B. Garner, Jr., “Artaud, Germ Theory, and the Theatre of Contagion,” Theatre Journal 58, no. 1 (2006): 1–14; Danielle Bainbridge, “The Future Perfect, Autopsy, and Enfreakment on the 19th-Century Stage,” TDR 64, no. 3 (2020): 100–17; Roberta Barker, “Consumption and the Stage: A Late-Blooming Fashion,” Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies 40, no. 4 (Fall 2017): 621–35; Meredith Conti, Playing Sick: Performances of Illness in the Age of Victorian Medicine (London: Routledge, 2019); Alex Mermikides and Gianna Bouchard, eds., Performance and the Medical Body (London: Bloomsbury, 2016). 19 See, for example, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Carrie Sandahl and Philip Auslander, eds., Bodies in Commotion: Disability & Performance (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2005); and Petra Kuppers, Theatre and Disability (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). 20 See Bruce McConachie, Evolution, Cognition, and Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Rhonda Blair and Amy Cook, eds., Theatre, Performance, and Cognition: Languages, Bodies, Ecologies (London: Bloomsbury Press, 2016); John Lutterbie, Toward a General Theory of Acting: Cognitive Science and Performance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Nicola Shaughnessy, Applying Performance: Live Art, Socially Engaged Theatre and Affective Practice (Houndsmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); and Evelyn Tribble, Cognition in the Globe: Attention and Memory in Shakespeare’s Theatre (New York:

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Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). A number of cognition and performance texts have been published in Bloomsbury’s Performance and Science: Interdisciplinary Dialogues series, of which this book is a recent entry. 21 See Jon McKenzie, Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance (London: Routledge, 2001); Kara Reilly, Automata and Mimesis on the Stage of Theatre History (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011); Michael Chemers, “Like Unto a Lively Thing: Social Robots and Theater History,” in Performance and Technology, ed. Kara Reilly (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); and Sarah Bay-Cheng, Jennifer ParkerStarbuck, and David Z. Saltz, Performance and Media: Taxonomies for a Changing Field (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2015). 22 See, for example, Una Chaudhuri, The Stage Lives of Animals: Zooësis and Performance (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2017); Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Kim Marra, “Equus and the Production of Queer Historical Memory,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 31, no. 2 (Spring 2017): 33–53; and Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013). 23 Snow, Charles Percy, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1959). 24 From his foundational We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) to recent collections that encounter climate change, including Latour and Peter Weibel’s Critical Zones: The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020), Latour continues to produce provocative science philosophy that moves across cultural domains. 25 The most recent of Donna Haraway’s significant oeuvre is Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). 26 See, for example, Objectivity and Diversity: Another Logic of Scientific Research (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 27 See, for example, Jorge Cañizares-Esquerra, Nature, Empire, and Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006); Walter Mignolo, The Politics of Decolonial Investigations (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021); and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (New York: New York University Press, 2020).

PART ONE

Building Community and Imagining Worlds through the Science Performance

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Performance Artists Roundtable Petra Kuppers and Stephanie Heit of the Olimpias and Lani Fu and Jem Pickard of Superhero Clubhouse1

In January 2021, at the height of the Covid-19 social-distancing period, we held a remote interview with members of two performance ensembles. In this interview, Petra Kuppers (she/her), Stephanie Heit (she/her), Jem Pickard (he/they), and Lanxing (Lani) Fu (she/her) discuss how the onset of Covid-19 and other sciencerelated crises have informed the evolution of their art-making. For both companies, a foundational commitment to improving access, equity, and a sense of belonging for their performances’ participants continues to shape their creative habits. Meredith Conti: Stephanie and Petra, we are interested in the relationship of the Asylum Project to Olimpias. Asylum seems to have taken on a particular momentum independently of Olimpias. How do these two performance enterprises inform, support, challenge, and evolve one another? Petra Kuppers: The Olimpias have been around since about 1996. We emerged out of a group of people with mental health differences who got together in Wales, UK, where I was living at the time. We decided to engage in experimental disability performance work together and most of that was in non-theatre, non-art spaces,

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because a lot of us couldn’t get into art spaces. For instance, I usually use a wheelchair or scooter, and most art spaces at that time didn’t have any wheelchair access. Many of us were not welcomed in conventional environments. We were people who had been incarcerated. People who had had depot medication inserted into their bodies. People whose sense of self had been significantly impaired not just by what’s deemed their disabilities, but also by the systems that we were caught in. We were a group of mental health system survivors who worked together, and we created these installations in which we invited people in the general public to experience meditative states with us.2 Ever since then, I’ve collaborated with people on projects as my core working practice: community performance. Each of these projects usually lasts between three and four years. They’re not funded in conventional ways; it wasn’t art that fit into theatres or galleries, and we also didn’t understand ourselves to be in therapeutic settings, and we didn’t want to take any medical money. We relied on different kinds of income streams. We got some support from universities early on. And universities have continued to support my work—in particular, funding streams interested in performance as research. From early on the Olimpias was able to pay people who wanted to participate in our workshop small sums of money, given that, in the US, especially, that’s the currency of value. It’s a currency of being recognized as a worker. Paying people as specialists, as valued artists, seemed an important moment of recognizing people who might otherwise be in a very complicated relationship to the university, often seen as “clients,” “patients,” “subjects,” or “informers.” The Asylum Project is something that Stephanie and I have created together under the Olimpias label. It’s one of these multiple year-long projects. Stephanie Heit: The Olimpias is a collective of people that is fluid and changeable. Wherever we are or go, we put out a call on different listservs and whoever wants to join us is welcome. We embrace disabled people with physical, sensory, cognitive, and mental health differences, and their co-conspirators. In the Asylum Project, which began shortly after I’d met Petra, we got an invitation from Anna Hickey Moody, who at that time was in the UK at Goldsmiths. She provided us with the title of

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“Asylum Project,” and we decided to explore multiple meanings of “asylum”: from asylum seekers to psychiatric asylums, from queer sanctuary space to temporary places of security and refuge in public. We had the first workshops in Detroit. Then we went to London and worked at different sites. One of our locations was at Bethlem psychiatric hospital, also known as Bedlam3: one of the most iconic sites of psychiatric asylum imagination. We all met there, used surrealist drifting techniques, and explored the grounds, tuning in to what the space was, in terms of asylum, in terms of its energy, its charge, how it shifted us. The Asylum Project workshops started with, “What does asylum mean to you?” People bring such different life experiences and ideas of what asylum is. In addition to us providing a framework or score for participants to work from, we welcomed whatever each individual personally brought to expand our group understanding.4 This was all under the umbrella of Olimpias. Partly our idea for it stemmed from my lived experience as a psychiatric system survivor and a shock survivor with a history of many psychiatric hospitalizations. I was working with those different meanings of asylum and what it is to be in that locked setting. PK: For me, one of the meanings of asylum was moving from one country to the next. I grew up in Germany where a lot of disabled people of my parents’ generation were exterminated by the Nazis. That history still has a hold on many European countries’ imagination of disabled people and their positions as citizens. Given these realities, I came to the US as a form of asylum. This is the place that offered someone like me citizenship rights: access, the right to get into my place of work, etc. Asylum-seeking was a very significant strand, particularly at that point in the UK and its colonial history. We worked in Greenwich at the site of the Prime Meridian—the line that distinguishes the East from the West, the place where colonial time and space emerge and organize the world, carve it up. We danced on that line as part of the Asylum Project, destabilizing it for short moments in our bodyminds, imagining other ways of conceiving of time and space relations. Currently, we’re operating out of Turtle Disco, which emerges from thoughts of sustainability and the environment. Instead of traveling the world widely we decided to make a home and to focus

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on community at home. Our living room becomes public, becomes part of our neighborhood’s social space. It is a somatic performance space and most people who work with us now can just cycle or walk to us. Vivian Appler: Lani and Jem, I have a similar origins question about Superhero Clubhouse. Could you talk about your early series, Planet Plays, and how it relates to the larger project of Superhero Clubhouse? Jem Pickard: Superhero Clubhouse is about fourteen years old. We’ve gone through various evolutions. It was founded as an experiment, a way to fill a niche that didn’t seem to exist, at least in the New York City theatre scene. As a result of this long-term experiment, it’s gone through lots of changes as an organization as far as what exactly we do, how we do it, or what’s our mission, vision, values, and process. Planet Plays was the project that really formed the organization. It was very much driven by me and various collaborators who I would develop each one of these plays with. It doesn’t feel quite right to box our fourteen years into two halves. But . . . it’s sort of like a Part One and now we’re in Part Two. Things look and feel very different than they did in Part One. The idea of using the solar system as a canvas to look—to go out in order to look in—was a driving inspiration behind that series. The idea was to create a collection of nine plays that, when they were put together, would form this new mythology, so that they all are interconnected to each other and each one of the plays circles around a different environmental problem. It’s one of those projects that probably will continue to be explored and revisited . . . I know a lot more now, not only about . . . those problems, but I know a lot better how to make what we call eco-theatre . . . We did at least a first draft of all nine plays by 2016 or 2017 and then we moved on. Lanxing (Lani) Fu: A staged draft. JP: That was always part of that project. It’s hard to learn whether or not live performance works until you do it in front of an audience.

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So, let’s just produce it when it’s still rough and raw in the name of this large long-term experiment. I think the idea of using sci-fi or cli-fi as a tool is still useful, and some of those plays, the ideas behind them, are definitely really valuable and work as a way to step outside of Earth to create some magical worlds or some alternative realities in order to zoom in on these difficult complex questions. LF: How work like that connects to the larger work and mission of Superhero Clubhouse is that through the years of working on those pieces, and other projects as well, we are trying to figure out ways to create performance experiences for audiences that hold a lot of complexity and that ask Impossible Questions.5 We’re constantly trying to experiment with art-making and artistic experiences that are really inclusive of people. Or just inviting. Inviting to people who are finding their way through some of these very heavy, big, overwhelming questions. As opposed to what I feel weighed down a lot by when I have an artistic experience that feels maybe more educational. Sometimes, especially for some reason with work that’s connected to environment, or climate or climate justice, there is a tendency to tell audience members what to do. It’s through the process of making stuff that we’re figuring out ways to bring people in to these questions without necessarily saying, “This is how you must think. This is how you must feel.” It’s just about how are we asking questions. JP: We’re trying to think about the play itself, or the production itself, as one facet of this ecosystem that is our organization and all of the various programs that we do. Our monthly gatherings, which are run by different core members. . . . Those, in and of themselves, constitute a theatre process that is no less important than the production of a play. We’re thinking more and more in those terms these days, so that’s a little different than when we began. MC: I’d like to ask about the embodied processes of your work, such as the drifting component within the Asylum Project or the research hikes within the Hike-Play project. How does audience involvement, within performance creation and reception, play into your social and/or eco-critical commentary?

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PK: I’m thinking of very specific moments in the Olimpias work. One moment is from the very beginning of the organization in this little village in Wales. We were right next to the Brecon Beacons National Park, and I lived in Ystradgynlais. Most of us were poor and didn’t have access to the park. I was unemployed, having been forced to leave my academic position when my mobility declined, and I could no longer navigate its spaces. The Brecon Beacons, this pristine park environment, wasn’t set up for people like us: there was no public transport, no ways for local people without cars to get to the beautiful parts. The parts that you get to go to as tourists. Our very first production was to look at one of the local healing places. It was a Lady of the Lake story, and it was one that was associated with the healers of Myddfai, another Welsh village nearby. We wrote and performed stories with us connecting to these healers of Myddfai as a way of inserting ourselves as people who are usually invisibilized in glossy tourist brochures. This way, we approached the park differently and re-valued our own ways of being. We expanded into mythic space. A lot of Olimpias work is about that moment when you step outside the public bus, and move from the carpark toward the tree. It’s the edge space between the carpark and the tree—on the one hand, the ordinary, and on the other that which holds portal space for the extraordinary. The carpark and the first tree past the concrete edge: that’s usually as far as most of us get. Either because of life with a wheelchair or because we can’t get out for very long, lose stamina, get disoriented. I’m very interested in these micro-engagements with natural worlds and what it can mean for someone who is excluded from hanging out in the forest to touch a tree. To be enabled to touch a tree, to experience time and space differently, in touch with different energetic signatures. Maybe to be helped, to experience interdependent support in a disability culture community. Maybe literally to be helped toward a tree or to lie on the grass, as we lean on each other, assure each other, find ways to move in our own grace as people with different kinds of impairments (Figure 1). A lot of our work is about playing around, freely, opening ourselves to influence. Sometimes, scientists become involved and we explore together how we can open up and protect spaces by undoing the notions of what is natural and unnatural in them.

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FIGURE 1 Tuning into site, CityScape. Courtesy of Petra Kuppers and Stephanie Heit.

So instead of imagining that your average hiker in a national park is some kind of super-able-bodied person that can march for miles and that needs no paved areas, we’re trying to conceive differently what it might mean to be in meaningful engagement with the world that surrounds us. Which then, in turn, allows us to be more mindful of the world we live in, wherever we are. So, the carpark moment is, for me, a very important moment. And so are the driftings (Figure 2). SH: A moment that I’m thinking about involves audience, sometimes a spontaneous audience. This was during a weekend workshop Olimpias offered through Movement Research in New York City called Tendings. In it we explored small, everyday, collaborative practices that combine experiential anatomy, disability culture, eco-specific investigations, somatic exercises, and writing. It was also around Earth Day so in our workshop we were looking at interdependent energies and stewardship of self, community, and the environment. What does it mean to tend?

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FIGURE 2 Hugging score. Photo courtesy of Stephanie Heit and Petra Kuppers.

We went out into public spaces to explore and experiment with different scores. For one of the scores, we were in a park on a beautiful weekend day with lots of people traveling through and hanging out in the space. We were doing the “hugging score” where we lined up on two sides of the pathway and at different times, two of us came to the middle, embraced, and then moved away. Within this, there were lots of people not in the workshop milling about who became audience. The scores often evoke curiosity, which is always interesting when you’re engaged in the action. A curiosity of, “What is this? What’s going on?” And different reactions. And, then, people actually wanting to join in. PK: And the people figured out the rules of the score. The public could get engaged in what we were doing, they could become curious, and then we gladly welcomed them in.

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SH: And then, just the agency. Sometimes there’s this power relationship of performer and audience, the audiencing role. Whereas, I feel like in public space, that gets really troubled as far as, do you know who’s performing for whom? And what are the roles? So that witnessing feels so important, energetically, to activate the score. PK: At one point, I lived in Rhode Island and during that time the Olimpias worked in every single state park. And the main idea was that we would get ourselves to one of these places, helping each other with transport, food, and comfort, and then we’d play in the park. We, as disabled people, would have access and a place to play. We wouldn’t be just a bunch of people to be stared at. Instead, we had really interesting things to do. We worked with wax from local beekeepers and made beautiful sculptures that looked like what we imagined the interiors of our scars to look like. Then we set these scars adrift on the ocean waves and on the beaches, honoring their beauty and their strength: the ability of our bodymindspirits to heal, to transform. People saw us have a great time on the beach and wanted to be involved. We were people with really cool gear making sculptural forms. Who wouldn’t want to get together with that, right? Olimpias actions have always been participatory audience events: fluid in terms of who connects (Figure 3).6 Seduction is one of the core principles of the Olimpias. Using seduction as a way to invite people: to seduce people towards disability’s difference, in outdoor space together, making art. JP: Our Hike-Play project is now conceived as a multimodal experience that involves both performance elements and these research hikes. The question that led us to develop it is, “What is the right space for a person to give themselves pause in their daily life, to explore their own personal relationship to the climate crisis?” When it comes to the climate crisis . . . we have excellent information space and we have excellent action space. But this space of emotional, psychological, creative relationship, we don’t have so much of that space. By “we,” I mean that the majority of humans, and certainly people who make art, and especially theatre, possess excellent tools to build those spaces. So, that leads to, “Well, OK. Let’s create this intimate experience of a walk that coexists with the woods, a performance that coexists with a walk through the woods.”

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FIGURE 3  Wax scar. Photo courtesy of Petra Kuppers and Stephanie Heit.

So that was the first step, “All right. Let’s figure out what that is. What is the content? How many people are on this walk? What does it mean to coexist with the woods?” We knew it was certainly not performance-dominant. We wanted the sounds and the sights of the woods to really, truly, coexist somehow. In creating the performance, we were going on these research hikes, just reaching out to people we thought were interesting or in our core community and going on hikes in various parks. By “hikes,” this was a broad definition, too. It could be sitting on a bench someplace near trees. It could be going out of the city into the Catskill Mountains and really . . . climbing up a mountain. It took a variety of forms. We realized that immersive, individualized engagement with the natural world is kind of what we were trying to do with the performance. It was rich in and of itself, and so we now have officially added that as this other mode to the Hike-Play project. So this is sort of Part 2. These series of hikes are very intimate. They’re like one-on-one or two-on-one . . . a hike host and then the audience member. It involves riffing on conversation around the person’s relationship to nature, growing up, and now their personal relationship to the climate crisis and their vision for a better future. This project exists within the broader, more expansive definition of

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theatre as an intentional pause, a space allowing people to pause their life in order to immerse themselves in a new perspective or reflection or emotion. And then Part Three, which hasn’t been created yet, but we would love to be able to create. What is a hike if you’re not walking? How can there be audio versions of this? Or, can there be indoor versions of this? Lots of exciting question marks for how to keep developing. LF: A lot of what Stephanie and Petra were saying resonates with me as well. Part of the larger work of shifting culture in general is shifting power dynamics between people, changing up that flow of power and relationship. . . . Usually, an audience is expected to receive something and consume it. What does it mean for them to have their own experience, have their own creative, or generative, or emotional experience actually at the center of the thing that is being created or witnessed? We just completed this project, Love Letter to a Seed. . . . We made it all virtually with collaborators, where people receive a hand-illustrated little booklet with words and images, and also an audio experience where they are guided into making a little space for themselves. The project asks, “How can we really actually feel into our interdependence with other beings?” That’s something that we can intellectualize and understand. Like, “Oh yeah, I’m connected.” That’s at the foundation of environmental justice. I’m connected to you and to this other thing. But, can we feel it? Is there a way to make an experience for yourself, as an audience member, to actually feel into that? What would that look like? I think we as a society, as a culture (or maybe this is more of an American culture thing), we really underestimate imagination as a political tool. I think it is the greatest source of our political power. I think that what we see theatre as—every time we’re getting together, whatever the group of people who are creating or witnessing—it’s like a little world that we’re building together. And in that world you get to practice. What are the dynamics? What are the relationships? How are we with each other? And that’s a really important thing that we would hope that . . . our audiences, or people who engage in that experience, leave feeling empowered to think differently about their own relationship to others in the world somehow, or to have had a lived experience of a different dynamic of a relationship than they usually sit in. To really just do

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something, poke at that imagination and ask them to really use it and not just witness how amazing the artist’s imagination is. VA: What are the environmental stakes of your work? PK: One of the stakes that I’m particularly interested in is how we, as disabled people, live in a compromised world for humans. To embrace disability culture ways of being is to become more aware of the interdependencies that we rely on. As disabled people, we live interdependently already. The traditional hero kind of solo fighter is unavailable to us. This is the case for many people, whether they identify as disabled or in any other way that may be seen as “less than”: stigmatized identities. Nazi Germany had a term, “lebensunwertes Leben”—life not worthy of life, life that’s not deemed to be as high quality as a certain kind of usually white, straight, male-identified kind of life. Life that can and should be exterminated. In Olimpias’ work, there’s an attention to co-conspiratorial work: to the way that racialized lives, queer lives, and disabled lives have all been put under erasure in different ways, both in the past and in the present. I’m using the word “co-conspirators” deliberately: breathing together is really important to our work, being aware of the heft and depth of the histories and presents that put pressure on people, uneven pressure, how white supremacy and ableism, misogyny, and transphobia all constrain breath. When we breathe together, we reach toward spirit breathing, ancestors breathing, finding connections to ground ourselves, expanding our space to take a breath. We’ve just finished three major ecosomatic meetings: two local ones in Ypsilanti and Detroit, and one that was online. In many Olimpias meetings we breathe together as the starting point for our inquiry. We turn to what Lani just explained, the notion of the imagination as our tool. One core question of these recent actions was: how can we think about the toxic environments that we live in? How can we take creative agency and use our imagination and our creativity in different ways to experience the richness of life? In these workshops, we go on meditative journeys in which we touch imaginary substances, for instance, lead, oil, or gold. As you know, we live in Michigan. When you think about the element lead here, you think about Flint, Michigan, about racialized precarity, poisoned water,

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and anti-Black and anti-poor urban policies. There are significant stories that surround us, elements that suffuse us and endanger us. These dream journeys allow us to find agency in our imagination around the elements that touch us, and over which we have little control. In our meditative journey we encounter lead. We encounter oil. We encounter these substances that are so heavily laden with metaphors, with danger, with toxicity. How do we respond when we meet these substances: how do they appear, how do they materialize in our imagination? How do we dance with them, move through them, shift them? How else can we offer nourishing grounds for ourselves in this kind of compromised world? Opening up these imaginative resources for us can allow us to become unstuck, to find more breathing room. Those are some of the questions I find interesting.7 During our ecosomatic symposium, one New York based artist, andrea haenggi, came and worked with moss. She collaborated with moss. The workshop leaders were andrea haenggi and moss. The two of them led us in a dancerly imagination around taking in water and releasing air. Being penetrable. Being open and available to the world. That kind of dance performance, that kind of participatory invitation, is what I also love to see in the kind of work we do. And that’s to me the heart of Olimpias work. SH: What I was struck by with the moss engagement was being guided by the material. Honoring the life and richness of the life of the moss. I led a session during this ecosomatics symposium called Water Bodies States of Mind. We engaged with water, both our local and personal watersheds. We also worked with the water within our own bodies and played with bodymind states and how those can be influenced and amplified through taking on different shapes and spaces of water. The area that we’re in now has been a constant throughout my whole life. I have been witnessing through somatic engagements and writing the shifts in the shoreline of Lake Michigan. Over this last three or four-year period the waters have been rising significantly and changing the whole cartography of the landscape. Earlier today, we went to Point Betsie where there’s a lighthouse. A huge portion of the beach there is gone. You can also see the

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effects of the erosion that’s happening around the base of the lighthouse. I’ve been dancing in those spaces and taking notes, writing about the changes that I’ve witnessed. Trying to take that into my body in some way and create a performance with the space, but also a performance that later can be experienced by others on the page. PK: We did a one-minute dance in order to prepare ourselves for this interview. SH: Yes! (chuckles) PK: One minute amongst all the snow and ice of the shoreline. We were moving together for one minute as our little dance. . . . Out on the ice. Actually, it was gorgeously icy. SH: Usually, we do five-minute dances as our practice, but because it was so cold, I was like, we’ll do one. Have to adjust the score for what the present needs are. PK: We love doing that. JP: The first thing that came to mind when you said environmental stakes was like, well, everything. Like the whole world. . . . I think this is the reality of the climate crisis: what’s at stake is human survival, and the many, many species that are threatened with extinction because of human activity. Those are the stakes. More specifically, we think a lot about, “What does it mean to live a full life? A quality life? A happy life? What does it mean for a community to thrive?” “Sustainability” is such a problematic word because it evokes creating something that is stable, instead of way better than it ever has been, which is really the goal. What we learn, especially from indigenous ways of life, philosophy, and culture, and also what we learn from the history, culture, and resilience of BIPOC peoples (I’m thinking about this country in particular) . . . what we learn from these communities is: it has to start with a relationship to the land. You have to see yourself as connected to more than yourself and your immediate people. That relationship is everything. Relationship capital “R.”

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I personally start thinking about the stakes when it comes to us creating theatre these days. Thinking about storytelling, and thinking about envisioning and imagining. I think about how happy we all could be. Not just people. How happy the orangutans could be. We consistently are faced with these big realities, which is that we will lose things. One of our key tools of eco-theatre is Tangible Hope. We talk a lot about how it can’t be happy thinking. It has to be grounded. It has to hold grief and loss and inevitable tragedy in one hand while you’re holding onto real, positive progress in the other hand. It’s hard because when we think about mass extinction—we are going to lose so many species in our lifetimes, let alone the next few generations—that is present. But that’s why turning to those to lead us, people from communities who have experienced tragedy and grief and loss for so long and thrive in spite of it. And, again, not just people, but other species that thrive and adapt in spite of everything that’s against them.

FIGURE 4 Tuning into site. Photo courtesy of Stephanie Heit and Petra Kuppers.

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LF: To me, the stakes are simple. The stakes for me are just, if we don’t figure out new ways of being together, then we’re going to continue the same cycles. As for this country. . . . The dominant culture that we are living in is very extractive. We live in violent relationship with each other and with the world around us. We gotta figure out a new way to be together. And also celebrate and uplift people who know that, who know how to be together, be with one another in ways that are not extractive and violent. Throughout all of history it’s been people who are on the margins, on the edges of things (Figure 4).

Notes 1 Find out more about Superhero Clubhouse and the Olimpias by perusing their websites: Superhero Clubhouse: Theatre for Climate and Environmental Justice, www​.superheroclubhouse​.org, and The Olimpias: Performance Research Projects, www​.personal​.umich​.edu/​ ~Petra/ (heritage site) and www​.petrakuppers​.com (current work). 2 For more details about this early work in Wales, see Petra Kuppers, “Towards the Unknown Body: Silence, Stillness, Space in Mental Health Settings,” Theatre Topics 10, no. 2 (2000): 129–43, reprinted in longer form in Petra Kuppers, Disability Culture and Community Performance: Find a Strange and Twisted Shape (Houndsmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave, 2011), 70–87. 3 The hospital’s official name is Bethlem Royal Hospital. 4 For details about the Asylum Project, using a montage technique of participant voices, see Petra Kuppers, Stephanie Heit, April Sizemore-Barber, VK Preston, Andy Hickey, and Andrew Wille, “Mad Methodologies and Community Performance: The Asylum Project,” Theatre Topics 26, no. 2 (2016): 221–37. 5 Superhero Clubhouse deploys three key tools to create their ecotheatre: “Impossible Questions, [m]oral dilemmas, trade-offs, or paradoxes that become harder to answer the more they are explored; Imposed Limitations: [s]patial, temporal, & narrative boundaries that challenge our relationship to resources and allow our creativity to thrive”; and Tangible Hope: “[p]rogress towards climate and environmental justice that acknowledges loss while inspiring new possibilities,” Superhero Clubhouse, “Eco-Theater Manifesto,” Superhero Clubhouse, www​.superheroclubhouse​.org.

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6 For more details on this project and its play with scars—cancer scars, implant scars, mind scars—see the last chapter of Petra Kuppers, The Scar of Visibility: Medical Performances and Contemporary Art (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2017). 7 For more details about the Burning project and its play with toxicity, see Petra Kuppers, “Butoh Rhizome: Choreography of a Moving Writing Self,” Choreographic Practices 1, no. 1 (2011): 75–92, expanded in Disability Culture and Community Performance, 109–50.

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1 SF for Many Modernities Hybridity in the Worlds of Margaret Cavendish and Donna Haraway Vivian Appler

I mean not as if fancy were not made by the rational parts of matter; but by reason I understand a rational search and enquiry into the causes of natural effects; and by fancy a voluntary creation or production of the mind, both being effects, or rather actions of the rational parts of matter. Blazing World, MARGARET CAVENDISH, DUCHESS OF NEWCASTLE1

Separated by centuries, early modern polymath Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623–73), and turn-of-themillennium feminist philosopher of science Donna Haraway (b. 1944) have a lot in common. Cavendish pressed against gender norms of her time by establishing herself among Restoration England’s social, literary, and scientific circles. Haraway’s feminist

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science philosophy has influenced twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury cross-disciplinary thinkers and practitioners who wish to foster collaborative processes across barriers pertaining to society, identity, species, ecology, gender, and even time. Both women’s philosophies are interdisciplinary in process and product; for each woman, performance projects have transpired alongside or enmeshed within the development of their theories. A comparative examination of key acts of performative writing by Cavendish and Haraway suggests that early modern hybridity might inform metamodern visions for the science performance.2 Metamodern practitioners—paradoxically full of hope and cynicism—may look to early modernism’s pre-disciplinary praxes to work toward integrative strategies for solving twenty-first-century problems. In this chapter, Cavendish’s sense of “fancy” is set as a precursor to Haraway’s particular definition of SF: I have proposed string figures, SF, as a serious figure for thinking— as a cognitive trope and material-semiotic technology for thinking more generative by far than binaries, hierarchies, triads, and linear arrays, all of which operate almost pornographically in the history of philosophy. SF: string figures, soin des ficelles, speculative feminism, science fiction, science fact, speculative fabulation, so far.3 Cavendish’s The Description of the New World, Called the Blazing World (1666), published concurrently with one of her most important contributions to seventeenth-century natural philosophy, Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (1666), provides a productive point of historiographical reflection upon Haraway’s “Camille Stories: Children of Compost,” the performative eighth chapter of Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016). This chapter considers performatic and performative elements of each thinker’s science philosophies as they intersect with the politics and oppressions of their times. For Cavendish as well as Haraway, the cultural aspects of scientific practice provide material for activism—sometimes as theatrical performances or playwriting, other times as performative elements of science writing. In the works examined here, each philosopher applies and embodies scientific and technological concepts (performatic) within projects that demand an active response on the part of the reading

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audience (performative), acts that might lead to a change in women’s status (for Cavendish) or a reduction in humanity’s climate impact (for Haraway). Interdisciplinarity—of thought and of practice— provides a transtemporal conversational thread for these utopias, which I hope will spark fruitful dialogue and action beyond the confines of this volume. Given Cavendish’s unique interpretation of vitalist materialism and Haraway’s call for kin making in what she describes as a “thick present,” one that expressly implicates the past, both philosophers might be pleased with the SF affinities (spiritual friendship, scientific fellowship) to be found among their performative oeuvres.4 Both works feature narratives that entwine themes of vitalism (materiality of spirit for Cavendish, vitality of Earth for Haraway), human-animal hybrid characters that enact contemporary philosophies of science, and feminist ideology that is progressive for each writer’s era.

Hybrid Praxes, Then and Now Hybridity of form and practice shape Cavendish’s and Haraway’s works. Cavendish wrote letters, plays, poems, philosophy, and prose that explored questions about natural phenomena and women’s empowerment; she used cross-disciplinary genre exploration to hone her ideas about her world. Blazing World has been examined as an early example of the science fiction genre and an important example of the early modern utopia in much feminist criticism,5 and the hybrid creatures she describes in it anticipate the symbiotic characters imagined by Haraway in Staying with the Trouble. Haraway—who has practiced science in the United States throughout iterations of second, third, and post-wave feminisms, and in explicit response to a rapidly changing climate brought on by the colonial legacies established during Cavendish’s lifetime— explores hybrid concepts and creations as actional efforts to manage the impact of Anthropocenic damage to Earth’s ecosystems. The Chthulucenic era that she proposes is itself a metamodern construct in its grim acceptance that much ecological loss caused by humans is irreversible, accompanied by an optimism that humanity can yet establish a sustainable planetary stasis. In exile with Queen Henrietta Maria’s entourage in France during England’s Interregnum,6 Cavendish moved among Europe’s elite

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social circles as Enlightenment philosophies and modern science’s “category work” were coming into vogue.7 Her engagement with the emerging “New Science” not only hearkened to earlier theories of natural philosophy but also incorporated contemporary trends in scientific conversation (she was mightily skeptical of the instruments the empiricists of the Royal Society relied upon for much of their work).8 Cavendish divided her creative and philosophical attentions between the composition of a natural philosophy that contemplated reason in a sensory world and a creative writing practice that explored socio-scientific fancy and wit through poetry, drama, and the occasional character sketch. She describes this process in the introduction to Blazing World: I added this Piece of Fancy to my Philosophical Observations, and joined them as two Worlds at the ends of their poles; both for my own sake, to divert my studious thoughts, which I employed in the Contemplation thereof, and to delight the reader with variety, which is always pleasing . . . it is the description of a new world . . . a World of my own Creating, which I call the Blazing-World: The first part whereof is Romancical [sic], the second Philosophical, and the third is merely Fancy, or (as I may call it) Fantastical.9 For Cavendish, “fancy” was an accessible instrument through which she could test her science and share it with her reading audience, which was mixed according to class and gender.10 The “two poles” analogy refers to a plot point in Blazing World in which a semi-autobiographical Princess, aboard a ship of foreign soldiers, crosses the North Pole to “another Pole of another world, which joined close to it.”11 Due to “the light of her Beauty, the heat of her Youth, and the protection of the Gods,”12 the Princess alone survives the extreme polar weather. She soon discovers herself in the company of “Ice strange Creatures, in shape like Bears, only they went upright as men,” who “shewed her all civility and kindness imaginable,” and who introduced her to a host of other kind, sentient hybrid creatures: “men like Foxes”; “Men which had heads, beaks, and feathers, like Wild-Geese . . . their rumps they carried between their legs, their wings were of the same length with their bodies, and their tails of an indifferent size, trailing after them like a Ladies [sic] Garment”; “Satyrs”; “men whereof were

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of a Grass-green complexion”; and others.13 She quickly weds the Emperor of this “Paradise,”14 and, as Empress, proceeds to establish “societies of the Vertuoso’s” [sic] (modeled after the Royal Society),15 organize a religion for women (who previously were excluded from the world’s social systems), and, finally, discover a spiritual friendship with the autobiographical character, Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle. Together, the Empress and the Duchess explore one another’s worlds and endeavor to imagine even more. Cavendish the author concludes Blazing World with a performative invitation for her readers to write their own stories: “if they cannot endure to be subjects, they may create Worlds of their own, and Govern themselves as they please.”16 Over 350 years later, Haraway asserts the world-(re)generative power to be found amid the interplay between fancy and reason that Cavendish found so productive: “[t]he imaginary and the rational—the visionary and objective vision—hover close together.”17 Haraway is perhaps best known for proposing a feminist approach to the study and practice of science in her landmark Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (1991), which includes the “Cyborg Manifesto,” wherein she challenges hegemonic patriarchal approaches to the science. Hers is a deeply collaborative vision for the performance of science which has led her to forge nontraditional partnerships; “Camille Stories” is the result of one such endeavor, conducted at philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers’s 2013 workshop on “gestes spéculatifs” (speculative gestures) in Cerisy-la-Salle, France.18 The central tenet of this workshop, codirected by Stengers with Didier Debaise, was the concept that thought alone is insufficient to affect change: La pensée speculative est trop souvent définie comme purement théorique, abusivemenent abstraite, ou relevant tout simplement d’un imaginaire déconnecté de toute prise sur le réel. Parler de “gestes spéculatifs,” c’est, au contraire, mettre la pensée sous le signe d’un engagement par et pour des possible qui’il s’agit d’activer, de render perceptibles dans le present.19 (Speculative thought is too often defined as purely theoretical, abusively abstract, or having to do simply with an imaginary disconnected from any hold on reality. To speak of “gestes spéculatifs,” is, on the contrary, to put thought under the heading

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of engagement by and for what is possible to activate, to render perceptible in the present (author’s translation)). Together with “Camille” cocreators Fabrizio Terranova (film) and Vinciane Despret (ethology), Haraway invites interdisciplinary collaborations that “participate in a kind of genre fiction committed to strengthening ways to propose near futures, possible futures, and implausible but real nows.”20 As Cavendish challenges her reading audiences to imagine worlds governed according to their own laws, Haraway’s story intentionally inspires further pursuits meant to instigate human actions with, of, and for Earth. In “Camille,” hybridity is Haraway’s proposed paradigm for the Chthulucene. Her objective is to intervene in the problem presented by the United Nations’ “World Population Prospects”—that by the year 2100, Earth’s global population will reach 11 billion people.21 The “resulting changes in the size, composition and distribution of the world’s population have important consequences for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals . . . the globally agreed targets for improving economic prosperity and social well-being while protecting the environment.”22 Haraway’s Chapter Eight depicts a community of people deliberately aligned with Earth’s at-risk populations and environments. The fictional Children of Compost (CoC) communities’ collective goal is to reduce global population to a “sustainable level of 3 billion by 2400.”23 Their chief tactic is “intentional kin making across deep damage and significant difference.”24 In addition to carefully planned biological human reproduction, the CoC reproduce via genetically engineered human-animal “symbionts,” humans who are designed to have a symbiotic relationship with other, threatened, species. Each human symbiont takes on a life’s work of tending to the hybrid needs of an endangered species—the human communities who have been damaged as a result of the toxic, extractive commercial practices enacted upon the animal-symbiont’s ecosystem, and the paired species’ environment itself. In “Camille,” the monarch butterfly and the ecosystems of its migration corridors are the focus of this generations-long project. The lives of five “Camille” characters, five generations of human-monarch symbionts, form the plot of Haraway’s tale, which she spins between the years 2025 and 2425.25 The details of the Camilles’ social and biological attunement to the

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monarch butterfly are rich in their incorporation of present and possible social and bioengineering performatics: Before birth, Camille 1 was given a suite of pattern-forming genes expressed on monarch surfaces over their transformations from caterpillar to winged adult. Camille 1 also received genes allowing per to taste in the wind and dilute chemical signals crucial to adult monarchs selecting diverse nectar-rich flowers and the best milkweed leaves for depositing their eggs.26 Camille 1 is a symbiotic individual, the result of a collective, progenerative choice to align humans with threatened communities, ecosystems, and animals on the brink of extinction. Where Cavendish’s cultural project was the empowerment of women to imagine themselves as authorities in their worlds, Haraway envisions a way toward a sustainable planet. Hybridity manifests through acts of “kin making and rebalancing human numbers . . . in embodied connections to places, corridors, and histories, and ongoing decolonial and postcolonial struggles.”27 Working from opposite ends of the colonial era, Cavendish and Haraway suggest remedies for problems in their respective presents.

Margaret Cavendish’s Many Worlds Cavendish operated at the edges of existing seventeenth-century power structures, yet she hobnobbed with numerous political and scientific authorities. In addition to her position at court, she married William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, in 1646.28 She also mingled with renowned scientists, philosophers, artists, poets, and playwrights, including her brother John Lucas (a founding member of the Royal Society), brother-in-law Charles Cavendish, René Descartes, Constantijn Huygens, and Thomas Hobbes.29 In 1667, she insisted upon an invitation and became the first woman to attend a meeting of the Royal Society, though she was never asked to join.30 Her regular exposure to new ideas in experimental science and natural philosophy, a desire for her own creative voice to be heard, and the continued expansion of the British Empire

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during the second half of the seventeenth-century influenced the development of her unique contributions to science, literature, and drama. Cavendish found ways to circumvent gendered social and professional restrictions in pursuit of her creative and scholarly interests. Through her writing, Cavendish found opportunities to imagine feminine authorities and female collaborations among her characters and also with her reading audience. Proto-feminist motifs parallel her explorations of vitalist materialism to provide the connective tissue necessary for a retrospective consideration of Cavendish’s science fancies as meaningful in the real world as her science writing. At its core, vitalist materialism is a philosophy that ascribes agency to matter; interpretations of this philosophical position vary, depending on the era. Early modern scholar Jonathan Gil Harris elucidates that vitalism was out of fashion at the time that Cavendish was writing Blazing World and Observations. Yet, “vitalism appealed to Cavendish inasmuch as it allowed her to articulate a feminist materialism.”31 Cavendish’s vitalism “sought to restore agency to matter, making it rational and capable of choice . . . a billiard ball will move when hit by a cue or another ball, not because it is reacting to an outside force but because it chooses to move.”32 One can derive from Cavendish’s collection of writing a consistent argument for the materiality of rational thought and its impact upon the world (or worlds) in which we live. Feminist literary historian Marina Leslie teases out how Cavendish’s materialism provides the philosophical scaffolding necessary to understand Blazing World’s real impact upon the lives of those who read it. Leslie contends that “Cavendish’s thoroughgoing materialism underwrites [her] defense of fiction as a transformative activity of the mind, materially produced and productive.”33 Rational thought, embodied and enacted by women, was capable of shaping the world. Meaningful world-making in her own life and in the lives of her readers transpired through creative activity. Cavendish’s vitalist materialism entertained the possibility for a material quality of mind, and she extended that possibility to suggest that imagined worlds, particularly those captured in writing, could move readers in the here and now (wherever and whenever that might be). Cavendish considered rational thought to be part of a natural, material system, and she described this worldview across a number

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of texts. In Sociable Letters (1664), she analogically describes the influence of thought upon matter: Sun-like . . . is the Light of their Thoughts; like the rest of the Planets receive light from the Sun, so the Thoughts from the Mind; and as the Sun hath Heat and Light, so that the Mind Reason and knowledge; and as the Sun inlivens [sic] several Creatures, so their Mind conceives several Causes and Effects, and creates several Fancies; and as the Sun Shews the World, and the World of Creatures, so the Mind finds and shews the Truth of Things.34 Cavendish’s analogy bases a comparison on her own experience, rather than what she considered to be the artificial circumstances of the laboratory. She maps, as science historian Mary Thomas Crane articulates with regard to empirical practice, “a system of relationships from a visible domain to an invisible one,”35 using a solar analogy to visualize the invisible impact of ideas upon different kinds of matter. She develops her material hierarchy of action through another natural analogy, placing thoughts at the top, affecting bodies, minds, and spirits: I am industrious to Gain so much of Nature’s Favour, as to enable me to do some Work, wherein I may leave my Idea, or Live in an Idea, or my Idea may Live in Many Brains, for then I shall Live as Nature Lives amongst her Creatures, which onely [sic] Live in her Works, and is not otherwise Known but by her Works, we cannot say, she lives Personally amongst her Works, but Spiritually within her Works . . . I am restless to Live, as Nature doth, in all Ages, and in every Brain. . . . And as I desire to Live in every Age, and in every Brain, so I desire to Live in every Heart.36 For Cavendish, the human mind is made up of rational matter, “selfmoving,” each thought an essential and connected component of the whole of nature, capable of influencing other material movements, even when separated by physical space and time. In Observations, Cavendish describes the “Soul or Mind, being all self-moving, as it is perceivable by their several, various compositions, divisions, productions, and alterations.”37 Thought is action put in motion by

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the rational, material, human mind, with far-reaching consequences. The capacity of thought to transcend physical barriers is necessary for Cavendish’s proto-feminist activism to take hold. Evidence of proto-feminist materialist thought can be identified in poetic, feminine analogies Cavendish draws to explore her theories, and the attention that Cavendish pays to friendships among women and woman-identified protagonists in her drama and prose. She often embeds feminine associations and experiences within her philosophies of science, as is demonstrated in her worlds-within-worlds model of the universe outlined in the poem “Of Many Worlds in This World” in Poems and Fancies (1653): “And if thus small, then ladies may well wear / A world of worlds, as pendants in each ear.”38 This is followed by the poem “A World in an Eare-Ring.”39 Cavendish’s natural analogies, often rooted in women’s experiences, render her philosophy accessible to womanidentified readers. Blazing World can be read as an encouragement of the disempowered to create new possibilities for self-expressive freedoms through creative acts, a message she had been honing since at least the publication of Poems and Fancies, in which she called upon women readers, “let us strive to build us Tombs while we live, of Noble, Honourable, and good Actions.”40 Blazing World’s collaborative writing scene depicts the Duchess and Empress characters’ efforts to compose worlds of their own imaginations. In this performative writing lesson, Cavendish (the author) cleverly demonstrates the potential for material impact that one mind has upon another when Cavendish (the character) helps the Empress overcome a bout of writer’s block: “for, said [the Duchess], your Majesties [sic] mind is full of rational corporeal motions, and the rational motions of my mind shall assist you by the help of sensitive expressions, with the best instructions they are able to give you.”41 After creating and rejecting worlds based on other philosophers’ concepts, Cavendish happily accepts her new world that reflects her own philosophical position, composed of sensitive and rational self-moving matter; indeed, it was composed onely [sic] of the rational, which is the subtlest and purest degree of Matter; for as the sensitive did move and act both to the perceptions and consistency of the body, so this

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degree of Matter at the same point of time . . . did move to the Creation of the Imaginary World.42 Cavendish-the-character’s instructions metatextually perform Cavendish-the-author’s own writing practice for the Empress and the reader alike. So moved, Cavendish’s readers might in turn act upon the Duchess’s instruction when tackling their own writing, per Cavendish’s imperative at the tale’s conclusion. The dramaturgical situation involving women’s companionship and ingenuity performs Cavendish’s theories regarding vitalist materialism: minds move other minds to action. This creative writing scene transpires during the “fanciful” third part of Blazing World, in which Cavendish and the Empress commune through their souls alone—no physical bodies are required to move one thought to another mind. Cavendish’s theory, anthropomorphized in the ethereal bodies of her characters and embedded in the brains of her readers—past, present, and future— invites action through writing. She establishes a performative by which readers are called to manifest freedom by acting in the worlds that they can reach by writing. Cavendish affirms her readers’ abilities to create new worlds based on their own desires. She underscores this capacity as she closes Blazing World with the directive that her readers use the tools offered therein and act accordingly.

Hybrid Time/Transtemporalities Cavendish’s notions of materiality, bodies, spirit, and thought blur in Blazing World. Science-oriented literary critic Anne Thell discerns that “although the process of imagining is material, what is imagined is not the same as what is real, and Cavendish often plays with this ambiguity.”43 Leslie contends it is through “the material efficacy of what Cavendish refers to as spiritual worlds—but instructs us to understand as the finest refinement of rational matter—that Cavendish offers us the navigational map for moving profitably between worlds and finally for returning to and reconceiving home.”44 Leslie considers “The Blazing World less as an escape from the world or a vision of a possible world than as a

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material engagement with the world that is.”45 Leslie’s theorizing of Cavendish’s hybrid creation strategies aligns Cavendish’s “fancy” with the urgent reconception of “home” performed in Haraway’s “Camille Stories.” In the twenty-first century, Haraway applies science concepts in ways that might at first appear analogical due to the incorporation of SF into her philosophy, comparing what is with what might be. But, Haraway’s performative writing reveals pathways toward decolonial actions. Where Cavendish offered the early modern reader agency through materiality of thought, Haraway advances a metamodern, performatic intervention into the pressing issue of climate change. As she expresses in the SF present of “Camille,” “[m]odernity and its category work proved terribly durable for hundreds of years after the withering critique conducted in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries had made explicit adherence to the tenets of philosophical and political modernity unthinkable for serious people, including scientists and artists.”46 Haraway’s plea is to dismantle boundaries—of discipline, class, family, even species—to retain as much of Earth’s diversity as possible, as soon as possible. She proposes a hybrid approach that combines bioengineering technics and the basic human capacity for cooperation and empathy as essential starting points for the disruption of colonial processes and the establishment of a new stasis for Earth and its organisms. In “Camille,” these technologies come together to create more than a hybrid body or a sense of empathy with others, but humanity’s conscientious actions of kinship—family-making—with individuals and groups belonging to a diverse range of Earth’s species.47 For Haraway, knowledge production works best when conducted within a network of other brains and bodies, especially when that knowledge generation process seeks to empower those who have been subjugated by colonialist, misogynist, racist, and anthropocentric systems enacted in the modern age: “Cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other.”48 Staying with the Trouble extends Haraway’s cyborg philosophy to propose a radically interdisciplinary, interspecial, Earth-oriented way of living well in the midst of planetary crisis. “Camille” models a hybrid strategy for collaboration among individuals and communities, one that emboldens readers to

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imagine a sustainable present with the people, things, animals, and ecosystems of the here and now. This proposition is an explicit alternative to perhaps more familiar imaginations of the future that involve an inexorable press toward the discovery, exploration, and exploitation of “other” lands (other worlds) to enable humanity’s increase, evolution, and resource consumption. Like Blazing World, Haraway’s work is more than a thought experiment. She asks, “what thinking can possibly mean in the civilization in which we find ourselves,”49 and presses her readers to embody and enact their desires for a sustainable planet. Haraway construes thought as vital, but she is cautious about the efficacy of thought alone to spark change in the world. Not just ideas—ideas in motion—lead to world-making in a Cavendishian sense. Haraway similarly cautions, “[v]isiting is not a heroic practice; making a fuss is not the Revolution; thinking with each other is not Thought. . . . The blackbird sings its importance; the babblers dance their shining prestige; the storytellers crack the established disorder.”50 Decolonial theorists Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang ask those readers who would consider themselves and their work within a decolonial context “to consider how the pursuit of critical consciousness, the pursuit of social justice through a critical enlightenment, can also be settler moves to innocence—diversions, distractions, which relieve the settler of feelings of guilt or responsibility, and conceal the need to give up land or power or privilege.”51 They underscore that “decolonization specifically requires the repatriation of Indigenous land and life. Decolonization is not a metonym for social justice.”52 In order to affect change, one must embody it. Dispossession is implicit in decolonization. The decolonial actions Haraway imagines involve complementary processes of profoundly intentional methods for kin making and voluntary dispossession. The Children of Compost choose to abandon Capitalocenic modes of existence in favor of communal living, an alignment with animal and human communities that have been negatively impacted by the Anthropocene, Plantationocene, and Capitalocene, and the eschewing of conventional, biological reproduction and its attendant nuclear family. The story that follows is not one of lack (although there is loss) but one filled with the metamodern hope—ironic yet idealistic—that Chthulucenic lifestyles which may appear to some as extreme privation offer a multitude of sustainable possibilities unimaginable without

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decolonial actions. Just as adopting a vegetarian diet can reveal an abundance of flavorful and healthy options often overlooked when restricted to meat-and-potatoes fare, so implementing alternative concepts of kin might bring unexpectedly joyful relationships as the world’s diverse communities draw closer toward a more sustainable planet. The performative challenge posed by “Camille” asks what might happen if humans could acknowledge individuals—human, animal, plant, Earth—beyond immediate biological relations as if we were family. To achieve this, “Camille” functions as an instruction manual for intentional dispossession, designed to disrupt the flow of economic abundance for some so that the whole planet might thrive. Dystopian worlds depicting the Capitalocene taken to extreme ends of polarization have been explored by such SF visionaries as Ursula K. LeGuin. Unlike LeGuin’s SF, in which the eponymous Dispossessed relocate to the moon to establish a community of people attempting to live independently of Earth’s colonial excesses and oppressions, Haraway’s “Camille” is explicitly of and for this planet, now.53 The consequences of Earth’s colonial past are everpresent. Haraway’s CoC mindfully remove themselves from the fray of late-stage capitalism, yet they are intrepid in their optimism in the face of capitalism’s grip on global culture and economy. Over five generations, CoC communities expand and human population subsides. By 2425: Human numbers are 3 billion One billion human-critter symbionts inhabit the earth . . . Two billion humans are not syms. Over 50 percent of all critter species living in 2015 have vanished by 2425. Millions of kinds of critters are syms with humans. The animal sym partners remain unaltered by human genes. The human syms take on ever more properties of their animal partners. Many humans are syms with extinct partners.54 Rituals for grieving the extinct become part of the CoC’s Chthulucenic labors.55 Science and science philosophy at the beginning of the new millennium hearken to a pre-Enlightenment mode of natural

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philosophy. Disciplinary distinctions and professional praxes are opening so that connections might be made across what have now become separate fields of astronomy, biology, chemistry, geology, etc. Harris posits that a transhistorical argument “insists on unexpected conversations between diverse agents across time.”56 Cavendish’s views on materiality of thought, especially when considered in conjunction with her fanciful depiction of spiritual friendships transcending the boundaries of time and space, seem less strange in light of today’s quantum reality. Certainly, the empowering call to those who have historically been excluded from hegemonic science and arts narratives must be heard. Cavendish’s transtemporal alliances of spirit might also be considered as a variety of kin making for which Haraway calls. In knowing the past, which we cannot change, we might affect the present in which we live and thereby subtly influence a shared future. Our imaginative presence must think with other bodies—animal, ideological, historical, fanciful—as kin. Blazing World and “Camille Stories” call for imagination-inaction, manifestations of alternative ways of being with and for the world and its inhabitants. Each story is the result of a woman writer whose work is the result of a deep engagement with the pressing scientific and cultural issues of her time. The works of Cavendish and Haraway affirm the power of speculative fiction to engender realities in the minds, bodies, and lived environments of their reading audiences. In reviewing each of these works, and as these science-arts integrative imaginations are enacted daily, I ask myself, “What world am I creating, and with whom?” What is my “Camille Story”? What is yours?

Notes 1 Margaret Cavendish, The Description of a New World Called The Blazing World/ Written by the Thrice Noble, Illustrious, and Excellent Princesse, the Duchess of Newcastle (London: A. Maxwell, 1666), “To the Reader” [f Utopia 1666.5], Houghton Library, Harvard University. 2 Dennis Kersten and Usha Wilbers define metamodernism, citing Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker: “this modernism is characterized by an oscillation between a typically modern

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commitment and a markedly postmodern detachment” (Dennis Kersten and Usha Wilbers, “Introduction: Metamodernism,” English Studies 99, no. 7 (2018): 719). 3 Donna Haraway, “SF with Stengers: Asked for or Not, the Pattern Is Now in Your Hands,” SubStance 47, no. 1 (2018): 61. 4 Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2016), 1. 5 See, for example, E. Mariah Spencer, “‘Earth’s Complaint’ and Other SF Poems by Margaret Cavendish,” Science Fiction Studies 46, no. 1 (2019): 159–65; and Marina Leslie, “Mind the Map: Fancy, Matter, and World Construction in Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World,” Renaissance and Reformation 35, no. 1 (2012): 85–112. 6 Katie Whitaker, Mad Madge: The Extraordinary Life of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, the First Woman to Live by Her Pen (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 43. 7 Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 157. 8 “Natural philosophy” was a term used to describe observational and experiential practices that now would not necessarily be considered “science,” including topics like astrology or alchemy, while also asking questions still relevant to chemistry and astronomy. The New Science referred to “experimental empiricism” enacted by figures such as Francis Bacon (1561–1626) and, later, by his followers in the Royal Society (Mary Thomas Crane, Losing Touch with Nature: Literature and the New Science in Sixteenth-Century England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 12). 9 Cavendish, The Description of a New World Called The Blazing World, “To the Reader.” 10 Citing praise that Cavendish received from Sarah Jinner, a midseventeenth-century almanac author who referred to the Restoration of Charles II as “Evill,” Cavendish scholar Lisa Walters reflects that Cavendish was indeed a role model for seventeenth-century women, regardless of class, religion, or political affinity (Lisa Walters, Margaret Cavendish, Gender, Science and Politics [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014], 2). 11 Cavendish, The Description of a New World Called The Blazing World, 3. 12 Ibid., 2. 13 Ibid., 4–6 (italics original).

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14 Ibid., 9 (italics original). 15 Ibid., 19. 16 Ibid., 122. 17 Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Free Association Books, 1991), 192. 18 Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 134. 19 Didier Debaise and Isabelle Stengers, “Gestes Spéculatifs,” Les Colloques Cerisy, Centre Culturel International de Cerisy, https:// cerisy​-colloques​.fr. 20 Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 136. 21 Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations Secretariat, Population Dynamics, “World Population Prospects 2019,” United Nations: Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Dynamics, www​ .population​.un​.org​/wpp. Population is a global issue fraught with histories of harm. In “Camille Stories” and other publications, Haraway acknowledges these histories by countering the false logic of eco-fascism and forwarding an imagination of human population reduction to levels that are sustainable for the entire planet and that benefit marginalized communities in ways that reframe reproductive choice within her kin making rubric: “Multi-kinded reproductive justice is an affirmative as well as critical task. No questions about reproductive justice should be approached as if only human beings matter. This is an insight and an obligation that most antiracist, Indigenous, decolonial, and other sorts of serious feminists share” (Donna Haraway with Marilyn Strathern, Jade S. Sasser, Adele Clarke, Ruha Benjamin, Kim Tallbear, Michelle Murphy, Yu-Ling Huang, and Chia Ling Wu, “Forum on Making Kin Not Population: Reconceiving Generations,” Feminist Studies 45, no. 1 (2019): 169. Italics original). 22 “Growing at a slower pace, world population is expected to reach 9.7 billion in 2050 and could peak at nearly 11 billion around 2100,” Department of Economic and Social Affairs, United Nations, www​.un​.org. 23 Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 144. 1960 is the last year that Earth’s population was three billion. See Marian Starkey, “World Population Milestones Throughout History,” Population Connection, www​.pop​ulat​ionc​onnection​.org. 24 Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 138.

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25 Ibid., 143. 26 Ibid., 148. Haraway cites Marge Piercy’s use of the term “per” as “the gender-neutral pronoun applying to every person,” 221. See Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time (New York: Knopf, 1976). 27 Ibid., 138. 28 Whitaker, Mad Madge, 80. 29 Ibid., 92–3. 30 Samuel I. Mintz, “The Duchess of Newcastle’s Visit to the Royal Society,” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 51, no. 2 (April 1952): 169. Whitaker discusses this visit in Mad Madge, 298–300. The first women to be accepted as Fellows of the Royal Society were crystallographer Kathleen Lonsdale and microbiologist Marjory Stephenson, both in 1945 (“Most Influential Women in British Science,” The Royal Society, https://royalsociety​.org). 31 Jonathan Gil Harris, Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 161. 32 Ibid. (emphasis original). 33 Leslie, “Mind the Map,” 88. 34 Margaret Cavendish, “Poets and Philosophers Minds,” in Sociable Letters, Written by the Thrice Noble, Illustrious, and Excellent Princess, the Lady Marchioness of Newcastle (London: William Wilson, 1664), f(4466.24.51), Houghton Library, Harvard University. 35 Mary Thomas Crane, “Analogy, Metaphor, and the New Science: Cognitive Science and Early Modern Epistemology,” in Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies, ed. Lisa Zunshine (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 111. 36 Cavendish, “Poets and Philosophers Minds,” 178. 37 Margaret Cavendish, “An Argumental Discourse,” in Observations upon Experimental Philosophy. To Which Is Added, The Description of a New Blazing World/Written by the Thrice Noble, Illustrious, and Excellent Princesse. The Duchess of Newcastle (London: A. Maxwell, 1666). 38 Margaret Cavendish, “Of Many Worlds in This World,” in Poems and Fancies Written by the Right Honourable, the Lady Margaret Newcastle (London: T.R. for J. Martin, and J. Allestrye, 1653). 39 Ibid., “A World in an Eare-Ring.”

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40 Ibid., “To All Writing Ladies.” 41 Cavendish, The Description of a New World Called The Blazing World, 101–2. 42 Ibid., 101. 43 Anne M. Thell, “‘[A]s Lightly as Two Thoughts’: Motion, Materialism, and Cavendish’s Blazing World,” Configurations 23, no. 1 (2015): 18. 44 Leslie, “Mind the Map,” 104. 45 Ibid., 88. 46 Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 164. 47 There is much emerging literature on the expansion of empathy, cognition, and performance. See, for example, Bruce McConachie, Evolution, Cognition, and Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). For more on explorations of performance and empathy within a feminist and liberatory context, see Michelle Maiese, “Transformative Learning, Enactivism, and Affectivity,” Studies in Philosophy and Education 36 (2017): 197–216; and Lori Gruen, “Attending to Nature: Empathetic Engagement with the More than Human World,” Ethics and the Environment 14, no. 2 (2009): 23–38. 48 Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, 175. 49 Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 130. 50 Ibid. 51 Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 21. 52 Ibid. 53 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (New York: Harper & Row, 1974). 54 Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 166. 55 These rituals already exist within twenty-first-century life. See Shelby Brewster, “Remembrance Day for Lost Species: Toward an Ethics of Witnessing Extinction,” Performance Research 25, no. 2 (2020): 95–101. 56 Harris, Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare, 166.

2 Cultivating Ensembles A Relational Reflection on Creating Cultural Transformation with New Performances of Science Raquell M. Holmes

History is not so important for teaching the past as it is for allowing students to select their own viable alternatives for the future. LEVELL HOLMES, PHD1

Introduction How does a queer, biracial African American woman with a family history of mental illness change how science contributes to racist, sexist, heteronormative, and ableist practices? Driven by a social change agenda and a love of science, I became a biologist to help science be on the right side of history. While I trained at

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prestigious universities, researching developmental biology and cell communication, I also volunteered in grassroots organizations where I learned the power of performance. I participated in new social performances of electoral politics, youth leadership, and emotional well-being, working alongside people from diverse racial, socioeconomic, and professional backgrounds. If performance could bring people together and change social norms outside of academia, could it do the same for scientists isolated in academia? My question is not “How do we get more women and minorities into the sciences?” Rather, I ask, “How do we create the culture of science that women and minorities want to be in?” and “How do we create a culture where people and their work can be seen and valued?” In this chapter, I introduce the emergence of a vibrant community of diverse educators, researchers, and practitioners that are Cultivating Ensembles, a STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics) community and conference. Together, they are transforming identities across disciplinary boundaries by embracing performance and building ensembles that value difference and humanize scientific environments. I could describe Cultivating Ensembles as if it were strange fruit, plucked from an unknown history, just as Blacks have been strange fruit throughout the history of the United States. The allusion to Billie Holiday’s song “Strange Fruit” is intentional.2 The lives of Black men, women, and children are not to be displayed ahistorically and, therefore, made strange by exceptionalist tellings of their stories. The scientists and artists of Cultivating Ensembles become visible through relational, historical acts. Here, I share the seeds, roots, and growth of my journey: the events and relational actions. The fruit of this journey—the vibrant, inclusive, interdisciplinary STEAM community that is as Black as it is white and as arts as it is science—may always be weird, but it will not be strange. This chapter makes visible a scientific community that is other than heteronormative, sexist, ableist, and classist. For me, challenging embedded “isms” of science and systemic barriers for underrepresented minorities is an activity that creates something new. It is performative in that it brings into existence new cultural ways of speaking, walking, and interacting in the world.3 The telling of our relational histories, including people like me—queer, women of color, biracial, multi-class, and societally ill (in the spirit of Martin Luther King, Jr., “creatively maladjusted”)—challenges embedded isms.4

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My work is part of an ecosystem of scientists, educators, and communicators who create and use their platforms to change the present and historical narrative of underrepresented minorities in STEM fields.5 These professionals are primarily people of color, first-generation academics/scientists/Americans. Instead of describing the life experiences of women, people of color, and poor and working-class scientists as obstacles that must be overcome in order to succeed, we relate to our sociocultural histories as integral to our success. We make use of who we are to create new scientific performances. My dream for science grows out of grassroots activism and the desire to create environments in which people have the material and emotional conditions they need to flourish. This springs from my childhood, my personal history, and my politics—choosing to relate to people as creators of their lives and our cultures, as performers.

California Roots My parents were married in the 1950s in San Francisco, California, in the Quaker meeting house, the only church at that time that would hold a ceremony for an interracial couple. My mother was raised by foster parents and, later, her grandparents. Her father, a boxer and a cutter in textiles, was in and out of the unions and jail. Her mother was a secretary who worked to pay families to raise her daughter. My dad’s family migrated from Arkansas to Richmond, California, amid the flight from Jim Crow racism and the Great Depression. He was the youngest son and the first of his twelve siblings to go to college, San Francisco State College, where my parents met. My mother became a librarian, my father a history professor. They moved north to rural Sonoma County, where my father created the Ethnic Studies program of Sonoma State College while finishing his PhD in History at the University of California, Berkeley. My mother employed her master’s degree in library science at the college library. Our neighbors were a vibrant mix of Hells Angels, Native Americans, welfare recipients, and wealthy farmers. My parents talked with respect for and interest in our neighbors. And our neighborhood friends were always welcome and invited to our house.

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My dad was gone a lot in my early years due to his PhD, which required extensive trips to Africa. My mother was left mostly alone to struggle with the challenges that came with raising three young biracial children. Without emotional and social support for the isolated position she was in, my mom experienced an emotional breakdown that became diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenia. This medical diagnosis, which treated my mother’s sociocultural emotional pain as a biological illness, scared and outraged me for years into my adult life. As my mother felt more stable in her life, she asked for a divorce. In the midst of divorce and family trials, my childhood was filled with unpredictable emotional turmoil. School created stability in my life. I went to a nondenominational Christian school. Before I was eight, I wanted to be like Jesus—a person creating change in his time, inviting the scorned and shunned to the table (the Passover table), and challenging the taxing institutions and practices of his time. I wanted to be like Martin Luther King, Jr., uniting people nationwide in the search for racial peace and justice, and like Gandhi, a nonviolent protest leader whose leadership invoked compassion. During middle school, my mother moved us to rural Oregon. When I stepped onto the small, square front porch of our singlewide trailer at the edge of a meadow at night, I could look up and see stars. There were no street lights—just the dim glow of the neighbors’ trailer. The stars and the constellations were, to me, myth, mystery, and science all tied into one. I fell in love with a small book that my mother gave me on science: a child primer on astronomy and relativity. My mother, being a librarian, fed my ambitions with books. Whatever I wanted to be, she would find resources and tell me what I needed to learn or do to become it. Yet we were not free from the impact of poverty that followed the divorce. My mother struggled financially and emotionally with taking care of her daughters. In her moments of pain and upset, all I heard—despite assurances to the contrary—was that I was causing problems. I left my mom and finished middle school while living with my father. Although he did not approve of my desire to get purple hair, when I said I wanted to play football he went and asked the football coach if I could join the otherwise boys-only team. The coach said yes. I did not play football. But I could have. My parents did a great job of keeping possibility—my ability to do something I chose to do—alive. They related to me as capable of doing anything.

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In high school, I decided to be a scientist. My German language teacher gave me Stephen J. Gould’s book The Mismeasure of Man.6 Reading, I learned of phrenology (looking at differences in human skull configuration and shape) and the related practice of craniometry (looking at differences in human skull size), popular in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Importantly, I learned how the social constructs of race and IQ were being justified through biological determinism.7 Did larger skulls mean larger brains and greater IQ? Through the lens of biological determinism and racist assumptions of the times, skull size was a biological explanation and justification for societal inequities. I also learned about the USPHS (United States Public Health Service) Syphilis Study at Tuskegee, Alabama, in which medical researchers kept African American men uninformed and untreated for syphilis until the 1970s—thirty years after a cure was known.8 How could we treat people this way? The Tuskegee actions can be seen as an extension of our country’s enduring cultural biases and practices that allow racialized and eugenic traditions to exist and thrive within science.9 I decided that I wanted to be in a position to counter sciences and pseudo-sciences that justify social inequalities and medicalize emotional pain. I could see that science was the authority that people looked to in order to validate their beliefs. I wanted to be a revolutionary and a scientist and for science to be part of humanizing—not dehumanizing—our world.

Activist at Heart I learned the power of performance through grassroots politics and street organizing while I was a graduate student at Tufts Biomedical School in the 1990s. The United States has a tradition of people creating social change by standing on the street having public conversations, informing fellow citizens, and asking for financial contributions to support social and political changes. I began organizing in electoral politics, collecting signatures and fundraising for Dr. Lenora B. Fulani. She was the first African American, the first woman, and the first independent candidate on the ballot for president in all fifty states.10 I learned this historical fact from an organizer, Jill Klowden, at a gay wedding in 1991. Klowden was running for Boston City Council as an openly gay,

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Jewish woman on a pro-gay, pro-socialist, Black-led, woman-led third-party line. Klowden invited me to participate in what she was doing. So began the grassroots organizing that I continue today. I chose to work on both Klowden’s local and Fulani’s national campaigns (1992 and 1994) because I saw that they were choosing to do something. They saw that to improve the lives of poor, working-class people in the United States we needed to create a political environment in which everyone has equal access to the process. Neither woman won their office. Yet, both campaigns made visible, by signatures and contributions, the ability of diverse Americans to work together for a fair electoral process. The organizers with whom I volunteered were informed by theatre. They saw their street organizing as performances. We created organizing stages—usually on a moderately busy street corner with lots of pedestrians. The “stage” included a table with literature. The organizer-performers stayed on set. We related to everyone who walked by (or on) the stage as part of our street performance. I would choose my emotion or kind of character and give my opening line: “Hi. Take a minute for democracy.” My invitation was met with silence, an awkward smile, or “Not now.” Occasionally, someone stopped to talk. We would then create a conversation together on building a fair political process. In these street performances of American democracy, I learned to lead conversations with people very different from me, confident in our ability to build something new together. In 1994, I joined Evelyn Dougherty, a grassroots organizer and social therapist, to build the Boston All Stars Talent Show Network, an offshoot of the All Stars Project, Inc., a national nonprofit that uses performance to create developmental experiences for youth and adults in poor communities. I stood near stores and libraries in poor Black and Latine neighborhoods inviting young people to produce and perform in talent shows in their neighborhood. I also stood on busy street corners in affluent, mostly white neighborhoods, inviting adults to contribute financially and to volunteer. Each training, workshop, or volunteer shift would begin with improvisational theatre games as warm-ups. At the performance workshops, the young people brought poems and improvised skits about their dreams and hopes for their neighborhoods and city. I saw how these improvisational exercises created conditions in which the young people and volunteers from very different backgrounds could build

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community and culture together. Building Boston All Stars stretched us beyond our usual societal boundaries. The white people who volunteered did not usually go to the poor, predominantly Black and Latine areas where we held talent shows. The young people did not often meet youth from other streets or neighborhoods or partner with affluent adults. By creating the All Stars experience together, we grew as colleagues and friends—as co-builders of a new social, cultural performance. They say in the All Stars: “If you can perform on stage, you can perform in life. Everything is a performance.”11 We created acts of listening, welcoming, appreciation, congratulations, and ours (without the “us” or “them”). I began to wonder: if the relational tools of improvisation and performance outside of academia could bring people together, change social norms, and transform our experiences, could it also do this for scientists within academia? This became my overarching professional question.

Scientist by Day Throughout this time, I was training as a biologist at Tufts and Harvard universities. Everyone I knew in science loved their science. But in the formal settings of the university, compassionate, collaborative, and exploratory exchanges were rare. Fellow students and postdocs felt isolated or defensive, uncertain of their careers, and frustrated with the ways they interacted with advisers and each other. Feedback was often a humiliating search for faults rather than developmental critique. When I and other working-class students or students of color talked with each other about the challenges of graduate school, we discovered we felt pained and isolated by the product-oriented, competitive culture that accompanied what we enjoyed: posing questions, designing experiments, and exploring phenomena. We wondered: Why participate in this kind of environment? In response to the environment, a Chinese American fellow student with an activist spirit brought Dr. Evelyn Fox Keller to give a seminar. Fox Keller was an unusual speaker for our experimental biomedical sciences research program. She was a physicist speaking on the philosophical and sociopolitical aspects of how scientists talk with one another and how the language we use in science has

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prejudices and politics embedded in it.12 Fox Keller’s work resonated with me. I often wondered in my studies of mammalian eggs: Was it possible for two women, two female gametes to create life? Was the male-female binary necessary for reproduction? Binaries of sex and gender were fundamental to our science culture and language, making it difficult to see such questions let alone pose them aloud. Fox Keller exposed the assumptions built into the language of science: language that also codifies science identity. The identities of mathematician, engineer, or scientist are often seen as immutable and inconsistent with other identities. Such constrained social performances distort and deny our entirety. For example, MIT mathematician John Urshel was also an NFL (National Football League) player. Computational scientist and physician Sherry Ann Brown, MD, PhD, is also a poet. Engineer Shaundra Daily is a dancer. Systems biologist Uri Alon is an improviser. These “non-scientific” identities are part of who these Black and Jewish scientists are, and denying part of someone is denying that person.13 Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon for science trainees to hear: “You can’t be a serious scientist or engineer if you’re dancing,” or “You can’t be a serious researcher if you’re interested in teaching kids.” This was (and is) the cultural stage onto which the historically excluded walk. Such critiques are not openly leveled at scientists who present as white-Anglo, heteronormative, cisgender men like Francis Collins,14 director of the National Institutes for Health, for whom artistic qualities are seen as assets rather than illegitimate distractions. Could science resist this double standard in a way that develops, not limits, the diversity of all scientists?

Building Ensembles, Community, and Culture Drawing on my grassroots work and social therapeutic training,15 I saw that creating something—a new science culture—and describing it—an existing or desired culture—are not the same activity. I began to seek out researchers using the language of performance, community, and learning with science. At an interdisciplinary conference, I met the DragonMUD (multiuser domain) community.

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This international research community created some of the earliest versions of multiple-user domains for the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons. In this online game, young people constructed virtual, text-based rooms and objects and taught elders how to build and play in the virtual world. They created community-based learning through role-play. DragonMUD was my introduction to researchers who were speaking of democratic and developmental education within the sciences. By volunteering with the organizations of people in DragonMUD, I met scientists and engineers who were also educators and activists building community. This included Roscoe Giles of Boston University who wanted to bring science out of the labs to everyone, especially young people of color. I joined Giles to manage educational outreach and training programs of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure program.16 Leading the partnership were Giles (African American), Richard Tapia (Chicano) of Rice University, and Greg Moses (white) of University of Wisconsin at Madison. These nationally recognized leaders, together with diverse colleagues, built cultural structures (workshops, conferences, projects) that related to students, K-12 teachers, university faculty, and people from historically excluded groups as creators and designers of innovative technologies. In parallel, we collaborated with other African American technical leaders (Bryant York, Valerie Taylor, Skip Ellis) to create the Institute for African American e-Culture—a hub for African American students and researchers to develop their work and have explicit conversations on the racial politics of completing their academic careers.17 Giles and I created the High Performance Computing research lab as a developmental activity for students in the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE) at Boston University. Our research question was: Could we establish a community resource, the lab, as a community-building activity? We invited everyone in NSBE to participate and worked with anyone who said yes. We collectively discovered what we needed to learn to build the lab together. Engineering students presented an improvised performance of our interactions in building the lab at the Performing the World (PTW 2001) conference for an audience of activists, artists, and educators.18

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Although I intentionally integrated play and discussions of performance throughout my programs, my first improvisational theatre workshop for scientists was in 2009. Nearly fifteen years from when the question formed, I was able to ask: Is improv useful to us as scientists? If so, how? The workshop was hosted by improviser, physicist, and systems biologist Uri Alon. We both wanted to create a science culture of compassion. I told Alon of my dream to lead scientists in an improv and performance workshop. In response he hosted the workshop at Harvard Medical School and invited everyone in the Systems Biology department to attend. Twelve to fifteen graduate students, postdocs, and faculty participated. I invited Evelyn Dougherty to lead the workshop with me. We were doing a cultural, not scientific, experiment. We started the workshop with everyone sitting in a circle, an uncommon configuration in scientific research environments. Dougherty and I shared our experiences of using performance and improv to create socially therapeutic environments, in youth development and in our day-to-day lives. Our focus was on creating a performance environment and building the ensemble. We said, “Let’s discover together what play and performance give us here.” Our games included “Name-Gesture,” “Whoosh,” and a “Yes, And” story. The group laughed and was awkward as we played together. Dougherty and I asked, “What was it like to do this together? How do you feel? What did we discover?” The scientists were excited. They got to know one another and found new ways of working with and relating to each other. Listening, appreciating, and building from someone’s offer without evaluating (i.e., searching for faults) were new processes in their lives as scientists. They created a new cultural performance that emphasized something other than rigid status and disciplinary identities. The students continued organizing and inviting me to lead improv theatre workshops at Harvard. I later introduced workshops at my home institution, the University of Connecticut Health Center. Colleagues from the computing partnership encouraged me to apply for a grant from the interdisciplinary CreativeIT program of the NSF. The awarded project, “Improvisational Theater for Computing Scientists,” studied the impact of learning improvisational theatre on the creativity of scientists and science educators.

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Cultivating Ensembles in STEM Education and Research With the grant from the NSF, I could now speak across the country about the benefits of seeing people as performers and improvising as something everyone does in everyday life. The research workshops and talks created the conditions for me to make bolder moves from which the conference, Cultivating Ensembles, would be born. Sarah Hug was the collaborative evaluator for my grant. We shared a love for Vygotsky and community.19 We looked at how professionals develop through group-based, creative, collaborative activity. Jennifer Alonzo attended one of our research workshops. Trained as a theatre practitioner, Alonzo collaborated with a biologist to foster communication among faculty so as to provoke and support mathbio cross-disciplinary projects.20 The three of us shared a passion for creative conversation, community, and development. I invited them to convene a meeting with me that would bring together professionals from our networks: biology, computational sciences, community organizing, and experimental and improvisational theatre. We invited over 200 colleagues. We dedicated the meeting to what we saw people doing, cultivating ensembles, and entitled it Cultivating Ensembles in STEM Education and Research (CESTEMER). The meeting was held in January 2012 in frosty Farmington, Connecticut. Forty students, educators, and professionals attended. They openly explored with each other how performance and the performing arts were relevant to their work building developmental, collaborative, or inclusive STEM programs. They valued learning from others who were working at the edges of different disciplines, so much so that they became the organizers of the next conference, which is now known as Cultivating Ensembles. The following snapshots highlight the work of Cultivating Ensembles conference attendees from 2012 to 2019. The conferences emerge as transdisciplinary, practitioner, academic spaces led by a community of individuals who, by their very existence and co-creative participation, are changing the heteronormative, ableist, racist, and sexist narratives embedded in and characteristic of science. They transform what is possible in STEM.

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Willa Taylor, director of education and community engagement at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre, presented her collaboration with Chicago-based schools to develop a multidisciplinary, arts-based approach to science teaching and learning.21 Taylor’s program invites participants to examine the craft of theatre through the lens of science in ways that challenge how we understand disciplinary identities: artist, engineer, physicist, or teacher. What materials will stay cool under intense spotlights? How is sound insulated from one room to another? These science and engineering questions are crucial to stage performances and accessible to elementary and middle school audiences. Tom Murphy, now retired professor of computer science and mathematics at Contra Costa College in San Pablo, California, presented on the creation of math and computing clubhouses at his home institution. These clubhouses were organized by students who mostly came from historically excluded groups. Murphy, a white Irish man with a background in theatre and science, saw and related to these students as leaders. As faculty, he used his position to establish the clubhouse as a student-led, co-created activity. Given that experiential and exploratory programs are common in science, what made this program a new performance in science? First-generation, working-class students of color, many of whom learned English as a second language, were leading open-ended inquiries in ways often reserved for more privileged students at select-admissions schools. Arlene Evangelista, first-generation Mexican American, presented on the relationship of the Mathematical Theoretical Biology Institute (MTBI), a community-based summer research experience for undergraduates founded by Carlos Castillo-Chavez,22 to student retention and persistence in mathematics and academia. In the MTBI, students from less privileged backgrounds direct the research and faculty function as essential consultants. In this creative, collaborative process students lead their science inquiries, thereby changing their relationships to science, to the discipline, and to the faculty. Attending directly to interpersonal, relational skills is a new science performance. The bioinformatician Ilija Dukovski and systems biologist Angela DePace are research faculty who invite improvscience into their research courses.23 At Cultivating Ensembles, they shared how they see the performance-based

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workshops as an opportunity to help students grow. In their courses, they create the conditions in which students can be who they are and develop their professional voice. The faculty and students play improvisational theatre games and co-create conversations that address how they feel and how they impact (and are impacted by) one another, their departments, and science at large.24 So how does this relate to mental health or remove the isms? When Dr. Simone A. Hyater-Adams walked through the door of her first Cultivating Ensembles conference, she exhaled in relief (and inhaled with excitement) when, at the conference’s “Welcome” event, she and the diverse professionals in attendance were encouraged to meet and converse with one another. Hyater-Adams attended the 2017 conference, presenting on the relationship of performance and identity for Black physicists.25 Cultivating Ensembles transformed her expectations for what was possible in STEM education and research. As she said, “Cultivating Ensembles in its very existence is a challenge to racism, homophobia [in science].”26 The 2019 conference was subsequently filled with young researchers and artists who Hyater-Adams had met and organized.27 Their work rejects the presupposition of binary and mutually exclusive identities. They do not force themselves to fit into one category: artist or scientist. They instead examine and perform as artist and scientist. That same year, Rebecca DePodwin spoke on the importance of fostering atmospheres of empathy and support so that we can enact meaningful change and end the stigma of mental illness. Atay Citron, theatre artist and University of Haifa professor, facilitated a physical theatre workshop entitled “Ebisu Sign Language Theatre Laboratory: An Ensemble of Deaf Performer-Researchers” that invited hearing scientists to follow the leadership of Deaf artists. Environmental scientist Todd Harwell introduced his research into the relationships of informal science education institutions and the LGBTQ+ community in “Queering Informal STEM Learning.”28 When I asked Harwell how the sessions were going, he responded, “Each session is like a warm hug.”

Conclusion My most significant contribution to STEM may be building communities of scientists, engineers, and technologists who embrace

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the developmental and transformative power of performance, play, and creativity. At Cultivating Ensembles, scientists create poetry as a way of contemplating the social identities their fields manifest, while arts practitioners lead explorations that integrate art and science; at each conference, participants perform the possibility of science beyond the false binaries and harmful isms imposed through institutionalized identities. Leading demographically diverse people in the creation of environments where they can learn and develop is at the heart of my work in transforming our culture. New science performances appear as diverse, radically inclusive communities of young people, students, faculty, and STEM professionals. They also appear as integrated and fundamentally interdisciplinary ensembles. Developing new forms of live performances is individually and collectively therapeutic. As the world watched and responded to the killing of George Floyd, this same community of artist-scientistacademic-activists asked me, “What can we do?”29 In response, I and we have created Uncomfortable Independent Conversations (UIC), a series of online conversations in which people come together across racial and class identities to move closer to one another and offer a new performance of Black and white in America. Black, Indigenous, people of color, LGBTQ+, people with diverse abilities, and women are creating stages and directing actions that cultivate ensembles in and beyond STEM. With play and performance, we are reorganizing our relationships and identities as players, artists, and scientists in ways that value our differences, develop our emotional intelligence and well-being, and humanize our scientific environments and professions.

Notes 1 LeVell Holmes was a cultural historian who received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. This quote is from the teaching statement provided in 1968 when he joined the faculty of Sonoma State College, which became Sonoma State University. 2 Abel Meeropol published the poem “Strange Fruit” in 1937. Holiday first performed the song at Café Society in 1939. For more on this history, see Bryan Pietsch, “Behind ‘Strange Fruit,’ Billie Holiday’s Anti-Lynching Anthem,” New York Times, April 25, 2021.

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3 I use “performative” after Butler’s interpretation, as she references the acts of Rosa Parks—her sitting invoked and demanded rights that had not previously existed for Black Americans. See Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997), 147. 4 Martin Luther King, Jr., often referred to the necessity of maintaining a state of “maladjustment” to institutionalized racism: “there are some things in our social system to which I’m proud to be maladjusted and to which I call upon you to be maladjusted . . . I never intend to adjust myself to the evils of segregation or the crippling effects of discrimination . . . it may be that the salvation of our world lies in the hands of the maladjusted. The challenge of this hour is to be maladjusted” (Martin Luther King, Jr., “The Christian Way of Life in Human Relations, Address Delivered at the General Assembly of the National Council of Churches,” December 4, 1957, St. Louis, Missouri, Stanford: The Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute, https://kinginstitute​.stanford​.edu). 5 See Erika T. Camacho, Raquell M. Holmes, and Stephen A. Wirkus, “Transforming the Undergraduate Research Experience Through Sustained Mentoring: Creating a Strong Support Network and a Collaborative Learning Environment,” New Directions in Higher Education 171 (2015): 63–73; Carlos Castillo-Garsow and Carlos Castillo-Chavez, “Why REUs Matter,” in Directions for Mathematics Research Experiences for Undergraduates, ed. Yanir A. Rubinstein and Mark A. Perterson (Hackensack, NJ: World Scientific Publishing Co., PTC. Ltd., 2015); Background to Breakthrough, ibiology, https:// www​.ibiology​.org​/stories​/background​-to​-breakthrough; and Fanuel Muindi, “Journal of Stories in Science,” in Diversity, Inclusion, & Belonging Conference 2019, STEM Advocacy Institute, May 21, 2019, Boston, MA, USA. https://stemadvocacy​.org​/news​/stories​-in​ -science​-presents​-at​-harvards​-1st​-dib​-conference/. 6 Steven J. Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1981). 7 For a deeper discussion of the history of phrenology in performance, see Marlis Schweitzer’s “Lecture on Heads and Lectures with Skulls— Performance Transmutations” in this volume. 8 See “The U.S. Public Health Service Syphilis Study at Tuskegee,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, www​.cdc​.gov. 9 Forced sterilization of the mentally ill, poor, and Black was taking place as the Tuskegee experiment began. See Steven A. Farber, “U.S. Scientists’ Role in the Eugenics Movement (1907–1939): A Contemporary Biologist’s Perspective,” Zebrafish 5, no. 4 (2008): 243–5.

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10 Lenora B. Fulani, The Making of a Fringe Candidate, 1992 (New York: Castillo International, 1992). 11 See the chapter “Outside of School: Creatively Imitating and Incorporating the Other” in Lois Holtzman, Vygotsky at Work and Play (London: Routledge, 2017), 67–86. 12 See Evelyn Fox Keller, Secrets of Life/Secrets of Death: Essays on Language, Gender and Science (New York: Routledge, 1992) and Refiguring Life: Metaphors of Twentieth-Century Biology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). 13 For more on arts and race in science identity, see Fay Cobb Payton, Ashley White, and Tara Mullins, “STEM Majors, Art Thinkers (STEM+Arts)—Issues of Duality, Rigor and Inclusion,” Journal of STEM Education: Innovations & Research 18, no. 3 (2017): 39–47. 14 For more on Collins, see Gardiner Harris, “For N.I.H. Chief, Issues of Identity and Culture,” New York Times, October 5, 2001. For details about arts-integrative Nobel Prize winners, see Robert Root-Bernstein, Lindsay Allen, Leighanna Beach, Ragini Ghadula, Justin Fast, Chelsea Hosey, Menjamin Kremknow, Jacqueline Lapp, Katilin Lonc, Kendall Pawelec, Abigail Podufaly, Caitlin Russ, Laurie Tennant, Eric Vrtis, and Stacey Weinlander, “Arts Foster Scientific Success: Avocations of Nobel, National Academy, Royal Society and Sigma Xi Members,” Journal of Psychology of Science and Technology 1, no. 2 (2008): 57. 15 Social therapy is a group-based therapeutic approach that grew from the 1960s and is best described in the words of Lenora Fulani in her Forward to Fred Newman’s Myth of Psychology (Castillo Intl., 1991): “Social therapy is a pro-Black, pro-working class political (not psychological) response to the murderously anti-working class and racist conditions of our people’s lives . . . it is political in the broadest sense—it is about the reorganization of power. We are not helping people to think or feel differently about society-as-it-is (and thereby to adjust to exploitation and oppression), but to do a different activity— to participate in changing a profoundly exploitative and oppressive world” (xvii). See more on social therapy in my career in an interview with Faith Kearns in Getting to the Heart of Science Communication: A Guide to Effective Engagement (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2021), 185–7. 16 For more information on the diversity-focused work in this partnership, see Raquell Holmes and Roscoe Giles, “Minority Participation in Computational Science,” Computing in Science & Engineering (March/April 2000): 11–13.

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17 Participants in the iAAEC have become directors, chairs, and deans of computing and engineering research institutions and departments around the country. 18 Dan Friedman and Lois Holzman, “Performing the World: The Performance Turn in Social Activism,” in Performance Studies in Motion: International Perspectives and Practices in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Atay Citron, David Zerbib, and Sharon Aronson-Lehavi (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). 19 For more on views on Vygotsky, see Lois Holzman, “Without Creating ZPDs There Is No Creativity,” in Vygotsky and Creativity: A Cultural Historical Approach to Play, Meaning Making, and the Arts, ed. M. Cathrene Connery, Vera P. John-Steiner, and Ana Marjanovic-Shane (New York: Peter Lang, 2010). 20 Jennifer Alonzo, Holly Gaff, and Ginger S. Watson, “A Laboratory for Collaboration: Rehearsal Communication Skills for Biologists and Mathematicians,” Biology International 53 (2013): 7–22. 21 Willa Taylor, Building ESTEAM: Developing a Multidisciplinary ArtsBased Approach to Science Teaching and Learning (Farmington, CT: Cultivating Ensembles in STEM Education and Research, 2012). 22 Castillo-Garsow and Castillo-Chavez, “Why REUs Matter,” 125–45. 23 improvscience is my consulting business that grew out of the improvisation workshops. 24 Raquell Holmes, Angela DePace, and Ilija Dukovski, Communicating and Humanizing Science in Interdisciplinary Research Programs (New York: Cultivating Ensembles in STEM Education and Research, 2019). For more on the culture change in research programs, see Raquell Holmes and Mia Anderson, “Transforming the Culture of Communication in Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School,” in The Applied Improvisation Mindset: Tools for Transforming Organizations and Communities, ed. Theresa Robbins Dudeck and Caitlin McClure (London: Bloomsbury, 2021). 25 Simone A. Hyater-Adams, Intersections of Physics and Performance for Physicists of Color (Chicago, IL: Cultivating Ensembles in STEM Education and Research, 2017). 26 Personal Communication, Simone A. Hyater-Adams, Computing Professionals Creating Inclusive STEM Communities (New York: National Science Foundation Workshop, January 2020). 27 Brean Prefontaine, “Physics and Figure Skating: Supporting the Performer and Scientist in Each of Us”; Foloshada C. Solomon, “Dancing Physics: Engaging Black Girls in Embodied Learning”;

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Xandria Quichocho, “Integrated Physics Identities of Women of Color and LGBQ+ Physicists”; and Tamia Williams, “The Intersection of Identity and Performing Arts for Black Physicists” (Cultivating Ensembles in STEM Education and Research, 2019). 28 Rebecca DePodwin, “It Only Takes One Person to Open the Door,” as well as Atay Citron’s workshop and Todd Harwell’s talk, were all given at the Cultivating Ensembles in STEM Education and Research, 2019. 29 George Floyd was a 46-year-old Black man who worked as a security guard in Minneapolis, MN. On May 25, 2020, he was murdered by then police officer Derek Chauvin, who was subsequently “convicted of second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter” (Eric Levenson and Aaron Cooper, “Derek Chauvin found guilty of all three charges for killing George Floyd,” CNN, April 21, 2021, www​.cnn​.com).

3 Shadow Ecologies Shadow Puppets as Science Performance Alison L. Dell, Stephanie Dowdy-Nava, Armando de la Torre, and Saúl S. Nava

On a night with infinite stars in the Chihuahuan Desert, a clip light illuminated a sheet suspended between twisted branches. Cumbia music accompanied desert sounds. The sheet became a cinema as shadow organisms paraded. Scorpions, owls, and lizards became their own ecosystem through motion and interaction. The humans that animated the puppets made strange sounds, adopted new voices, and engaged with the landscape and each other. We had made the puppets earlier that day, though none of us had ever made any before. Brought together as participants and presenters in the ART±BIO Collaborative’s 2019 Cultivo Field Residency for Artists and Scientists of Color on the U.S.-Mexico Border, we sat shoulder to shoulder with paper, scissors, and pencils to construct our puppets. Guided by artist, activist, puppeteer, and fellow participant

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Armando de la Torre, a sheet of construction paper became a thing with agency. Using field guides, recollection, or imagination, we created our own shadow animal avatars; it was these constructions that participated in starlit dance and parade. Armando de la Torre’s lesson was part of the participatory teaching for the Cultivo Field Residency. It subsequently inspired Saúl Nava and Stephanie Dowdy-Nava—founders of ART±BIO Collaborative (A±BC) and organizers of the residency—to include shadow puppets in their ongoing work in science outreach. From its inception, this project was imbued with a deep sense of social justice, identity, and connection to natural history, landscape, and environment. This chapter considers shadow play as a route to natural history exploration and social engagement through the lens of participatory events staged by A±BC as part of their ongoing work in art-, science-, and nature-based community outreach. This chapter proposes that making and performing shadow puppets—a project here called Shadow Ecologies—render erased spaces and experiences visible and provide a powerful tool for science outreach to underserved, displaced, or vulnerable populations. How can an abstracted piece of paper—a shadow puppet made by a person who may have limited or no experience with science or puppetry—navigate both the connectedness of animals and place (as in A±BC’s educational outreach) and the disconnectedness of displaced communities (as addressed in de la Torre’s practice)? This chapter crystallizes hours of discussion between the authors into an analysis of what makes these works work and how they are entangled with identity and science learning. This is not an education paper, a science paper, a theatre paper, or a social change paper, though we write this for biologists, artists, educators, and activists. We first consider Shadow Ecologies and puppetry within the framework of science-adjacent performance and outreach as we describe and contextualize A±BC’s development of these projects through the artistic practice of Cultivo participant de la Torre. We then describe and analyze Shadow Ecologies projects in community, museum, and classroom settings. More than a new route to represent science content, we argue that puppet creation and activation are points of intervention: a process for connecting with fellow organisms and natural histories and reconnecting with place.

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Framing Shadow Ecologies The shadow play projects we describe here fall under a broad category of outreach, situated in the distinct but overlapping fields of participatory science performance, performances by scientists, and performances about science. Such projects are effective methods for communicating science and expanding the popular perception of who is socially empowered to be a scientist and what it means to do science.1 Scientists can be participant-performers in science-focused improvisational theatre such as improvscience and its affiliate, Cultivating Ensembles, each playful participatory interventions that promote inclusion and STEM creativity.2 Scientists may also generate and perform science-focused content as in the ongoing contest Dance Your PhD, for which STEM graduate students create choreography reflective of their research projects.3 Story Collider is a performance series in which science-adjacent stories take center stage; scientists relate their experiences in a theatrical setting.4 Each of these may be considered interventions, described by Michael Carklin as “theatre with the intent to promote science engagement.”5 These and other arts integration efforts generate opportunities for authentic cultural expression within science settings.6 Puppets are not strangers to science-oriented performance. In David Morton’s Wider Earth (2018), scientifically accurate puppets reflect the species diversity Darwin encountered during the voyage of the Beagle.7 These puppets are set in an appropriate ecological context and play an essential role in the story line. In 2017’s Rama and the Worm, a short film written and directed by Dan Bendrups and Joko Susilo, shadow puppets act as public health “edutainment” embedded within the classic story of the Ramayana. In Indonesia, where the Hindu epic is traditionally performed through shadow puppetry, Rama and the Worm is used in tandem with health outreach efforts demonstrating the dangers of helminth parasites and the importance of handwashing.8 The participatory and creative aspects of A±BC’s Shadow Ecologies project set it apart from these more discretely theatrical or pedagogical works. Participants in Shadow Ecologies tell their own stories through the process of making and connecting with the object that will manifest their experiences. Telling one’s own story is particularly important for those whose experience is rarely represented in traditional science narratives or acknowledged

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within the science classroom.9 Acknowledgment of place is linked to learning communities and collective meaning-finding, and thus inextricably linked with identity.10 Shadow Ecologies, as begun at Cultivo, is a seedling of both community and social change puppetry traditions, resonating with de la Torre’s affiliation with the San Diego Guild of Puppetry as well as puppetry’s historic applications in therapy and education. As experience and narrative are abstracted through shadow, puppet avatars can forge connection and trust among people of varied populations and in difficult situations.11 By conveying meaning in shape and gesture, shadow play narratives need not rely on spoken language. In Saudade, a shadow puppet performance documenting immigrant life in Washington DC, creator Cecilia Cackley noted that the power of these performances comes in part from their near-wordlessness.12 This has become particularly important to A±BC in developing Shadow Ecologies as curricula for multilingual settings. As Bread and Puppet founder Peter Schumann notes, “Puppets need silence and their silences are an outspoken part of their language.”13 A rich literature already exists to support using puppets in early education and therapy settings; more recently, puppetry has been used in undergraduate biology courses.14 Taken together, these examples highlight puppetry’s ability to engage diverse participants in a variety of contexts.

Materiality of Shadows Shadow play’s accessibility comes in part from the materiality of the puppets themselves, though their performance makes them into something immaterial: shadow. As Stephen Kaplin notes, “Shadow image, spun out of light and its absence . . . shifts effortlessly between spiritual realms and the physical plane.”15 This observation about simultaneous physicality and absence invokes a simple corollary: all that is required to make shadow puppets is something that blocks the light and something with which to shape that light-blocking material. Given this flexibility, the materials needed to construct shadow puppets are generally accessible and inexpensive. Making the puppets described in this work requires familiar tools: a pencil, scissors, and

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paper. These materials are portable for outreach events and easy to lift and manipulate by participants with a range of abilities. Puppeteers David and Donna Wisniewski suggest that shadow play images may engage participants by mimicking the light projected through a screen.16 This observation complements Claudia Orenstein’s assertion that part of a puppet’s appeal comes from consumer-driven identification with objects, “to see things as a means of satisfying our desires, expressing our personalities and somehow completing us—things as an essential extension of ourselves.”17 Responsiveness to things and also to backlit, abstracted versions of things (vis-à-vis television and smartphones) may contribute to the approachability and appeal of Shadow Ecologies. Familiarity and accessibility manifest in making the puppet and extend to performing. As puppet-wielders, performers are free to take part in a performance, yet be apart from it. Pageantry and giant puppets animated by both company members and community volunteers have become catalysts for a joyful subgenre of street protest and puppet performances that take on global social issues.18 Emerging from counterculture movements of the 1960s and 1970s, radical puppetry organizations such as Bread and Puppet and their contemporary, the UK’s Welfare State International,19 have since inspired the creation of many socially engaged puppet companies and theatres including the San Diego Guild of Puppetry, a focus for Armando de la Torre’s work in engaging communities through artistic practice.20

Armando de la Torre: Toy Theatres and Puppets Reframing Displacement “There’s something interesting in hiding behind something,” said Armando de la Torre, transforming a ping pong ball, a bandana, a stick, and a rubber band into animated hilarity, as he introduced Cultivo artists to puppet making. Armando de la Torre’s work combines installation, music, and activism while referencing performance traditions such as toy theatre and puppetry. A±BC and de la Torre engage social circus’ participatory performance traditions along with the more internal liberatory practice of making and voicing another thing.21 Created just after Cultivo, the

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2019 installation Rosas y Nopales (Roses and Prickly Pear Cactus) intertwined landscape and local history using plants and earth, lit by video and juxtaposed with a structure built of salvaged wood and cardboard in homage to the tradition of toy theatre. At the San Diego Art Institute’s Who Are We Anyways? (2017), de la Torre presented a monumental installation of toy theatre and found objects in an interrogation of contested spaces, gentrification, displacement, and environmental justice.22 Through the San Diego Guild of Puppetry, de la Torre facilitates yearly summer programs with displaced and homeless young people. Our conversations about puppets’ function in these contexts circled erasure, displacement, working with/ teaching through trauma, and the transformative effects of using puppetry in trauma spaces such as homeless shelters.23 de la Torre described facilitating a 2017 event in which children transformed such a space through a parade of banners and large puppets. The procession wound around the complex, through what he described as the otherwise “lifeless and cold” buildings: residence hallways with doors on each side, one family in each room, each family at the door watching the parade. De la Torre’s curatorial, artistic, and outreach work consistently and deliberately transcends the USMexico border. At Cultivo, the distinct practices of A±BC and de la Torre formed a continuing symbiosis based in landscape. Here, we broadly consider these practices in the larger context of performance-based artworks addressing borders and particularly the US-Mexico border. While community puppetry involves performance, it is distinct from performance art legacies that center the artist and particularly the artist’s body.24 For instance, Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Coco Fusco have used performance to juxtapose viewers of their work and the institutions that house their work with acts of colonial oppression.25 Their collaborative exhibit, The Year of the White Bear, featuring the now iconic Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West (1992), called attention to the colonialist practice of displaying people of color in museums as exhibits, implicating both the viewers who experienced the performance and the major museums that commissioned their work.26 Another collaborative performance art initiative, The Border Art Workshop-Taller de Arte Fronterizo (BAW/TAF), established in 1984 by Gómez-Peña, Michael Schnorr, David Avalos, and others, has involved many artists and communities in performance-based works. Fusco notes,

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“Despite the heterogeneity of forms they use, the members of BAW/ TAF have a unifying strategy. They present a spectacle of life at the border . . . to explore the symbolic implications of each site.”27 While similarly place-based, A±BC’s work shifts the focus from performer to participant experiences through workshops that acknowledge and celebrate lived histories and local landscape. Community members become collaborators in the process of both creating and performing their shadow puppet. This difference is fundamental to participatory artwork including the puppetry traditions that inform de la Torre’s work. Jim Lasko of Chicago’s Redmoon Puppet Theater asserts that in community-based work, the puppet becomes a “third thing,” bridging those who are catalyzing participation and the public who will become participants.28 In using this term, Lasko is directly alluding to Claire Bishop’s analysis of community-based performance in which “the emphasis is on collaboration and the collective dimension of social experience.”29 A±BC’s communitybased shadow puppetry identifies with participatory performance traditions rather than performance art. Both de la Torre’s and A±BC’s work connects to landscape and community but in different ways. Each practice demonstrates that shadow play can intervene in dominant narratives through participant accounts that are not typically sought out or are whitewashed. De la Torre’s art and outreach practices address trauma inherent in displacement, separation by borders, gentrification, consumerism, and environmental (in)justice. A±BC’s participatory shadow play fosters identification with local landscapes to center natural environments and their inhabitants and thus acts as an intervention in a colonized science curriculum, even as some of these events occur in contested spaces of expertise such as museums.30 Shadow Ecologies incorporates visual arts and performance as a conduit to animal communication, animal and plant morphology, and behavioral ecology. Through silhouette avatars of local flora and fauna, participants perform to celebrate and gain greater insight into local ecology and environments and, therefore, into their own identities.

A Conduit to Natural History and Ecology A±BC’s ongoing outreach work is closely interwoven with landscape and validation. Shadow Ecologies leverages the strengths of

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puppetry and puppet making to synergize with learning ecological concepts. The enactment of animal behaviors through puppetry is a means of exploring and understanding the ecological interactions unique to different landscapes. When outreach focuses on local ecology, participants’ lived experiences with nature are validated and become the subject for their science engagement. Further, participants are empowered when they make and celebrate their own object of learning. The day after de la Torre’s Cultivo workshop, our group of artists/scientists visited the Rio Bosque Wetlands Park, a rolling, sepia landscape in West Texas dotted with endemic tornillo, seepwillow, arrowweed, and bitterweed. The Rio Grande once flowed through this park, which now directly abuts the wall, America’s complicated, environmentally destructive, deeply politicized attempt to divide the nearly 2,000-mile-long USMexico borderlands. A tall fence abruptly separates the landscape into here (the United States) and there (Mexico), a disruptive force rending human and ecological interactions. As Gloria Anzaldua notes, “The US-Mexican border es una herida abierta (is an open wound) where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds.”31 Cultivo participants—rooted in Argentina, Jamaica, Mexico, Peru, Bolivia, Haiti, and Kenya—stood together at this barrier, many of us with family and history on both sides of this unceremonious fence. Among all the participants, A±BC’s founders stood in a profoundly familiar landscape. In 1999, as the Rio Bosque Wetlands began to be restored to a riparian area, Saúl Nava conducted the area’s first bird count. As we stood together in 2019, a multiplicity of his identities stood in a single map point: a young naturalist exploring a marginalized ecosystem, a scientist contributing to knowledge about that space, a mentor introducing others to the space and its history. The Rio Bosque, the US-Mexico border, and El Paso itself are contested, yet resurgent, landscapes. Its restoration is an acknowledgment of all the life-forms that call it home. For Saúl Nava and Stephanie Dowdy-Nava, creative exploration that celebrates these borderlands is a reclamation that synergizes with restoration efforts. Science is bound with identity as is landscape, but it is only a part of engaging with landscape. As Robin Wall Kimmerer, writer, botanist, and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation notes,

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“[l]istening in wild places, we witness conversation in a language not our own. I think now that it was a longing to comprehend this language I hear in the woods that led me to science, to learn over the years to speak fluent botany. Which should not, by the way, be mistaken for the language of plants.”32 This merging of worlds forms the cornerstone of Kimmerer’s work uniting traditional, indigenous, and scientific knowledge. In A±BC’s outreach puppet interventions, puppets become a conduit to science. Making and extending observations to understand organismal behavior and interactions are fundamental skills to ecology and field biology. Applied to local landscapes and experiences, these activities also hold space for community knowledge. STEM education scholar Justice Toshiba Walker enumerates pillars of science learning: innovation, occupation, civic, and personal.33 Shadow Ecologies is located adjacent to “civic” and “personal” within this framework as an inquiry toward science’s function in society (including ethics, human impacts, and societal interactions) and connectedness with scientific inquiry “designed to facilitate delight in STEM activities.”34 While Walker is referring to biodesign- and makerfocused education, making science shadow puppets that reflect local ecosystems benefits from the same analysis. In the following section, we describe several iterations of Shadow Ecologies through two lenses, first focusing on the project as public engagement and second on its educational outreach.

Shadow Ecologies as Public Engagement—Puppets in Nature Harvard Arboretum Art+Bioblitz (2019) Shortly after 2019’s Cultivo residency, A±BC introduced shadow puppets into their public engagement efforts. At Art+Bioblitz, A±BC led participants in a daytime exploration of urban ecology to collect and identify invertebrates at the Harvard University Arnold Arboretum, a 281-acre preserve in Boston. Using sweepnets, flipping rocks, and collecting by hand, people from childhood to late adulthood observed, identified, and creatively interpreted the creatures they found into shadow puppets. In previous years, these

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activities centered on insect classification, observational drawing, and visualizing evolutionary relationships by creating phylogenetic trees. Refocusing the activity to the creation of simplified invertebrate silhouettes used as shadow puppets eased drawing-related anxiety, a potential barrier to participation. Switching from drawing to puppet making also expanded observation beyond form. A study of a grasshopper now included close attention to movement and behavior, as well as its morphology. Puppets in hand, participants could mimic animal behaviors and free-play by casting shadows on tent walls backlit by the summer sun.

Biocriaturas en Panamá (2019) Shadow Ecologies continued as Biocriaturas: Titeres en Sombra (Biocreatures: Shadow Puppets), a public engagement event organized by A±BC at Panama City’s Biomuseo, a biodiversity museum celebrating the natural history of the Panamanian isthmus. Here, education and engagement components evolved as A±BC led a group of adult participants in their Tropical Field Studies of Art+Nature art-science residency and at the participatory Digital Naturalism Conference (DiNaCon) in Panama. At various field sites, this group of artists and naturalists created field drawings of local animals, including howler monkeys, sloths, tree frogs, centipedes, caimans, agoutis, kinkajous, and toucans (Figure 5). Observational drawing, in the form of natural history illustration and field sketches, has a long tradition within the study and dissemination of knowledge that continues in formal life science education today. The artists, though visitors to Panama, forged connections to local biota by making the drawings and subsequently transforming them into shadow puppet templates which they used as teaching tools and to inspire museumgoers to create their own puppets at the Biocriaturas event at the Biomuseo. While puppets themselves are agents of engagement and learning, they also catalyze transformation of roles in the groups of people who make them. These iterative transformations—of drawings into puppets and visiting artists into community educators— connected the artists, landscape, museum exhibits, museum visitors, and community members. Selected Titeres en Sombra from the Biocriaturas event were incorporated into a gallery show, “ART±BIO

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FIGURE 5  BioCriaturas en Panamá, Biomuseo, 2019. Photo courtesy of Saúl Nava, ART±BIO Collaborative.

Collaborative DiNaLab Exhibition” (2019), in Gamboa, Panama. Tropical Field Studies artists, conference participants, Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute fellows, Gamboan community members, and Panama City residents connected through shadow representations of Panama’s plants and animals.

Shadow Ecologies as Educational Outreach—Puppets in Collaboration with Teachers Shadow Ecologies engages learners of diverse backgrounds, simplifies complex scientific concepts, and helps participants make

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direct connections to their own identity and environment as they create art with personal meaning. Through Shadow Ecologies, students become teachers and experts. Field Studies artists in Panama created Biocriaturas to understand the local habitat and then used them to share what they had learned with the public. A±BC terms this disruption, in which students take on leadership roles in helping others learn, “multilayered learning.”

Outreach Week at Harvard Museum of Natural History (2019) A±BC continued to explore the role of shadow play in art-science outreach, with increasing attention to mentorship and classroom learning. In a third iteration of Shadow Ecologies at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, Art+Bio Outreach Week (A±BC’s Boston-area, weeklong series of art and biology themed public engagement events at schools and museums) invited local primary school teachers and their students to investigate plant and animal specimens from Harvard’s collections. In collaboration with MassArt’s BioMedia Lab—a science initiative led by Saúl Nava merging biological inquiry, Art+Science exploration, and public engagement—A±BC mentored college art students studying science communication to develop and present science-inspired art-making activities, including creating collaged insect comics, botanical pop-up zines, and animal shadow puppets. As learners, BioMedia Lab students created templates for shadow puppet assembly, focusing on articulation, morphology, and skeletal anatomy. Then, as new experts, they led the activity for museum visitors, who observed and then drew an organism’s skeleton on the cut-paper silhouettes. Completed shadow puppets were manipulated and photographed next to corresponding specimens to feature their articulation and/or skeletal features. These silhouettes were also used to create stop motion animations that demonstrated animal movements. A shadow armadillo curled up into a ball. A rhinoceros beetle snapped its mandible to meet its formidable horn. The animations were shared on social media, providing another opportunity for ecological shadow play to reach a broader audience.

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School Visits with a Boston Public School (2019–20) As Shadow Ecologies evolved, A±BC aimed to situate shadow puppets in art and science classrooms. A±BC regularly visits schools in underserved communities. Viewed as collaborations with classroom teachers, the visits complement curriculum and broaden participation and accessibility in art and science. Here, we detail how college art students facilitated Shadow Ecologies activities for over fifty elementary school students over two semesters through A±BC’s continued mentorship of the MassArt BioMedia Lab. These activities engaged science classes at a Title I Boston Public School, where in 2019, 80 percent of the students were described as economically disadvantaged, 26 percent were English Language Learners (ELL), and only 2.5 percent identified as white.35 As with the Biocriaturas and Outreach Week, A±BC aimed to erase lines between teachers and learners, empowering students to learn by teaching and thereby undermining a traditional deficit model of science outreach toward a “vibrant symbiosis,” as described by Lindsey E. Lopes and colleagues.36 For example, elementary school student participants may observe and mimic animal behaviors missed by instructors. In October 2019, the adaptations and displays of Birds-of-Paradise formed the basis of an activity for second-grade learners. In February 2020, fifth graders explored predator-prey relationships in various habitats. Though these activities connected with existing curricula rather than local environments, they remained an important intervention for removing classroom barriers. A significant portion of the student body are ELL students. Shadow Ecologies curricula reduced language barriers by demonstrating activities, sharing scientific information visually (via photos and videos), and facilitating the creation of dialogue-free performances that focused on animal communication (Figure 6).​ Thus, the lessons became more accessible for ELL students, as did the student-created puppet performances.37 In the essay “Teaching New Worlds/New Words,” bell hooks argues that decolonization of language is an essential part of resisting oppression.38 hooks also describes the self-erasure that occurs for many underrepresented students as they enter

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FIGURE 6  Boston Public School visit, 2019. Photo courtesy of Saúl Nava, ART±BIO Collaborative.

academia.39 These observations are reflected in recent work calling for alternative spaces and stories which foster intersectionality and inclusivity in science.40 Science learning environments and methods that resist the deficit model and embrace interdisciplinary processes serve to “erase the implied boundaries between scientific and nonscientific meaningful others . . . offering the tools to productively exist in central STEM spaces like classrooms and departments.”41 #VanguardSTEM is one such digital community that argues for the centering of intersectional STEM identities,42 fundamental to which is including recognition of oneself as a “STEM person,” and ultimately, “yes and” to perceive oneself as a STEM person alongside the simultaneous identities that make a whole person.43 The works created during A±BC’s Shadow Ecologies outreach projects make space for participants to create and tell their own STEM and STEM-adjacent stories.

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A±BC’s multilayered mentoring of Shadow Ecologies resulted in BioMedia Lab art students leading classroom activities and learning behavioral ecology as they guided younger learners through the creation and performance of shadow puppets. This flows into the New London Group’s work on multiliteracies, teaching to “reflect and promote social change,” part of which is expanding the definition of literacy “from language to the broader concept of ‘semiotic activities,’ in which organized meaning is analyzed in nonverbal activities like play.”44 Luis Camnitzer furthers this argument toward upending the hegemony of pedagogy, advocating for nonhierarchical, inquiry-based explorations and open communication as a conduit for learning.45 A±BC uses shadow puppets as a multilayered teaching tool wherein learners teach, teachers learn, and marginalized narratives are centered. Learners (like college art students, Field Studies participants, or community members) experience, observe, and interpret nature first-hand and make art about it that has a personal connection. Then, they share their new learned experiences with others (K-12 students or museumgoers), who are in turn also learning novel scientific concepts and making art with personal connections about both local and non-endemic animals and habitats. Finally, participants share those art objects and experiences with a new audience either virtually (as the animations) or in person (as with the DiNaCon exhibition or a performance).

Conclusion Shadow puppets are flat silhouettes, and yet they represent an unflattening of science reflected in informal science learning.46 In focusing on essentials of natural history or animal morphology, A±BC educators introduce science concepts as narrative, movement, and play. Biological and ecological processes are rooted in time and suited to the time-based medium of performance. Through creating and performing with the puppet, a participant is challenged to go beyond basic information and bring themselves into the performance; they embellish and imagine movements and actions that fit the parameters of the animal’s behavior or habitat, which becomes especially powerful if that participant or environment has been marginalized. Fostering empathy with the

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earth is a strong entry point into the study of local ecosystems or science-art activism.47 While deeply personal, performing through a puppet avatar offers the participant a safe space or counterspace for engagement, intersecting science and theatre as ways of knowing. The shadows that danced in the Chihuahuan Desert in the Cultivo Field Residency have grown and continue to grow. Estamos cultivando. We are cultivating. The seedling of an idea translated through Armando de la Torre’s participatory teaching has taken root, extending tendrils that transcend borders and broaden participation in both art and science. Estamos cultivando. We are cultivating—as shadow puppets dance, we also dance—and we are mentoring, performing, and making. Shadow Ecologies sprout among many such Cultivo seedlings. Shadow Ecologies as science engagement represents a through line from analysis to creation to performance, a form of active learning that engages the whole body and imagination. The shadows are not re-presenting, they are representing.

Notes 1 A metanalysis of “draw a scientist” studies shows measurable changes toward gender parity in children’s perception of what a scientist looks like, though today 73 percent of those drawings still depict scientists as male. See Katie Langin, “What Does a Scientist Look like? Children Are Drawing Women More than Ever Before,” Science, March 20, 2018; David I. Miller, Kyle M. Nolla, Alice H. Eagly, and David H. Uttal, “The Development of Children’s Gender-Science Stereotypes: A Meta-Analysis of 5 Decades of U.S. Draw-a-Scientist Studies,” Child Development 89, no. 6 (2018): 1943–55. Efforts like #IAmAScientist and #IfThenSheCan highlight diverse STEM practitioners to model the idea that there is no one way to be a scientist. 2 In this volume, see Raquell M. Holmes, “Cultivating Ensembles: A Personal Reflection on Creating Cultural Transformation through New Performances of Science.” 3 John Travis, “Watch the Winner of This Year’s ‘Dance Your Ph.D.’ Contest,” Science (2020). 4 Explore shows on the website, The Story Collider: True, Personal Stories about Science, www​.storycollider​.org.

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5 Michael Carklin, “Theater and Science as Social Intervention,” in The Cambridge Companion to Theatre and Science, ed. Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). 6 For two diverse examples: one using opera to learn about the cosmos and the other a conduit to the properties of shadow, see Irma Smegen and Oded Ben-Horin, Inquiry-Based Learning—A Guidebook to Writing a Science Opera (Leiden: Brill, 2020) and Theresa Sotto and Amy Heathcott, “The Science of Shadow Puppets: How Is Light Reflected, Absorbed, or Transmitted through an Object?” Kennedy Center Educational Materials (2021), www​ .kennedy​-center​.org. 7 Patrick Goymer, “Evolutionary Puppets,” Nature Ecology & Evolution 2, no. 12 (2018): 1834–35. 8 Johanna Kurscheid, Dan Bendrups, Joko Susilo, Courtney Williams, Salvador Amaral, Budi Laksono, Donald Stewart, and Darren Grey, “Shadow Puppets and Neglected Diseases: Evaluating a Health Promotion Performance in Rural Indonesia,” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 15, no. 9 (2018). 9 Daniel A. Colón-Ramos, “The Need to Connect: On the Cell Biology of Synapses, Behaviors, and Networks in Science,” Molecular Biology of the Cell 27, no. 21 (2016): 3203–7. 10 bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, 1st ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994); Cynthia L. Bejarano and Jeffrey P. Shepherd, “Reflections from the U.S.– Mexico Borderlands on a ‘Border-Rooted’ Paradigm in Higher Education,” Ethnicities 18, no. 2 (2018): 277–94; Étienne WengerTrayner, Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 11 Lauretta Bender and Adolf G. Woltmann, “The Use of Puppet Shows as a Psychotherapeutic Method for Behavior Problems in Children,” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 6, no. 3 (July 1936): 341–54. 12 Cecilia Cackley, “Out of the Shadows: Immigrant Stories through Puppetry,” Smithsonian Folklife Festival, Smithsonian Institute, June 14, 2016, https://festival​.si​.edu. 13 Peter Schumann, Radicality of the Puppet Theater (Glover, VT: Bread and Puppet, 1990), 5. 14 See Tarja Kröger, “Puppet as a Pedagogical Tool: A Literature Review,” International Electronic Journal of Elementary Education

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11, no. 4 (2019): 393–401; Josef De Beer, Neal Petersen, and Sanette Brits, “The Use of Puppetry and Drama in the Biology Classroom,” American Biology Teacher 80, no. 3 (2018): 175–81. 15 Stephen Kaplin, “The Eye of Light,” in Routledge Companion to Puppetry and Material Performance, ed. Dassi Posner, Claudia Orenstein, and John Bell (New York: Routledge, 2014), 91. 16 David Wisniewski and Donna Wisniewski, Worlds of Shadow: Teaching with Shadow Puppetry (Englewood, CO: Teacher Ideas Press, 1997). 17 Claudia Orenstein, “A Puppet Moment,” in The Routledge Companion to Puppetry and Material Performance, 2. 18 David Dudley, “Bread and Puppet Theater’s Half-Century Parade of Joy, Anger, Anarchy, and Purpose,” American Theater, December 1, 2013, www​.americantheatre​.org. Bread and Puppet continues to create performances concerned with the US-Mexico border, in addition to the participatory events conducted in Mexico and throughout Central America since the 1980s. See Silvia Isabel Gámez, “El Arte Debe Tener Una Intención Política”; Peter Schumann Del Legendario Grupo, “Bread & Puppet Se Encuentra En México Invitado Por La Casa Del Teatro Para Impartir Una Taller En Xico, Veracruz, Donde Hará Una Representación Del Día de Muertos,” Reforma (Ciudad de Mexico, Distrito Federal, Mexico), October 29, 1996; Susan Green, Bread and Puppet Stories of Struggle and Faith from Central America (New York: Backcountry Publications, W.W. Norton and Co., 1985); “Insurrection Mass at Goddard College,” Bread and Puppet, July 2018, https://breadandpuppet​.org. 19 For more about WSI, see Baz Kershaw, “Fragmentation in the 1990s?: The celebratory performance of John Fox and Welfare State International,” in The Politics of Performance: Radical Theatre as Cultural Intervention, ed. Baz Kershaw (London: Routledge, 1992): 218–54; and the archival website Welfare State International, www​ .welfare​-state​.org. 20 Other socially engaged puppetry organizations include In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre, https://hobt​.org; SpiralQ, www​.spiralq​.org; Wisefool Community Arts (closed) and its affiliate Wise Fool New Mexico, https://wisefoolnewmexico​.org. For more about social circus, see The Art of Collectivity: Social Circus and the Cultural Politics of a Post-Neoliberal Vision, ed. Jennifer Beth Spiegel and Benjamin Ortiz Choukroun (Montreal & Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2019).

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21 Joe Yorty and Allie Mundt, “Armando de la Torre At Best Practice— October 19, 2019 KPBS,” KPBS Public Media, 2019, https://www​ .kpbs​.org. 22 San Diego Art Institute, “Who Are We Anyways: Armando de la Torre,” San Diego Art Institute Exhibition Press Release, 2017, https://www​.sandiego​-art​.org. 23 Our chief concern is with trauma-informed teaching, a set of classroom strategies to engage learners who have experienced adverse life events. See Maura Mcinerney and Amy W. Mcklindon, “Unlocking the Door to Learning: Trauma-Informed Classrooms and Transformational Schools,” Education Law Center, 2014. 24 “[N]o actor, robot, or virtual avatar can replace the singular spectacle of the body-in-action of the performance artist,” Guillermo GómezPeña, “In Defense of Performance Art,” Pocha Texts, http://www​ .pochanostra​.com​/antes​/jazz​_pocha2​/mainpages​/in​_defense​.htm. 25 De la Torre’s work also includes social criticism through performance art. Winter Wonderland (2013) included both installation and performance in a shopping mall on Black Friday as a critique of holiday-driven consumerism. See Angela Carone, “Artwork in Carlsbad Mall Temporarily Halted by Management,” KPBS, December 6, 2013, https://www​.kpbs​.org. 26 Leticia Robles-Moreno, “‘Please, Don’t Discover Me!’ On The Year of the White Bear,” Walker: Sightlines, July 19, 2018, www​.walker​.org. For video framing of this live performance series, see Paula Heredia, Coco Fusco, and Guillermo Gómez-Peña, The Couple in the Cage: A Gautinaui Odyssey (New York: Third World Newsreel, 1993). 27 Coco Fusco, “The Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo: Interview with Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Emily Hicks,” The Nation 258, no. 17 (1989): 602. 28 Jim Lasko, “The Third Thing,” in The Routledge Companion, 376. 29 Claire Bishop, “Introduction/Viewers as Producers,” in Participation, Whitechapel Documents of Contemporary Art, ed. Claire Bishop (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 10. For more on the “third term” that inspired Lasko, see Claire Bishop, “Participation and Spectacle: Where Are We Now?” in Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art from 1991–2011, ed. Nato Thompson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 45. 30 For more on race and museum studies, see Chris Taylor, “From Systemic Exclusion to Systemic Inclusion: A Critical Look at Museums,” Journal of Museum Education 42, no. 2 (2017): 155–62;

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Wendy Ng, Syrus Marcus Ware, and Alyssa Greenberg, “Activating Diversity and Inclusion: A Blueprint for Museum Educators as Allies and Change Makers,” Journal of Museum Education 42, no. 2 (2017): 142–54; and Marit Dewhurst and Keonna Hendrick, Journal of Museum Education (2017): 102–7. 31 Anzalduá, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Fourth Edition (1987; San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2012), 3. 32 Robin Wall Kimmerer, “Learning the Grammar of Animacy,” in Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity, and the Natural World, ed. Alison Deming and Lauret Savoy (Minneapolis: Milkweed Press, 2011), 167–8. 33 Justice Toshiba Walker, “Biodesign Education: For What, Whom, and How?” Biodesigned 5 (2021). 34 Ibid. 35 For more on the Title I program and its application throughout the Boston Public School system, see “Grants and External Funding,” Boston Public Schools, www​.bostonpublicschools​.org. 36 Lindsey E. Lopes, Sarah J. Waldis, Stephanie M. Terrell, Kristin A. Lindgren, and Louise K. Charkoudian, “Vibrant Symbiosis: Achieving Reciprocal Science Outreach through Biological Art,” PLOS Biology 16, no. 11 (2018). 37 As in Cackley’s Saudade, “Out of the Shadows,” discussed earlier. 38 hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 173. 39 Ibid., 177–90. 40 Jedidah C. Isler, Natasha V. Berryman, Anicca Harriot, Chrystelle L. Vilfranc, Léolène J. Carrington, and Danielle N. Lee, “Defining the Flow—Using an Intersectional Scientific Methodology to Construct a Vanguard STEM Hyperspace,” Genealogy 5, no. 1 (2021): 8; Maria Ong, Janet M. Smith, and Lily T. Ko, “Counterspaces for Women of Color in STEM Higher Education: Marginal and Central Spaces for Persistence and Success,” Journal of Research in Science Teaching 55, no. 2 (2018): 206–45. 41 Isler et al., 5. 42 Vanguard: Conversations with Women of Color in STEM, www​ .vanguardstem​.com. 43 Isler et al., 17. 44 Luis Camnitzer, “ALPHABETIZATION, Part II: Hegemonic Language and Arbitrary Order,” E-Flux Journal no. 10 (2009): 89.

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45 Ibid. 46 See Nick Sousanis, Unflattening (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015) and National Research Council, Learning Science in Informal Environments, Learning Science in Informal Environments (National Academies Press, 2009). 47 Alison Dell and Mary Mattingly, “Soil Narratives: Toward a Symbiotic Art-Science Activisim,” Public Art Dialogue 9, no. 2 (2019): 166–80.

Creative Interlude Science Poetry Kate Gillespie

Absence Enter the Anechoic chamber Silence yourself for thought Close your eyes Memory Invigoration Focused Enlightenment Now, it is still Begin to listen to yourself Internal Eternal Heartbeat Beat, beat Beat, beat Perceptional amplification Precedes Auditory biological fluidity, Muscular contractions Blood drains into capillary backwaters Swooshing and Seeping from crevices Of skin and bone Beat, beat Beat, beat Touch the vibration

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Stalled by Tactile ear severing Brain misfires into static Beat, beat, beat Taste the frequencies, Adaptation reflex rewinds Rewinds Resets, beat Resets, beat Resets, beat fatal Earworm muzak You scream Try to escape into sight Motion after effects had begun The walls flow slowly upwards Field of view shrinks You see points of contrast You see the luminance You see the patterns And they see you Beat . . . Beat . . . Beat . . . Cardiac timepiece skips Measure The countdown Of insanity

Richard Has Gone Fishing Knocked on my creek Heard the sound of wood Steel made from trout Shack of tin reddish, like a hat under the guillotine

CREATIVE INTERLUDE I: SCIENCE POETRY

Water spigot, like a saint’s finger spills out Kool-Aid a discolored portion of imagination The child eyed rats eat dead companions like popcorn There was some good fishing Beside the Cobra Lily pads It’s dead, but dancing Wino flea circuses Are captured from clever Siamese cat’s tails Let’s drop by the graveyard creek sit on the stale bread Markers for the poor, marble for the rich Then cast a line up into the sky Towards the evening

Bioengineered Life Lungs organs to engineer extracellular matrix architecture Nichols et al. challenges engraftment clinically

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Nanoparticle growth factors pig lung scaffolds And showed collateral circulation transplanted Developed the microbiomes Respiratory after transplant It’s a considerable advance field possibility.

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4 Lecture on Heads and Lectures with Skulls— Performance Transmutations Marlis Schweitzer

This chapter is a thought experiment—an essai—an attempt to tug at some dangling historical threads. I fear this chapter may be too speculative, that the evidence I present here is insufficient or partial—too prone to confirmation bias and the traits of the “awful archive,” which uses the accumulation of faulty evidence to prop up specious theories.1 But in the spirit of the essai, I proceed. Let’s begin with two images created eighty-seven years apart (Figure 7). 1765. A scene from George Stevens’s Lecture on Heads. An elegantly dressed man in a wig and waistcoat stands before an audience. In one hand, he holds the head of a helmeted figure. This is not the actual head of another human being but rather the sculpted head of Alexander the Great. Behind Alexander and on two long tables, an assemblage of twenty other heads mounted on wooden or plaster blocks gaze out at a row of bewigged spectators and beyond them to the viewer. These heads represent a diverse company of men and women of varying ages and dispositions. Many wear hats or wigs that offer clues to their social status. But for the blocks and the arrangement of the heads across two tables, they might be audience members themselves (Figure 8).2

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FIGURE 7  “A Representation of the several humerous Heads, exhibited in the Lecture on Heads: etched in Caricatura.” Great Britain. Courtesy: © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

1852. A phrenology lecture in Leipzig. An elegantly dressed man stands on a raised platform behind two tiered tables. He rests his right hand gently atop a bald head. This is not the actual head of another human being but rather the sculpted head of a phrenological model covered in lines demarcating the many “organs” of the mind. Beneath the model on the lower table an assemblage of twenty or more other block-mounted heads gaze out at an audience of white men and women. Many of these heads appear lifelike, with distinctive facial expressions. But for their mounts and arrangement on the table, they might be audience members themselves.3 It is impossible to ignore Figure 8’s scenographic echo of Figure 7: from the elevation of the lecturer/solo performer and his authoritative stance to the central placement of the twin tables to the arrangement of the heads. What is the significance, if any, of these striking similarities? What evidence do they offer of the evolving

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FIGURE 8  Dr. Gustav Schere lectures on phrenology at the Buchhandlerdorfe, Leipzig, 1852. Chronicle/Alamy Stock Photo.

relationship between theatrical and scientific performance? Did phrenologists model their lectures on Stevens’s solo performance or did other factors inform the apparent remediation of Lecture on Heads for phrenological ends? Many questions arise—but perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself, so let’s return to the play. Lecture on Heads debuted in April 1764 in London on the stage of the Little Haymarket Theatre. Working within the genre of the academic lecture, George Stevens (playing himself) introduced audiences to a series of heads made of wood and papier-mâché, each of which represented a unique character type: busybody, fop, jockey, lady of fashion, Frenchman, “Cherokee chief,”4 Methodist Parson, and so on. Many of these heads are visible in Figure 7 and presumably remained in view for the duration of the performance. Despite or perhaps because of its simplicity, the Lecture was, in the words of theatre historian Gerald Kahan, an “instantaneous and resounding success.”5 Following twelve performances in London, Stevens’s lecture (if not the man himself) traveled swiftly throughout the English-speaking world, appearing in India, Nova Scotia, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Jamaica, among other

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locales.6 In fact, the Lecture remained an Anglo-American audience favorite for the rest of the century, giving rise to numerous parodies, adaptations, and other textual appropriations.7 The Lecture’s structural flexibility and bare-bones scenography—a long table, green tablecloth, and company of heads—offer some explanation for its enduring popularity, transportability across oceans, and susceptibility to adaptation or theft by others. The play could also be modified to suit various performance environments, from a large stage to a small salon, town hall, or lecture room.8 Although one historian observes that by the 1790s, “the never-dying” Lecture was fading fast, Kahan’s detailed performance calendar shows that the play continued to circulate in the United States as late as 1820.9 Phrenology’s rise coincided with the Lecture’s gradual decline. As a new science of the mind, phrenology gained tremendous popularity with Anglo-American and European audiences, thanks to Scottish phrenologist George Combe, whose 1828 book The Constitution of Man became one the most widely read publications of the period. Combe’s ideas derived from the earlier work of Franz Joseph Gall, a Viennese physician, and his student J. G. Spurzheim, who developed a method for “compar[ing] cerebral development with the manifestations of mental power, for the purpose of discovering the functions of the brain, and the organs of the mind.”10 Through close analysis of human remains and living subjects, Gall and Spurzheim identified correspondences between the size and shape of an individual’s brain and that individual’s behavioral tendencies. They grouped each of the brain’s faculties into two Orders and six Genera for a total of thirty-three separate faculties, each tied to a specific “organ” or section of the brain.11 These ranged from Order 1 feelings of Philoprogenitiveness (love of offspring), Self-Esteem, and Benevolence to Order 2 intellectual faculties, which included the senses, perceptive faculties, and faculties related to external objects (such as Time, Tune, Language).12 Through the detailed analysis of many different brains, phrenologists theorized that an individual with an enlarged “Ideality” organ, “which prompts to embellishment and splendid conceptions,”13 was artistically inclined, just as an individual with an enlarged “Destructiveness” organ would feel a greater desire for revenge and thus be more prone to acts of violence.14 In addition to publishing books and articles, phrenologists like Combe took to the lecture stage to appeal to a nonspecialist

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(predominantly white) middle-class audience. This was not unusual; by the early nineteenth century, scientific lecturing had become a popular performance genre in its own right and lectures by doctors and other medical professionals featured dissections and the display of human remains—modifying earlier forms of anatomy theatre for general public consumption.15 What most distinguished phrenologists from their fellow lecturers, however, was their presentation of a diverse array of busts, skulls, and casts. Standing alone on a raised stage, Combe spoke about the mysteries of human existence through direct interaction with human remains, blending education with entertainment in the interests of affirming phrenology’s value. Theatre and performance historians have been understandably reluctant to engage with the history of phrenology given its association with later forms of scientific racism.16 There is no denying that phrenologists (and their imitators) promoted deeply troubling ideas about human difference.17 Take Combe’s 1830 publication A System of Phrenology, which includes a chapter on “National Character and Development of Brain,” with an accompanying chart comparing the measurements of “national skulls” from Brazil, Switzerland, the Caribbean, India, Africa, and North America.18 Like many of his peers, Combe did not question the superiority of “Caucasians” over other racialized groups, treating them as the “norm” against which they measured all other “nations.”19 For the most part, his theorizing stopped short of the vicious arguments advanced by craniologists such as Samuel George Morton, who argued that cranial size was both a distinguishing feature of racial difference and an indicator of intelligence and promoted a racial hierarchy that positioned “Caucasians” at the top with Asian, Indigenous, and African groups below.20 Historian Britt Rusert notes that phrenology’s emphasis on self-transformation and the relative ease with which an individual could learn the skills of phrenological analysis made it seem “radically inclusive” and democratic to some African American thinkers.21 Nevertheless, Combe’s friendship with Morton, not to mention his contribution of an essay to the latter’s Crania Americana (1839), “did much to tether phrenology to craniology, and by association, to the history of scientific racism.”22 Moreover, while later scientists rejected phrenology and its methods,23 phrenological ideas about racial hierarchies and other forms of human difference continue to percolate in popular culture throughout the nineteenth century, especially in North America.24

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It is therefore incumbent upon historians grappling with the long shadows of scientific racism to examine phrenology’s entanglement with theatre and performance. With this broader goal in mind, let’s now return to one of the questions posed earlier: Did phrenologists model their lectures after Stevens’s solo performance or did other factors affect their apparent remediation of Lecture on Heads? The cheeky, if inelegant, answer is yes and yes. In its dramatic structure, its elevation of the lecturer-expert, and its use of “props” resembling human heads, Lecture on Heads is an obvious precursor to later phrenological lectures. George Combe’s personal life offers additional, albeit circumstantial, evidence: he was a regular theatregoer, an avid fan of the neoclassical acting of Sarah Siddons and John Philip Kemble and a friend of the actress Fanny Kemble. In 1833 he married Fanny’s cousin Cecilia, who also happened to be Sarah Siddons’s daughter.25 Though none of these details offer proof, they make it difficult to imagine that Combe did not cross paths with the Lecture at some point in his theatrical travels.26 But for all of this, I am not particularly interested in proving where, when, or even if Combe saw Lecture on Heads. It is not the persistence of the form itself that fascinates me—indeed, as I suggest further, Stevens’s lecture was itself a clever remediation of other genres. The more pressing question is how and why Combe and his fellow phrenologists adapted aspects of the Lecture to serve their own ends. Ultimately, this chapter offers a textbook example of intermediality in performance—of the blurring or softening of boundaries between a particular performance genre and its reshaping into something new.27 Whereas Stevens used the lecture to satirize contemporary preoccupations with class and the public performance of character, Combe used similar dramaturgical and scenographic elements to affirm phrenology’s importance—most notably its ability to explain both individual human behavior and distinctions between racialized groups. Whereas Stevens used his sculpted heads to trade in caricature and stereotype, Combe presented skulls and casts to demonstrate that every human being possessed unique and discernible attributes—with the underlying message that some humans were more advanced than others. Thus, my goal in this chapter is to call attention to phrenology’s debt to Stevens and thereby acknowledge one way that theatre participated in the popularization and dissemination of scientific racism.

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Lecture on Heads Lecture on Heads is a dynamic blend or remediation of eighteenthcentury performance forms, including virtuoso satire, waxwork exhibition, puppet show, and academic lecture. “Remediation,” write Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, is the “formal logic by which new media refashion prior media forms.”28 Although it may seem bizarre to describe an eighteenth-century solo performance as “new media,” Stevens’s skillful mixing of the old and the new, the familiar and the strange, reflected the expansiveness of his professional experiences as an actor, playwright, essayist, publisher, novelist, and songwriter. As an actor, he developed a broad repertoire of supporting character roles and played in theatres throughout Britain, including several seasons at both Covent Garden and Drury Lane, where he performed alongside such luminaries as David Garrick. While in London, Stevens also ventured into the world of publishing with an unsuccessful stint as the editor of The Beauties of All the Magazines Selected, a digest-style periodical. When the periodical failed, Stevens pivoted quickly, repurposing his mini-essays, character studies, and other satirical writing into a solo performance text: Lecture on Heads.29 At 12:30 p.m. on April 30, 1764, Stevens introduced the Lecture to audiences at the Little Haymarket Theatre. According to newspaper notices, those attending the event encountered A CAPUT-all Exhibition, with proper Apparatus, of Antique and Modern Sculptures, Bronzes, Pictures, &c. &c. With Observations on the LEXONICAL and PHYZICAL CONSEQUENCE OF WIGS; wherein a Full-bottom Oration, and SECUNDUM ARTEM dissertation, will be CARICATURED, HORNS will be accounted for AB ORIGINE: And the Genealogical Table of NOBODY, properly explained. To conclude with a Dissection of THREE HEADS Viz. 1st, a STOCKJOBBER’s; 2d, An AUTHOR’s; 3d, A CRITIC’s. Attempted by G. STEVENS N.B. No HEAD FOR POLITICS. Gallery 2s. Pit 3s. Boxes 4s.30 Here, the ample use of puns, pseudo-academic language, and Latin phrases prepares audiences for an afternoon of lighthearted parody, in keeping with the “anti-virtuoso satiric discourse” that defined many early eighteenth-century plays about scientists. Theatre

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historian Al Coppola traces this discourse back to Thomas Shadwell’s 1676 play The Virtuoso, which presents a “gentleman-scientist” as a foolish, overconfident figure “whose recondite dabbling in natural philosophy seemed to produce nothing of enduring truth or solid use.”31 Although by the mid-eighteenth century, dramatists had begun to represent scientists in a more positive light, “virtuoso satire,” that is, the practice of swiping at scientists and the medical profession, remained a “stock-in-trade of the theater,” with jokes and other parodic material that “were both entirely predictable and reliably evergreen.”32 While several of Stevens’s character creations, notably the Quack-Doctor, draw on the tropes of virtuoso satire, the Lecture departs from conventional dramatic fare in its embrace of the exhibition format. “I must declare I never met with more original Humour and Novelty in any one Exhibition than there is in the Lecture upon Heads, now exhibiting at the Hay-Market,” a writer for the Public Advertiser enthused.33 Outside the theatre, eighteenth-century audiences consumed exhibitions of scientific innovation and technological wonder in private display rooms. Many of these exhibitions centered around the fantastical display of “humans transformed into commodified and consumable objects”—everything from puppets and dolls to waxworks and automata.34 For literary scholar Julie Park, the popularity of such spectacles exemplifies “the period’s fascination with ‘man-made’ versions of the human, as well as objects made to look like the human.”35 In 1786, for example, Mrs. Salmon’s Waxworks, located on Fleet Street, invited “The Naturalist, Artist, and Connoisseur” to attend a “most Wonderful, Curious, and Ingenious Exhibition” of waxworks and “animated figures.”36 Although the original Mrs. Salmon had died in 1760, the waxworks bearing her name continued to attract audiences well into the nineteenth century with the introduction of “new” presses of the famous and the infamous.37 Between 9:00 a.m. and 10:00 p.m., paying customers strolled through a series of connected rooms where they could observe over 200 life-sized figures representing historical figures, royalty, folklore characters, and rogue adventurers.38 Such exhibitions appealed to the public by fusing spectacular novelty with reassuring familiarity. Audiences may not have understood how the proprietors at Mrs. Salmon’s achieved their miraculous effects, but they took pleasure in recognizing who their wax figures doubled.

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Like those operating behind the scenes at Mrs. Salmon’s, Stevens transmuted the human form into “commodified and consumable objects.” Yet, whereas the proprietors of Mrs. Salmon’s waxworks invited audiences to meander at will through a series of rooms, Stevens held his audience in place, positioning himself at the center of the spectacle with his wooden and papier-mâché heads arranged behind him. Mrs. Salmon’s waxworks delighted on their own accord, but Stevens’s Lecture heads required his animating force; without him, they were simply objects. And whereas exhibitors of waxworks “generate[d] fascination through a heightened effect of verisimilitude,”39 inviting audiences to marvel at their lifelike creations, Stevens opened his lecture by calling attention to the materiality of the heads: “Some of these heads are manufactured in wood, and others in pasteboard, to denote, that there are not only Blockheads, but Paper Sculls [sic].”40 Images of the Lecture in performance nevertheless suggest that Stevens sought a degree of verisimilitude: the heads are roughly the same size as an actual human head, with lifelike facial features, wigs, and characterappropriate costume elements such as a hat, collar, jewelry, or bodice. In some cases, Stevens further blurred the boundary between “Blockheads,” “Paper Sculls,” and human animator by donning the clothing, wigs, and dispositions of certain characters himself (e.g., Poet, Quack-Doctor, Methodist Parson), briefly rendering wood and pasteboard in flesh.41 Stevens’s Lecture nods to another example of the era’s “fascination with ‘man-made’ versions of the human”: the puppet show. Puppet shows enjoyed incredible popularity throughout the eighteenth century, with adults as well as children, so much so that theatre artists often migrated into puppetry when they were in need of employment.42 In the 1760s and into the 1770s, Stevens’s contemporary Samuel Foote created life-sized puppets, which he performed alongside on the stage of the Haymarket Theatre. Making the most of an unfortunate accident that had left him with a wooden leg, Foote drew playful equations between himself and his puppet creations, using the lecture persona to place himself at a literal and critical distance from the social types he was parodying.43 Stevens’s own adventures in puppetry were limited, though evidence suggests that he spent some time as an “interpreter” or narrator for puppet shows, tasked with introducing various puppet characters and filling in critical details to advance the narrative.44 Images of

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the act, including Figure 7, seem to indicate that Stevens’s heads were relatively static, more closely resembling busts or other sculpted objects than marionettes or puppets with movable mouths and limbs. As noted earlier, Stevens also used objects other than heads such as wigs or hats to make his satiric points.45 Yet in its deceptively simple dramatic structure, the Lecture on Heads shows signs of this earlier experience with puppetry. This can be observed, for example, in Stevens’s satirical interplay with the prop heads, which he introduced in sequence: This is one of those extraordinary personages called Conquerors. He was called Alexander the Great, from the great number of people his ambition had cut to pieces . . . . . . This is the head of a Quack-Doctor: a greater man-killer than either of the too. This head of the quack-doctor is exhibited to shew the weakness of Wisdom, and the strength of folly . . . . . . The ornaments of this head [the Cuckold], are not for what the wearer has done; on the contrary, he bears about with him the constant memorial of the faults of others, and is, by the ill-judging part of the world, condemned for crimes he could not commit, and the very commission of which constitute all his unhappiness.46 As these brief excerpts show, much of Lecture’s “Humour and Novelty” derived from Stevens’s use of puns and clever word play, his rapid transition between heads, and the way he encouraged audiences to associate each head’s character traits with its physical appearance. Moreover, the play’s flexible structure enabled Stevens (and his imitators) to respond swiftly to current events or the temperament of a specific audience by introducing new heads or retiring old ones. In addition to foregrounding Stevens’s comedic talents, the lecture format allowed him to slip through a loophole in the Licensing Act of 1737, which prohibited the production of plays in any venue other than London’s two licensed theatres, Covent Garden and Drury Lane. Stevens was not the first to exploit this legal ambiguity: Samuel Foote popularized the lecture as a mode of solo performance in 1747 when he premiered The Diversions of the Morning, “a series of imitations of metropolitan personalities.”47 By inviting audiences to gather with him for “a cup of tea” or a “dish of chocolate” and to

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observe his performance as though they had come for a social call, Foote upheld the letter, if not the spirit, of law.48 Stevens similarly framed the Lecture as an educational outing rather than a theatrical experience. In fact, Foote’s biographer John Bee asserts that Stevens modeled his Lecture on Foote’s 1748 piece “An Auction of Pictures,” in which Foote, in the guise of an auctioneer, introduced audiences to a daily-evolving series of satirical sketches drawn from real life.49 Yet whereas Foote was celebrated for his mimetic talents, which extended to cutting impersonations of real-world figures,50 Stevens tended to represent character types rather than recognizable individuals. These types included middle-class professionals like lawyers and doctors; religious figures like the Methodist and the Quaker; individuals defined by their marital status or lack thereof (the Cuckold, the Old Bachelor, the Old Maid, the New Married Lady), along with a series of unusual or extravagant types (the Jockey, Nobody, Somebody).51 Stevens’s tendency to feature character types makes his introduction of the head of a “Cherokee chief” in the opening moments of his lecture curious, if not surprising, given Londoners’ growing fascination with Indigenous peoples. In 1762, a delegation of Cherokee men visited London and “took in entertainments” at Haymarket Theatre, the same venue where the Lecture debuted.52 Stevens makes no explicit reference to the earlier Cherokee visitors, though his audience likely noticed a close resemblance between the head and widely circulated illustrations of the celebrated “Cherokee king,” the leader of the delegation also known as Ostenado or “Man Killer.”53 In presenting the man, Stevens leans hard into racial stereotypes of the bloodthirsty “Indian,” introducing the head as that of “Sachem-Swampus-Scalpo-Tomahauk;—He was a great hero, warrior, and man-killer. Lately.”54 Here, Stevens implies that the Cherokee chief has become something of a trophy on the Haymarket stage—the ideal noble savage. Yet in juxtaposing the Cherokee chief with Alexander the Great, Stevens also points to the racialized politics of history and the role of the interpreter/ historian: “this copper-complexioned hero wants nothing to make him as great as Alexander, but the rust of antiquity to varnish over his crimes, and the pens of writers to illustrate his actions.”55 The relationship Stevens describes between the racialized other and the writer/expert anticipates the rise of phrenology, which likewise positioned the lecturer as an interpreter of the lives and minds of Indigenous and other racialized peoples.

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Phrenological Lectures Throughout the Anglo-American world, nineteenth-century audiences clamored to watch science performed onstage.56 Between 1840 and 1860, for example, residents of New York City attended over 3,000 public lectures, while Bostonians chose from a diverse menu of twenty-six lecture “courses” in a single year (1846).57 These lectures varied widely in their subject matter, covering everything from politics and history to literature and religion.58 In their appeal to a broad audience base, scientists crafted lectures that balanced entertainment with the dissemination of knowledge, for example by displaying artifacts from the natural world or demonstrating the latest scientific experiments. Such lectures appealed directly to the sensory and the emotional, with the goal of instilling in audiences a sense of wonder and excitement, not unlike that experienced during a theatrical performance.59 At the same time, the scientific lecturer had to craft his performance in keeping with nineteenth-century models of bourgeois white masculinity,60 which emphasized restraint and self-control.61 “Command over his body was constitutive of the public man,” writes Iwyn Morus in his study of physics lecturers, “and was, consequently, a key to demonstrating mastery over nature through appropriate experimental performances.”62 In other words, the nineteenth-century white male lecturer walked a fine line between the spectacular and the educational, between emotional sensation and rational persuasion. If he leaned too heavily into the former, qualities associated with women and racialized others, he risked undermining his authority and credibility.63 George Combe was a skilled lecturer who could hold his audience’s attention for several hours at a time. Yet there was nothing flashy or spectacular about his approach. As Andrew Boardman, recording secretary of the Phrenological Society of New York, remarked in his introductory essay to a collection of Combe’s Lectures on Phrenology (1839), “Mr. Combe is not a splendid lecturer, nor a brilliant lecturer, nor a fascinating lecturer,” yet his “language is full and flowing; his style familiar, chaste, earnest, and unambitious.”64 Where other lecturers aimed to dazzle, Combe sought “to enlighten the understanding, elevate and purify the feelings” and therefore “all clap-trap artifices are elbowed off the stage.”65 These descriptions characterize Combe as a proto-realist who rejected bombastic vocalizations or overwrought emotional

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displays for calm, persuasive argumentation. But if Combe eschewed cheap tricks, he did not dispense with the theatrical altogether. His physical appearance, notably his shock of prematurely white hair and his tall, thin frame, combined with a stern manner of speaking, made him an imposing figure on the lecture stage. Combe also recognized the importance of monitoring his audience’s behavior and interest; during his tours of the United States between 1838 and 1840, he paused at the hour mark to give his listeners a chance to stretch, chat, and move around, before resuming his lecture.66 This break was not unlike the kind of intermission audiences expected at the theatre. Combe’s lectures skillfully deployed many of the techniques that had made George Stevens’s Lecture on Heads an international phenomenon. Just as Stevens had structured his lecture around the display of unique heads, Combe built his performance around the display of a series of casts, busts, and skulls. Such lectures were possible because Combe had access to a vast collection of phrenological objects through his affiliation with the Edinburgh Phrenological Society. In 1820, shortly after its founding, the society had undertaken an aggressive campaign to establish a permanent research collection of skulls, casts, and busts. “No adequate idea of the foundation of the science can be formed,” Combe later wrote, until phrenologists had inspected “a number of heads; and especially by contrasting instances of extreme development with others of extreme deficiency.”67 Through their personal and professional networks, the society acquired important donations, including the “Skull of Kapitapol, a Canadian Chief, presented by Henry Marshall, Esq. Surgeon to the Forces in Scotland,” the “Cast of the Head of an African; Ditto, of a Deaf, Dumb and Blind Individual,” as well as “Casts of Heads of Three Ladies” and the “Head of a Boy, with a large Cerebellum.”68 To supplement these donations, the society enlisted the expertise of the sculptor William Scoular, who created a series of casts modeled on the heads of important political figures and unique individuals, including Robert the Bruce.69 With the growth of the society’s collection, Combe moved away from giving lectures built around the live dissection of animal heads (typically an ox or sheep), a practice common to the scientific lecture stage and a feature of Spurzheim’s own lectures.70 Rather than stand on a lecture stage dressed in a bloody medical gown, he appeared as an elegantly

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dressed gentleman surrounded by a company of bleached skulls and casts (Figure 9).​ A less-than-flattering caricature created in 1826 and attributed to the English illustrator Henry Thomas Aiken71 offers a useful, if biased, view of a phrenological lecture. The tall, thin elegantly dressed central figure is probably a representation of George Combe, given the similarities in physique, the Scottish scientist’s status as phrenology’s leading representative at this time, and the appearance of Combe’s name on the spine of two books on the shelf directly in line with the phrenologist’s head. This figure has removed his curly wig (a possible wink at Combe’s own mane) to expose a baldhead covered in red bumps suggestive of excessive self-analysis or the phrenologist’s own physical abnormalities. On the table before him rests a placid-faced bust marked with the thirty-three organs of the brain. Other busts and skulls peer down from shelves. Many of these bear the names

FIGURE 9  A satirical caricature depicting a phrenology lecture, “Calves’ Heads and Brains of a Phrenological Lecture,” September 1826. Image attributed to Henry Thomas Aiken. Courtesy: Collection of the Center for the History of Medicine, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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of important artists, writers, and scholars—Shakespeare, Scott, Gall, Spurzheim, Tremain—while others represent individual (fictional) “faculties” of Pride, Sleepiness, Slyness, Consequence.72 An audience of men and women and at least one child look on in varying states of interest, wonder, bemusement, and suspicion. A man in the front row gazes into the eyes of a skull, while a woman in black looks on with an expression of surprise or suspicion. Behind this male spectator, a woman in a feather hat and two bald men touch their heads as if trying to apply the lessons of the lecture to their own bodies. Another man seated in the front row glances sternly down at two busts on the floor of the lecture hall, which stare back at him. So, too, do the other busts, skulls, and casts in the room, mirroring the gazes of the still-living audiences. Aiken’s keen attention to the details of the room spotlights the complex choreography of human remains on the phrenological lecture stage, showing how phrenologists asserted their authoritative status by littering the lecture area with skulls, casts, and busts. Here the excessiveness of the display—the sheer number of objects on the floor, table, and wall—testifies to the rigor and expansiveness of the phrenologist’s reach.73 This excess is also reminiscent of the cast of heads deployed by Stevens in Lecture on Heads. Note the (re)appearance of the table and the green/turquoise tablecloth, the lecturer’s authoritative position behind the table, and the fascinated gazes of the audience. Indeed, but for the particularities of the skulls and heads, there is little to distinguish this image of a phrenological lecture performance from the 1765 illustration of Stevens performing his Lecture on Heads. Other, more flattering, images of Combe repeat similar details—a draped table on which the life-size heads of known individuals await their turn, the figure of an elegantly dressed scientist holding a head, the juxtaposition of living human with objects or human remains. Combe’s published lectures offer further evidence of his debt to Stevens. This can be observed in the way Combe structured his lecture to direct audience attention toward the unique features of each skull, bust, or cast on display. When illustrating “Imitation,” for example, he used five busts to show how and where this organ manifested itself: This organ is situated on the sides of Benevolence. It gives a squareness to the frontal part of the coronal region, constituting

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a sort of table-land. . . . In this of Voltaire it is still more strikingly developed, rising, indeed, higher than Benevolence. This is the head of Clara Fisher, taken when she was eight or nine years old, and much distinguished. In it you see the same conformation. In this head of Jacob Jarvis it is small.74 Like Stevens, Combe moves quickly from one bust to another, pointing to the specific characteristics that distinguish each one. Unlike Stevens, however, Combe approaches the busts from a clinical vantage point, affirming the phrenologist’s ability to correlate behavioral tendencies and physical characteristics. Whereas the Lecture on Heads offered satirical, at times disparaging, commentary on recognizable social types in a way that allowed audiences to distance themselves from the subjects on display, Combe used busts, casts, and other specimens to teach audiences about the biological roots of human difference and to encourage them to apply phrenological techniques to better understand themselves and those around them. Combe refrained from preaching biological determinism, insisting that self-knowledge could enable an individual to improve or change their behavior. But later scientists, including craniologists like Samuel George Morton, pushed these ideas further, incorporating the display of casts, skulls, and other objects into their lectures to affirm white supremacist views of human difference. Sir Francis Galton’s experiments with composite photography to identify the biological “traits” of criminals and other deviants can also be traced back to Combe and Stevens’s analysis of distinctive human features.75 Here, then, is where theatre and performance historians must contend with this particular example of theatre’s complicity in the history of scientific racism. With Lecture on Heads George Stevens created an appealing, highly adaptive performance that phrenologists like George Combe remediated to spread the gospel of phrenology. Their lectures facilitated the widespread circulation of ideas rooted in scientific racism throughout the Anglo-American world—ideas that continue to bubble up today in popular psychology magazines, Reddit forums, and social media threads and inform insurance policies in high impact sports like football and hockey.76 Understanding the role of performance in the rapid spread and uptake of such ideas is a critical step in undoing centuries of violence, harm, and dehumanization.

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Notes 1 Jenny Rice, Awful Archives: Conspiracy Theory, Rhetoric, and Acts of Evidence (Columbus: Ohio State Press, 2020), 1–15. 2 Gerald Kahan, George Alexander Stevens and The Lecture on Heads (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1984), plate 7. 3 “Dr. Gustav Schere lectures on phrenology at the Buchhandlerdorfe, Leipzig.” Unnamed artist in Illustrirte Zeitung, March 13, 1852, 169. Mary Evans Picture Library, https://www​.maryevans​.com​/history​/ phrenology​-lecture​-1852​-10018234. 4 I discuss this head later. 5 Kahan, George Alexander Stevens, 29. 6 Ibid., 3. Kahan’s book includes a detailed production history with numerous excerpts from reviews and other accounts of the play. The Lecture first appeared in the United States at the Christ Church School House in February 1766 (111). Performances in New York, Boston, Charleston, South Carolina, and Portsmouth, New Hampshire, followed before the decade was over (111–29). The play’s flexibility meant that it could be adapted to halls, assembly rooms, and other performance spaces. 7 Circa 1819–20, the Black Dwarf (aka Jonathan Wooler), a popular political satirist, published A Political Lecture on Heads, alias Blockheads!!, which he claimed drew inspiration from “Craniological Inspection, After the Manner of Doctors Gall and Spurzheim.” Don Juan Asmodeus [pseudonym for Jonathan Wooler, aka The Black Dwarf], A Political Lecture on Heads, alias Blockheads!! (London: John Fairburn, 1819), 6. British Library. For more on Stevens’s response to imitators and pirated productions of his play, see Jane Wessel, “‘My Other Folks’ Heads: Reproducible Identities and Literary Property on the Eighteenth-Century Stage,” EighteenthCentury Studies 53, no. 2 (2020): 279–97. 8 Kahan, George Alexander Stevens, ii. 9 Kurt L. Garrett, “Palliative for Players: The Lecture on Heads,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 103, no. 2 (April 1979): 166–76; Kahan, George Alexander Stevens, 208–10. 10 George Combe, Elements of Phrenology (Edinburgh: John Anderson Jr., 1824), 13–14. 11 For a full discussion of all thirty-three organs, see Combe, Elements of Phrenology. On the history of phrenology, see John B. Davies, Phrenology: Fad and Science, A 19th-Century American Crusade (New

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Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1955 [1971]); Charles Colbert, A Measure of Perfection: Phrenology and the Fine Arts in America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); and John van Wyhe, Phrenology and the Origins of Victorian Scientific Naturalism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). 12 Combe, Elements of Phrenology, 35. Some of the material in this paragraph also appears in Schweitzer, “Casting Clara Fisher: Phrenology, Protean Farce, and the ‘Astonishing’ Career of a Child Actress,” Theatre Survey 68, no. 2 (June 2016): 167–90. 13 Combe, Elements of Phrenology, 68–9. 14 Ibid, 35–6. 15 See Iwan Rhys Morus, “Worlds of Wonder: Sensation and the Victorian Scientific Performance,” Isis 101, no. 4 (Dec. 2010): 806–16. On anatomy theatre, Maaike Bleeker, Anatomy Live: Performance and the Operating Theatre (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008). 16 This reticence is most notable in the recent cognitive turn in theatre and performance studies. For example, neither Performance and Cognition: Theatre Studies and the Cognitive Turn nor Theatre & Mind reference theatre’s entanglement with phrenology. Performance and Cognition: Theatre Studies and the Cognitive Turn, ed. Bruce McConachie and F. Elizabeth Hart (London and New York: Routledge, 2006); Bruce McConachie, Theatre & Mind (London: Red Globe Press, 2013). Phrenology is also absent from Kristen Shepherd-Barr’s groundbreaking Science on Stage: From Doctor Faustus to Cophenhagen (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006). 17 David Stack, Queen Victoria’s Skull: George Combe and the MidVictorian Mind (New York: Bloomsbury, 2008), 222. 18 George Combe, A System of Phrenology, 3rd ed. (Edinburgh: John Anderson Jun., 1830), 621. 19 Stack, Queen Victoria’s Skull, 225. This included attributing the “savage state” of the Indigenous peoples of North America to deficiencies in cranial development, which became apparent in comparing their measurements to the considerably larger measurements of the ancient Greeks and Egyptians. Stack, Queen Victoria’s Skull, 217–19. 20 “A History of Craniology in Race Science and Physical Anthropology,” Penn Museum, https://www​.penn​.museum​/sites​/ morton​/craniology​.php#​_ftnref20. 21 Britt Rusert, Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2017), 123–6, at 126.

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22 Ibid., 125. 23 Phrenology’s reception varied depending on location. Although by the 1840s, phrenological findings were dismissed by the medical professionals throughout Europe and North America, phrenology continued to engage the popular imagination in the United States into the second half of the nineteenth century. Peter McCandless, “Mesmerism and Phrenology in Antebellum Charleston: ‘Enough of the Marvellous,’” The Journal of Southern History 58, no. 2 (March 1992): 199–230. 24 On the persistence of phrenology, see Carla Bittel, “Testing the Truth of Phrenology: Knowledge Experiments in Antebellum American Cultures of Science and Health,” Medical History 16, no. 3 (2019): 352–74. On twenty-first-century echoes of phrenology, see, for example, The Atlantic’s November 2019 cover photo of Jeff Bezos, https://www​ .theatlantic​.com​/magazine​/archive​/2019​/11​/what​-jeff​-bezos​-wants​ /598363/. See also “The New Phrenology?” Psychological Science, May 12, 2010, https://www​.psy​chol​ogic​alscience​.org​/news​/were​-only​ -human​/the​-new​-phrenology​.html; Matthew Cobb, “Phrenology: From Bumps on the Head to the Birth of Neuroscience,” Science Focus, May 12, 2020, https://www​.sciencefocus​.com​/the​-human​-body​/phrenology​ -from​-bumps​-on​-the​-head​-to​-the​-birth​-of​-neuroscience/. 25 On these relationships, see Stack, Queen Victoria’s Skull, 79–80. I detail Combe’s ties to the theatre more extensively in Schweitzer, “Casting Clara Fisher,” 181–2. 26 According to James N. Dibdin’s The Annals of the Edinburgh Stage, Lee Lewes performed his version of the lecture in 1787, the year before Combe’s birth. A listing of the publication of another version of the play appeared in the 1799 edition of Edinburgh Magazine: Or Literary Miscellany, vol. 13, 297, which suggests that Combe may well have encountered the Lectures in book form if not in performance. 27 Freda Chapple and Chiel Kattenbelt, Intermediality in Theatre and Performance (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 12. 28 Qtd in Caroline Radcliffe, “Remediation and Immediacy in the Theatre of Sensation,” in Nineteenth Century Theatre & Film 36, no. 2 (2009): 28–52, at 39. 29 Kahan, George Alexander Stevens, 27–8. 30 Rev. from Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, April 26, 1764, qtd. in Kahan, George Alexander Stevens, 92. 31 Al Copolla, The Theater of Experiment: Staging Natural Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New York: Oxford University Press,

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2016), 10–11. The character of the foolish doctor can be traced back even further to the popular commedia character of Il Dottore. For excellent analysis of Aphra Behn’s satirical take on dottore character in The Emperor on the Moon (1687), see Vivian Appler, “‘Shuffled Together under the Name of a Farce’: Finding Nature in Aphra Behn’s The Emperor on the Moon,” Theatre History Studies 37 (2018): 27–51. 32 Ibid., 13. 33 May 3, 1764. Qtd. in Kahan, George Alexander Stevens, 92. Kahan acknowledges that this may have been a puff. 34 Julie Park, The Self and It: Novel Objects in Eighteenth-Century England (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), xv. 35 Ibid., xv. 36 Qtd. in Ibid., 94. 37 Mrs. Salmon went into business with her husband, a “famous waxwork man,” in the late seventeenth century and continued to operate it after his death in 1718. She was known for her sense of humor in arranging wax figures, including the “mechanized figure of Mother Shipton, who administered a farewell kick to Mrs. Salmon’s patrons as they left.” Richard D. Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 52–3. 38 Park, The Self and It, 94. 39 Ibid., 102. 40 Stevens, in Kahan, George Alexander Stevens, 70. 41 Ibid., 64. See also images in the collections of the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum. 42 See, for example, the actress Charlotte Charke, who turned to puppetry in the 1830s. See Park, The Self and It, 164–5. 43 Kahan, George Alexander Stevens, 49–50. Park, The Self and It, 166–7. 44 Kahan, George Alexander Stevens, 51. 45 Ibid., 57–8, 60, 64. 46 Qtd. in Kahan, George Alexander Stevens, 70–1. 47 Jane Moody, “Stolen Identities: Character, Mimicry, and the Invention of Samuel Foote,” in Theatre and Celebrity in Britain, 1660-2000, ed. Mary Luckhurst and Jane Moody (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 69. 48 Kahan, George Alexander Stevens, 48; also Moody, “Stolen Identities,” 69.

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49 John Bee, Esq. (Badcock), The Works of Samuel Foote (London: Sherwood, Gilbert, and Piper: 1830), Lxxxii. 50 Moody, “Stolen Identities,” 71; Jim Davis, “Representing the Comic Actor at Work: The Harlow Portrait of Charles Mathews,” Nineteenth Century Theatre & Film 31, no. 2 (November 2004): 3–15, at 5. 51 Kahan, George Alexander Stevens, 65–6. 52 Coll Thrush, Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2016), 86–7. See also Monica Anke Hahn, “Pantomime Indian: Performing the Encounter in Robert Sayer’s Harlequin Cherokee,” The William and Mary Quarterly 78, no. 1 (January 2021): 117–46. 53 Thrush, Indigenous London, 70. 54 Qtd. in Kahan, George Alexander Stevens, 70. 55 Qtd. in Ibid., 70. 56 Some of the material in this section appeared in Schweitzer, “Casting Clara Fisher.” I have reworked it for this chapter. 57 Donald M. Scott, “The Popular Lecture and the Creation of a Public in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America,” The Journal of American History 66, no. 4 (1980): 791. 58 Carla Bittel, “Woman, Know Thyself: Producing and Using Phrenological Knowledge in 19th-Century America,” Centaurus 55 (2013): 107. 59 Morus, “Worlds of Wonder,” 814. 60 I use the male pronoun here to emphasize the overall gendering of lecturing as a performance practice in this period, though of course women also toured the lecture circuit. 61 See John Tosh, Manliness and Masculinities in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Essays on Gender, Family, and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 62 Morus, “Worlds of Wonder,” 815. 63 The literature on the relationship between science and racial formations in the nineteenth century is extensive. See, for example, Rusert, Fugitive Science; William R. Stanton, The Leopard’s Spots: Scientific Attitudes towards Race in America, 1815-1859 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1960); Ann Fabian, The Skull Collectors: Race, Science, and America’s Unburied Dead (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010); James Poskett, Materials of the Mind: Phrenology, Race, and the Global History of Science (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2019).

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64 George Combe, Lectures on Phrenology (New York: Samuel Colman, 1839), v–vi. 65 Ibid., vi. 66 George Combe, Notes on the United States of North America during a Phrenological Visit in 1838-9-30, vol. 11 (Philadelphia: Carey & Hart, 1841). 67 Combe, A System of Phrenology, 93, original emphasis. 68 “List of Donations,” in Transactions of the Phrenological Society (Edinburgh: J. Anderson, 1824), xv–xvi. 69 See, for example, “Skull of King Robert I (the Bruce), 1819,” Royal Collection Trust, https://www​.rct​.uk​/collection​/26757​/skull​-of​-king​ -robert​-i​-the​-bruce. 70 On the Combe brother dissections, see Stack, Queen Victoria’s Skull, 53. 71 “Calves Heads and Brains, or a Phrenological Lecture,” Center for the History of Medicine, Harvard University, http://collections​.countway​ .harvard​.edu​/onview​/items​/show​/6158. 72 These faculties do not correspond to the thirty-three faculties identified in Combe’s Elements, and it is unclear what the artist intended with such naming. The first two seem to allude to the seven deadly sins (pride and sloth/sleepiness); “slyness” seems to be a rebuke of the phrenologist himself, and “consequence” is perhaps a warning from the artist. 73 In this respect, the phrenological stage anticipates later innovations in naturalist stage design, where the accumulation of “stuff” onstage was intended to offer important clues to the psychology of individual characters. Thanks to Sara Masciotra-Milstein for this point. 74 Combe, Lectures on Phrenology, 224. 75 On Morton, see John S. Michael, “Memorializing Philadelphia Physician and Race Supremacist Samuel George Morton,” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 87, no. 2 (Spring 2020): 279–312. On Galton, see Nicholas W. Gillham, “Sir Francis Galton and the Birth of Eugenics,” Annual Review of Genetics 35 (2001): 83–101; “Composite Portraits of Criminal Types (1877),” Met Museum, https://www​.metmuseum​.org​/art​/collection​/search​ /301897. 76 See, for example, Tracie Canada and Chelsea R. Carter, “The NFL’s Racist ‘Race Norming’ Is an Afterlife of Slavery,” Scientific American, July 8, 2021, https://www​.scientificamerican​.com​/article​/the​-nfls​-racist​ -race​-norming​-is​-an​-afterlife​-of​-slavery/.

5 Performing Paleontology at the Natural History Museum Shelby Brewster

In June 2019, after “a five-year extinction,” the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) celebrated the reopening of one of its most crowd-pleasing displays: the Hall of Fossils.1 Both the scientific community and NMNH’s approximately eight million yearly visitors eagerly anticipated the reappearance of the museum’s charismatic dinosaur fossils. The reopening also marked the culmination of the museum’s largest research and renovation project, Deep Time, which was initiated in 2009. A large interdisciplinary team including Smithsonian curatorial staff, exhibition designers, and educational and outreach specialists led the project, which included routine maintenance on specimens, infrastructure repairs, and updates to reflect current scientific research.2 The renovation ultimately cost $125 million, generated from donations and federal funds. Conservative businessman David H. Koch provided $35 million—the largest single donation in the museum’s history. The new hall bears his name: the David H. Koch Hall of Fossils—Deep Time. Conceptually, deep time represents an important new direction for NMNH and fossil display generally. The Deep Time team reframed the museum’s most popular attractions to tell a (hi)story of planetary climate change: “The exhibition will give visitors tools

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to interpret the past, present, and future and see how the choices they make today will live far beyond them, in deep time.”3 The term, coined by science writer John McPhee in 1980, aims to capture the conceptual incommensurability of geological time, which encompasses biological, geological, and planetary rhythms that exceed human timescales.4 This perspective has been embraced by scientists and others as an avenue for humans to better understand their role in the Earth’s history—and their planetary impact in the Anthropocene, the proposed current geological epoch in which human activity will leave evidence in the fossil record.5 If humans can reconceptualize their actions within the scale of deep time, “the current suite of ecological changes [becomes] the latest in an array of upheavals—some of them desperately harmful to the whole biosphere—that have emerged and reverberated within earth’s systems. [. . .] And this in turn makes possible a kind of understanding that might, one way or another, contribute toward well-judged actions in the face of the crisis.”6 Or, as the Deep Time team explains: “Earth’s distant past is connected to the present and shapes our future.”7 The complex narrative in the Hall of Fossils and its implications for understanding humanity’s role in planetary change prompt a thorough exploration beyond the scope of this chapter. Here, I focus on one aspect of the exhibition, the FossiLab. Tucked into a passage at the rear of the hall, a brightly lit lab filled with the tools and people necessary for the work of preparing fossils provides museum visitors a glimpse of the “backstage” of scientific labor.8 Above the workbenches, microscopes, and specimen crates arranged throughout the lab, a sign explains: “Here, in FossiLab, museum staff and volunteers prepare fossils for further scientific study, exhibition, and storage in the museum’s collections.” In this chapter, I examine the FossiLab as an example of paleontological performance, focusing on how this performance space, like the natural history museum of which it is a part, creates the fossil imaginary of the prehistoric past by constructing fossils for display—literal performing remains in which “absent flesh does ghost bones.”9 The authority of natural history “rests on a richly choreographed cultural performance”;10 as I detail here, open labs are an integral part of this performance. Rather than focusing on the educational or outreach function of paleo labs, I delve into the role they play in this new kind of fossil hall, one that attempts to harness the cultural and aesthetic power of spectacular fossils to constitute

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an experience of deep time, thereby shifting ideas about the place of humans within the planet. I briefly discuss the differences between traditional fossil displays and the Smithsonian’s new model, and then explore the importance of fossils for performing deep time and the function of the FossiLab in that performance.

On the Uses of Nature in the Museum Natural history museums have historically served as mechanisms by which people (particularly city dwellers) encounter nature. Through the display of collections, nature could be experienced and defined in very particular ways, “ideally to be consumed in palatable chunks of time.”11 And, as many museum studies scholars have shown, these displays not only structure scientific knowledge but also produce and uphold hierarchies of race, class, and gender.12 In the first decades of the twentieth century, a series of US reformers began reconceiving and remaking the museum to focus on public education (display-based) rather than specimen preservation and scientific research (collections-based).13 Display techniques that emerged during this period include the habitat diorama and mounted skeleton, both accompanied by explanatory labels. Because museums are “slow media” that resist change, new display methods accumulate over older practices.14 Thus, dioramas and fossil mounts remain standard practices a hundred years after their introduction. The Smithsonian’s new Hall of Fossils combines these traditional displays with new techniques like digital interactives, all of which contribute to the exhibition’s goal of shifting visitors’ understandings of deep time. The main entrance to the David H. Koch Hall of Fossils—Deep Time is on the first floor of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, just off the rotunda showcasing the institution’s famous African bush elephant. Visitors are invited to travel back in time through phases of the planet’s history, from the Age of Humans to the Long Beginning of life on Earth. Mounted skeletons of immense creatures long extinct—both mammals and dinosaurs— are distributed throughout the airy, well-lit hall; their arrangement allows visitors to flow around them in multiple directions. Less charismatic fossils (plants, trilobites, microfossils) fill display cases along the walls.15 Scattered throughout the exhibit, miniature

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dioramas depict dinosaurs and their contemporaries in the flesh to complement their fossilized remains. Tall black pillars mark the mass extinction events of the planet’s past and—arguably—its present. To that end, the Hall of Fossils includes a Changing Climates section: digital and interactive displays demonstrating the impact of humans on the biosphere. Nearby, the Age of Humans Gallery features a semi-enclosed seating area with several screens; a series of short videos chronicling five different ways humans are responding to climate change plays on loop. Nearby infographics depict humans as a “global force of change,” illustrating phenomena such as species extinction. Several visuals and an interactive display encourage visitors that, despite humanity’s negative impacts, “there is hope—we can adapt, innovate, and collaborate to leave a positive legacy.” By positioning both dinosaurs and humans within the historical narrative of deep time, the exhibit “aimed to both harness [dinosaurs’] popular energy and combat diluted renderings of past worlds, focusing on an ecosystem- and climate-driven perspective.”16 In most display-based natural history museums, material objects are displayed to create a particular temporal relationship. In the case of the Hall of Fossils, remains—both authentic and reconstructed— are deployed to constitute a deep time journey joining humans with the rest of planetary life. This directly counters conventional fossil halls, which work to achieve what anthropologist Brian Noble calls the “lost world” of Mesozoic performativity: “the quasi-fictional, quasi-factual time-space locales” where dinosaurs are imagined to be (like the isolated island in the Jurassic Park films).17 Noble articulates the ways scientific practice and cultural production utter the time-space of the Mesozoic (approximately 248 million to 65 million years ago) into being through a variety of “world-making practices” including museum display (see Table 1).18 However, the Hall of Fossils departs from the Mesozoic imaginary as it attempts to mobilize fossils to reimagine ecological relations within the history of life on the planet and reframe the place of humans within that history. Through exhibition design and multiple visual elements, the Hall of Fossils works to entice visitors with the expectation of dinosaurs’ lost world and then rearticulate these famous displays to incorporate them within the planetary time-space of deep time, of which humans are a significant part. The inclusion of the role

Table 1.  Geologic Time Scale, Including the Proposed Anthropocene Eon

Era

Period

Epoch

Phanerozoic

Cenozoic

Quaternary

Anthropocene? ?

Tertiary Neogene

Holocene

Present–.01

Pleistocene

.01–2.6

Pliocene

2.6–5.3

Miocene

5.3–23

Oligocene

23–33

Paleogene Eocene Paleocene Mesozoic

MYA* Age of Mammals

33–56 56–66

Cretaceous

66–145

Jurassic

145–201

Triassic

201–252

Age of Reptiles

Table 1.  (Continued) Eon

Proterozoic

Era

Period

Epoch

MYA*

Paleozoic

Permian

252–299

Pennsylvanian

299–323

Mississippian

323–359

Devonian

359–419

Silurian

419–443

Ordovician

443–485

Cambrian

485–541

Precambrian

541–2500

Archean

2500–4000

Hadean

4000–4600

Age of Amphibians

Fishes

Marine Invertebrates

*Millions of years ago. Adapted from National Park Service, “Geologic Time Scale,” US Department of the Interior, updated October 26, 2020, https://www​.nps​ .gov​/subjects​/geology​/time​-scale​.htm.

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of humanity in global environmental systems—past, present, and future—distinguishes the Smithsonian’s Hall of Fossils from other dinosaur displays.

“Ghostly Sculptures”: Fossils as Performative Remains19 In 1998 cultural critic W. J. T. Mitchell wrote that “no one has ever seen a dinosaur but everyone knows what they look like.”20 Representations of the extinct creatures abound in popular media, scientific study, and natural history museums, where their reconstructed and reassembled remains draw millions of spectators. Fossil displays are, to riff on Rebecca Schneider’s theorization, performative remains that bring deep time into being in the museum space, instances of “a kind of touch or whisper or ‘shiver’ of time seemingly gone ajar,” mediations between liveness and deadness, the present and the past.21 The remains displayed in the Hall of Fossils—which include actual bones, reproductions, and specimens that are composites of both—embody the dinosaur dreams of visitors, who bring to the exhibit their prior cultural experiences of the extinct monsters of the past, the “performative nexus” of Mesozoic time-space.22 The Smithsonian Hall of Fossils aims to leverage this familiar performance to reshape ideas of climate change and the place of humans in the biosphere. The Hall of Fossils provides a useful example of the ways the Mesozoic is composed in its new display of “the nation’s T. rex.”23 The specimen, the Wankel T. Rex, was uncovered in 1988 in Montana by rancher Kathy Wankel. The skeleton had since been on display in its home state at the Montana Museum of the Rockies but was loaned to the Smithsonian for the new Hall of Fossils in 2014. To celebrate the hall’s reopening, the nearly complete skeleton was reconfigured from its original “death pose” to a more dynamic arrangement. To show the T. rex “in all its former glory,” the Smithsonian staff decided on a more theatrical—and violent—pose showing the carnivore mid-kill, its massive jaws around the crown of another familiar dinosaur, the Triceratops.24 During the fossil hall’s renovation, the Smithsonian set up a “Rex Room” where visitors could observe technicians scanning the bones to create a

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3-D rendering for study before the specimen went on public display. The marketing around the “homecoming” of the Wankel T. rex and its central place within the Hall of Fossils as “gut-wrenching theater of macabre” exemplify the Mesozoic time-space.25 As the ultimate carnivore, aesthetically terrifying but safely unthreatening because it is extinct, the T. rex serves as a paradigmatic dinosaur specimen that attracts visitors with its spectacular charisma. The Mesozoic nexus is, importantly, expressed as a time-space where humans do not live.26 They can access this time-space, however, through objects like the Hall of Fossils; via what Jennifer Tyburczy calls display choreography—“how to do things with things”—visitors can time travel to the geological past and in doing so (hopefully) gain a new understanding of their planetary position.27 That is, through the specific display choreography of the Hall of Fossils, the Smithsonian hopes to create a deep time encounter that reshapes how visitors understand their place in the world. However, because it depends upon normative forms of display that uphold numerous hierarchies placing the human outside of (and usually above) nature, in its performance of deep time the Hall of Fossils reveals the incompatibility of traditional display choreographies with new ethical planetary relations. The FossiLab, as a cultural performance of scientific authority within this display, remains an essential part of the Smithsonian’s goal of reframing natural history in the Anthropocene. The display choreography of the Hall of Fossils was designed to intervene in pedestrian understandings of time—the everyday rhythms of clock and calendar. Timekeeping, in any form, does not involve making objective statements of fact, but rather is “an act that orders the world in particular ways.”28 Timekeeping is performative: the ways that humans tell, mark, practice, and inscribe time are what create it. As Michelle Bastian writes, clock time and its rhythms have proven inadequate to address ecological emergency, as “rather than representing the urgency and danger of these changes, clock time emphasizes continuity and similarity across all moments and projects an empty and unending future.”29 The hopelessly human scale of clock time, which pales alongside the scope of planetary history, cannot capture the seemingly unreal temporal reach of climate change; its linearity, its relentless march forward, clashes with more organic, fluid, circular earthly rhythms. Beyond its performative nature, clock

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time is generated materially: “a great variety of material objects are tracked or monitored in our efforts to coordinate ourselves with what is important to us.”30 Moreover, as Brittney Cooper argues, “white people own time,” determining who and what is in the past, and how that affects the future, through institutional power, such as that exercised in and by museums.31 Despite their temporal remove from humans, dinosaurs are not exempt from the political nature of time; the Mesozoic “installs a performative apparatus that readily launches and knits together narratives and practices which have long been associated with colonialism and imperialism.”32 As the Hall of Fossils attempts to use “a hope-based model of environmental messaging” to “spark individual action,” the political and ethical characteristics of time are worth considering.33 At the main entrance to the Hall of Fossils, visitors encounter the Deep Time Map, a diagram of the exhibit space similar to those found in museums of all kinds. But the Deep Time Map explicitly invites visitors to travel through time, offering the ability to move from the present to the past. Such time-traveling is a hallmark of the lost world imaginary, “a unified and highly influential location around and through which the actions of science practitioners and public authorities have cultivated senses of nature, of certain forms of humanness, and of particular histories of life on earth.”34 Through fossils especially, museums portray the (planetary) past as a lost world that can be recovered through their authoritative interpretation. By traveling (backward) through the narrative of Earth’s history, the display choreography of the Hall of Fossils offers an opportunity to transport visitors to another (imagined) time-space. The whole of the history of the planet is laid out for spectators to consume, a planetary (en)visioning rooted in both early earth sciences and theatrical techniques like the panorama.35 At the hall’s other entrance, adjacent to the FossiLab, a smaller Deep Time Map invites visitors to travel forward in time. This journey, too, will show how the distant past is connected to the present and future, beginning with the FossiLab and its efforts to decipher paleontological evidence. A visitor could choose to begin here, where life begins, and move forward to the Age of Humans, though the design emphasizes the main entrance. Thus, the introduction to the “Long Beginning” of life on Earth is paired with a glimpse into the scientific techniques that make such knowledge possible.

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Alongside the performative remains of the T. rex and other specimens, the Smithsonian enacts its expertise for the public through the FossiLab, exemplifying what Noble calls the “specimenspectacle complex,” where historically fossils “could be taken as specimens and the object of scientific investigation, or as spectacles and the objects of public marveling.”36 The FossiLab, by granting a certain amount of access to the scientific process, contributes to the “specimen” axis of the specimen-spectacle complex in an act of what Noble calls “techno-theatre.”37 Unlike narrative additions to exhibits such as interpretive labels, the FossiLab serves as a performance space. That is, at the FossiLab audiences witness a performance of scientific objectivity that is integral to the cultural and political work of the exhibition as a whole.

Labs as Public Performance Fossils on display are not only material traces of a planetary past but also artifacts of human intention. Finding a complete skeleton is exceedingly rare, so many displays are composites of several distinct fossils combined with simulacra constructed from plaster or other materials.38 Visitors are drawn to natural history museums generally, and dinosaur fossils specifically, by a fascination with seeing the real thing. (The FossiLab’s online description lists “Are the fossils real?” as the first frequently asked question.39) The tension between authenticity and attracting audiences took on a particular valence in the Hall of Fossils renovation, where museum staff aimed to use fossils to tell a specific story about the planet’s history. As Diana E. Marsh details in her ethnography of the Deep Time research project, “the real thing is evidence for the story of Deep Time. While the team could not advocate or be truly political about changing people’s beliefs, they felt that real fossils were crucial to convincing disbelievers, for instance, that climate change is in fact real.”40 Several interpretive devices were integrated into the exhibit to reconcile this tension, including color-coded labels, to show which parts of the skeleton are authentic and which are reconstructed. By showing the “real” work of fossil preparation, the FossiLab contributes to the exhibition’s “real” scientific authority, an important ideological function with significant implications for Deep Time, as its fossil displays are designed to refigure visitors’

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experience of temporality and by doing so promote environmental consciousness. Beginning in the 1990s, museums of science and natural history began incorporating the work of their scientists into exhibition spaces, juxtaposing static displays of artifacts and dioramas with dynamic, working public labs. Many such labs aimed to demystify the scientific process for museum visitors, “to dispel the ‘myth of the white coat’ and show that scientists are ‘normal’ people.”41 This is especially true for paleontology labs, which are largely staffed by volunteers. Specimen preparation is one of the most common sights in exhibition labs; staff members or trained volunteers, called preparators, use various tools and methods for the delicate task of preparing fossils for research, display, and/or collection. This complicated work contains aspects of technique (using the right tools for the job), scientific knowledge, and art.42 Although often completed by volunteers, fossil preparation takes a high level of commitment and extensive training.43 Abby Tefler, who manages the Smithsonian’s FossiLab, explains that “‘the volunteers give science a face. [. . .] Visitors can get a sense of what it looks like to do this type of science and that the people doing it look like them— we don’t have lab coats here.’”44 While stereotypical white coats are absent, the fact that fossil preparators are usually volunteers may not always be clearly communicated to visitors. Thus, the voluntary nature of this work does not necessarily detract from or work against traditional scientific authority, which is imperative for the museum to maintain. The historical legacy of natural history museums and the Smithsonian’s position as a US national museum contributed to a need to balance scientific rigor with audience appeal; public labs are an important part of this endeavor. Caitlin Wylie calls these performances “glass-boxing science,” in contrast to museums’ traditional practice of “black-boxing science,” or presenting objects as vectors of knowledge without any context of their creation.45 Wylie argues that exhibition “labs are simultaneously backstage and frontstage because they offer views of authentic scientific work while also changing that work for public consumption.”46 Staff and volunteers working in public labs edit their work for their audience in an affective performance, one that “simultaneously [is] and [is] not theatre.”47 Moreover, not all scientific work is dynamic enough to display in a lab. Preparing fossil specimens is only a small part of

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paleontology and associated disciplines. Other research activities— attending conferences, reading, writing, teaching, meeting with colleagues—are absent from public labs.48 So the behind-the-scenes perspective museum visitors receive from exhibition labs is a limited one. This is especially true of the FossiLab, where interpretive materials around the lab are minimal. There is a single video monitor above the tall glass windows, which plays a presentation about excavating fossils from their original sites. Some tools are identified for viewers; large air hoses dangling from the ceiling bear bold labels reading “DUST COLLECTOR.” But the majority of interpretation is left to individual preparators, who might turn on outward-facing monitors to display their microscope views or detail their current tasks on whiteboards. Direct access to workers is limited. While some may step out of the lab from time to time to take questions or speak with visitors, overall, the windows act as a literal fourth wall separating the audience from the science. As Wylie explains, “the public assumes that fossil lab workers are robots or scientists when in fact they are technicians or volunteers, none of whom study the fossils they work with. The lack of interaction and effective text panels means that visitors’ perceptions are primarily based on what they see rather than on what experts tell them.”49 While it is possible that researchers might speak directly to visitors, as in live demonstrations common in other parts of the museum, there is no guarantee that audiences will experience a one-on-one conversation. Thus, this paleontological performance does not necessarily always make science clearer. Aside from practical concerns (only some parts of preparation can be feasibly accomplished in the FossiLab; watching a scientist read papers is not visually exciting; preparators cannot be “on display” at all times), some degree of black-boxing is necessary to maintain the Smithsonian’s sense of scientific authority. In other words, the magician cannot reveal all their secrets. Natural history institutions like the Smithsonian are built on more than a century of exercising the power to arrange and display objects, thus dictating particular modes of understanding and being in the world.50 A public lab has the potential to jeopardize this sense of authority, as it can “[appear] to risk exposing all of that which museums had attained through a history of hiding the action of science.”51 Retaining at least some sense of scientific authority is necessary for the Smithsonian to pursue its mission: “the increase

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and diffusion of knowledge.”52 Though the meanings of these goals have shifted since the Smithsonian’s founding, a tension between the two—between research and outreach—remains.53 Furthermore, as the Deep Time project proposal explains, this tension “‘use[s] the popularity of fossils to foster appreciation for the history of life and the grand context for our own existence.’ Earth’s history could help people predict their shared future and empower the public to embrace their role as ‘planet managers.’”54 That is, by better understanding deep time through fossil evidence, museum visitors might better understand the impact of their actions on the planet’s future.

Deep Time for the Future The Smithsonian is not unique in positioning its most spectacular (fossil) specimens within the narrative of life on the planet.55 Fossils—especially dinosaurs—embody a particular connection to deep time. Materially, the history of fossils is the history of capitalism, as the remains of dinosaurs and their contemporaries provided the carbon for oil. Prior to the popularization of the Anthropocene idea, Mitchell argued that the dinosaur “epitomizes a modern time sense—both the geological ‘deep time’ of paleontology and the temporal cycles of innovation and obsolescence endemic to modern capitalism.”56 Mitchell refers to the history of paleontology in the United States, which is intricately connected to the growth of wealth. Nineteenth-century capitalist philanthropists supported paleontological expeditions and received naming honors in return, including at natural history museums. This practice continues into the present, complicating the exhibit’s goals of fostering environmental consciousness. The Hall of Fossils’ namesake, David H. Koch, gave the Smithsonian its largest single donation in its history. But he also funded organizations fighting against environmental protections and promoting climate change denial.57 Koch, who died in August 2019, was an extremely influential donor among scientific institutions; NMNH’s permanent Hall of Human Origins also bears Koch’s name, and he served on the boards of the NMNH and New York’s American Natural History Museum (whose dinosaur hall sports Koch’s moniker as well). Koch’s connections to the fossil fuel industry and its suppression

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of climate science led to significant backlash against his positions at these institutions. In 2015, activist group The Natural History Museum, part of the collective Not An Alternative, led a protest and petition calling for Koch’s removal from both boards. Koch resigned his position at the American Museum of Natural History but retained his board membership at NMNH until his death—and his name remains. Despite its complicated political position, the Hall of Fossils works to bring together the disjunctive timescales of human time and geological time, which have been historically separated by academic disciplines.58 In the natural history museum generally, and in the Hall of Fossils specifically, fossils and other specimens function as what Bronislaw Szerszynski describes as monuments: material objects that mediate between the differing registers of deep and human time. Szerszynski argues that the classically influenced architecture of museums serves as a transition to monumental time, an observation that I extend to the contents displayed within such structures.59 The display of the material traces—performing remains—of the planet’s history brings visitors into the inhuman domain of deep time. This temporal shift is accomplished by viewers moving through the exhibit, “traveling through time,” as “the monumental ‘scene’ thus defines the ‘obscene’; the presence of the monument determines what is prescribed and what is proscribed behaviour.”60 Alongside typical museum-going behavior—observing objects but not touching them, for example— the Hall of Fossils works to temporally reorient visitors (with)in deep time. Beyond the inscription of behavior in particular spaces, be they museums, ruins, or public monuments, (monumental) time also creates ethical orientations. Time structures human experience; we “use time to synchronise ourselves and our actions with others, to mark and perform our relationship to larger collectivities and to make connections between the time of our concrete actions and the more abstract times of distant and global events.”61 Alongside the invitation to travel through the planet’s history, the Hall of Fossils uses particular labels in a rhetorical attempt to reconcile the incongruous rhythms of human and deep time. For example, the label accompanying the hall’s massive mastodon skeleton, which occupies a prime position at its main entrance, describes the role of humans in the extinction of large North American mammals. Titled “Human Connections,” a short

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paragraph explains that “at the end of the last glacial period around 11,700 years ago, large land mammals in North America faced climate change and the spread of a new predator—humans.” This explanation simplifies the scientific debates surrounding the role of early humans in Pleistocene extinctions.62 More importantly, in an effort to create new ecological relations, these labels subtly equate human agency with climate change. Mastodons faced the threats of both the changing climate and human hunters; contemporary scientists examine evidence of both forces (sediment cores and remains of kill sites, respectively) to better understand their extinction. The Human Connections labels trace one of the Hall of Fossil’s thematic throughlines: humans have become a geological force and have been intervening in the planet’s processes for thousands of years. Planetary history thus becomes human history. This (attempted) temporal unification underscores the tension inherent in the ways natural history museums seek to (re)articulate human relations within deep time without considering the role of their own conventions in creating the current state of environmental affairs. Perhaps identifying the remnants of human presence in planetary history does work toward a new understanding of the temporality of species actions. However, as this shift is ostensibly brought about through the display of nature’s remains for human consumption, the Smithsonian’s version of deep time also falls into the trap of human exceptionalism. The Hall of Fossils attempts to perform deep time, to articulate the becoming-geological of the human,63 as a remedy to other temporalities that are less attuned to nonhuman others. But the hall ultimately reinscribes a narrative of progress, as visitors travel from the past to the present and the future.

Notes 1 Jennifer Zeleski, “Dino-Mite: Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History Reopens Dinosaur and Fossil Hall,” Northern Virginia Magazine, June 11, 2019, https://northernvirginiamag​.com​/ things​-to​-do​/things​-to​-do​-features​/2019​/06​/11​/dino​-mite​-smithsonian​ -national​-museum​-of​-natural​-history​-reopens​-dinosaur​-and​-fossil​ -hall/. 2 Due to the length of the project, staff changed throughout, but key leaders included Kirk Johnson (NMNH Director), Anna

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Behrensmeyer (NMNH Curator of Fossil Vertebrates), Amy Bolton (Deep Time Education and Outreach Manager), Matthew Carrano (NMNH Curator of Dinosauria), Siobhan Starrs (Exhibition Project Manager), and Scott L. Wing (NMNH Curator of Fossil Plants). For more about the development and progression of the project, see Diana E. Marsh, Extinct Monsters to Deep Time: Conflict, Compromise, and the Making of Smithsonian’s Fossil Halls (New York: Berghahn Books, 2019). 3 “David H. Koch Hall of Fossils—Deep Time,” National Museum of Natural History, https://naturalhistory​.si​.edu​/exhibits​/david​-h​-koch​ -hall​-fossils​-deep​-time. 4 John McPhee, Basin and Range (New York: Farrer, Strauss, and Giroux, 1980). 5 For overviews of the Anthropocene concept, see Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History, and Us (New York: Verso Books, 2016); Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer, “The ‘Anthropocene,’” Global Change Newsletter 41 (May 2000): 17–8; Jeremy Davies, The Birth of the Anthropocene (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016). For deep time in the Anthropocene, see, for example, Bronislaw Szerszynski, “The Anthropocene Monument: On Relating Geological and Human Time,” European Journal of Social Theory 20, no. 1 (February 2017): 111–31; David Farrier, Anthropocene Poetics: Deep Time, Sacrifice Zones, and Extinction (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2019); Noah Heringman, “Deep Time at the Dawn of the Anthropocene,” Representations 129, no. 1 (2015): 56–85. 6 Davies, Birth of the Anthropocene, 30. 7 Marsh, Extinct Monsters to Deep Time, 177. 8 Caitlin Donahue Wylie, “Glass-Boxing Science: Laboratory Work on Display in Museums,” Science, Technology, and Human Values 45, no. 4 (2020): 631. 9 Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (New York: Routledge, 2011), 102. 10 Lukas Rieppel, “Bringing Dinosaurs Back to Life: Exhibiting Prehistory at the American Museum of Natural History,” Isis 103, no. 3 (2012): 465. 11 Samuel J. M. M. Alberti, The Afterlives of Animals: A Museum Menagerie (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2011), 7. 12 Addressing these issues is vital but beyond the scope of this chapter. For more on the social functions of museums, see Donna Haraway,

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“Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908–1936,” Social Text 11 (1984): 20–64; Jennifer Tyburczy, Sex Museums: The Politics and Performance of Display (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2016); Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995); Tony Bennett, Pasts beyond Memory: Evolution, Museums, Colonialism (London: Routledge, 2004). 13 Karen A. Rader and Victoria E. M. Cain, Life on Display: Revolutionizing U.S. Museums of Science and Natural History in the Twentieth Century (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 12–17. 14 Jennifer Newell, Libby Robin, and Kirsten Wehner, “Introduction: Curating Connections in a Climate-Changed World,” in Curating the Future: Museums, Communities, and Climate Change, ed. Jennifer Newell, Libby Robin, and Kirsten Wehner (New York: Routledge, 2017), 15. 15 For the role “charisma” plays in conservation and understanding of species, see Ursula K. Heise, Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 16 Marsh, Extinct Monsters to Deep Time, 5. 17 Brian Noble, Articulating Dinosaurs: A Political Anthropology (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 30. Noble details the lost world/Mesozoic in “Part 1: Animating the Tyrant Kingdoms.” 18 Ibid., 46. 19 W. J. T. Mitchell, The Last Dinosaur Book: The Life and Times of a Cultural Icon (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 63. 20 Ibid., 48. 21 Schneider, Performing Remains, 51. 22 Noble, Articulating Dinosaurs, 67. 23 Katherine J. Wu, “Homecoming King: The Nation’s T. rex Returns to the Smithsonian,” Smithsonian Magazine, July 17, 2018, https:// www​.smithsonianmag​.com​/smithsonian​-institution​/homecoming​-king​ -nations​-t​-rex​-returns​-smithsonian​-180969673/. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid. 26 Noble, Articulating Dinosaurs, 31. 27 Tyburczy, Sex Museums, 13.

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28 Michelle Bastian, “Fatally Confused: Telling the Time in the Midst of Ecological Crises,” Environmental Philosophy 9, no. 1 (2012): 32. 29 Ibid., 33. 30 Ibid., 28. 31 Brittney Cooper, The Racial Politics of Time (San Francisco, CA: TEDWomen 2016, October 2016), https://www​.ted​.com​/talks​/brittney​ _cooper​_the​_racial​_politics​_of​_time​?language​=en. 32 Noble, Articulating Dinosaurs, 69. 33 Stephen Humphries, “How T. rex Can Make You Think about the Future,” The Christian Science Monitor, June 7, 2019, https://www​ .csmonitor​.com​/Environment​/2019​/0607​/How​-T.​-rex​-can​-make​-you​ -think​-about​-the​-future. 34 Noble, Articulating Dinosaurs, 33, emphasis in original. 35 Ralph O’Connor, The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802–1856 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 27. 36 Noble, Articulating Dinosaurs, 13. 37 Ibid., 357. 38 Rieppel, “Bringing Dinosaurs Back to Life,” 470. 39 “FossiLab,” National Museum of Natural History, accessed May 30, 2021, https://naturalhistory​.si​.edu​/exhibits​/david​-h​-koch​-hall​-fossils​ -deep​-time​/fossilab. 40 Marsh, Extinct Monsters to Deep Time, 143, emphasis in original. 41 Morgan Meyer, “Researchers on Display: Moving the Laboratory into the Museum,” Museum Management and Curatorship 26, no. 3 (2011): 263. 42 Caitlin Donahue Wylie, “Preparation in Action: Paleontological Skill and the Role of the Fossil Preparator,” in Methods in Fossil Preparation: Proceedings of the First Annual Fossil Preparation and Collections Symposium, ed. Matthew A. Brown, John F. Kane and William G. Parker (2009), 3–12. 43 Bailey Bedford, “Smithsonian Puts Backstage Fossil Preparation Center Stage in Its New Fossil Hall,” Smithsonian Magazine, October 16, 2019, https://www​.smithsonianmag​.com​/blogs​/national​-museum​ -of​-natural​-history​/2019​/10​/16​/smithsonian​-puts​-backstage​-fossil​ -preparation​-center​-stage​-its​-new​-fossil​-hall/. 44 Quoted in Bedford, “Smithsonian Puts Backstage Fossil Preparation Center Stage.” 45 Wylie, “Glass-Boxing Science.”

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46 Ibid., 622. Wylie’s use of the terms “backstage” and “frontstage” is derived from Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life (1959), but the theatrical connotations are also useful here, especially as they capture the revelation of usually hidden activities to museum visitors. 47 Noble, Articulating Dinosaurs, 257. 48 Meyer, “Researchers on Display.” 49 Wylie, “Glass-Boxing Science,” 630. 50 Bennett, The Birth of the Museum. 51 Noble, Articulating Dinosaurs, 191. 52 Smithsonian Institution, “Mission,” https://www​.si​.edu​/about​/ mission. 53 Marsh, Extinct Monsters to Deep Time, 5. 54 Ibid., 135. 55 For example, the Field Museum (Chicago) permanent exhibition “The Griffin Halls of Evolving Planet” takes a similar approach. 56 Mitchell, The Last Dinosaur Book, 77. 57 See Lukas Rieppel, “The Smithsonian’s New Dinosaur Hall Is a Marvel. But Its Ties to David Koch Are a Problem,” The Washington Post, June 9, 2019, https://www​.washingtonpost​.com​/outlook​/2019​ /06​/09​/smithsonians​-new​-dinosaur​-hall​-is​-marvel​-its​-ties​-david​-koch​ -are​-problem/. 58 Szerszynski, “The Anthropocene Monument,” 117. 59 Ibid., 120. 60 Ibid., 119. 61 Bronislaw Szerszynski, “Wild Times and Domesticated Times: The Temporalities of Environmental Lifestyles and Politics,” Landscape and Urban Planning 61 (2002): 183. 62 See, for example, A. D. Barnosky, “Assessing the Causes of Late Pleistocene Extinctions on the Continents,” Science 306, no. 5693 (2004): 70–5, and S. A. Zimov et al., “Steppe-Tundra Transition: A Herbivore-Driven Biome Shift at the End of the Pleistocene,” The American Naturalist 146, no. 5 (1995): 765–94. The role of humans in the Pleistocene extinctions also influences the debates on the starting date of the Anthropocene. See, for example, Will Steffen, Paul J. Crutzen, and John R. McNeill, “The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?” Ambio 36, no. 8 (2007): 614–21.

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63 Becoming-geological is a figure that threads through much Anthropocene scholarship. See, for example, Bronislaw Szerszynski, “The End of the End of Nature: The Anthropocene and the Fate of the Human,” Oxford Literary Review 34, no. 2 (2012): 165–84; Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin, “Art and Death: Lives between the Fifth Assessment and the Sixth Extinction,” in Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies, ed. Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin (London: Open Humanities Press, 2015), 3–29; Serenella Iovino, “The Reverse of the Sublime: Dilemmas (and Resources) of the Anthropocene Garden,” RCC Perspectives: Transformations in Environment and Society, no. 3 (2019).

6 Ether, Acid, Sweat, and Blood Toward a Dramaturgy of Smells in the Victorian Operating Theatre Meredith Conti

Joseph Lister’s antiseptic smelled. Not that it mattered to him; the British physician’s quest to reduce fatal postoperative infections depended upon the frequent, heavy spraying of his carbolic acid solution on the patient’s wounds and incision sites, on bandages and surgical instruments, on the operating theatre’s surfaces and into the very air. Distilled from coal tar, carbolic acid (or phenol) has, noted nineteenth-century physician David Cerna, “a corrosive, hot taste, and a very peculiar smell, which resembles the odor of creosote.”1 Even diluted in Lister’s spray, the odor of carbolic acid was strong enough that in 1878 the Scientific American announced the superiority of thymol, a rival antiseptic boasting a “less objectionable odor” that was first used to “deodorize unhealthy wounds.”2 For patients undergoing surgeries in the era’s operating theatres, antiseptic odors were perhaps of little concern. Procedures performed in these spaces were often experimental, tricky, or

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carried with them high mortality rates, not to mention by the time Lister introduced carbolic acid in 1865 patients were routinely “etherized” prior to surgery.3 Olfactory objections to antiseptics, then, came from the theatres’ other regular occupants: the medical professionals who performed surgeries and the spectators who crowded the observation galleries to watch. Although antiseptic odors were but one of many site-specific smells pervading operating theatres, the optics of nineteenthcentury surgery loom large in the twenty-first-century imagination. Small wonder, too, as visitors to the 1800s operating theatre were met with a profusion of arresting visuals: trays of serrated instruments; bulbous tumors being excised from necks, thighs, or genitalia; arcs of blood spurting from newly amputated limbs. Our continued prioritizing of sight as the most crucial of the five human senses was also a firmly held bias of nineteenth-century medical science. Medicine’s ocularcentrism, registered by Michel Foucault’s notion of the “medical gaze” as an instrument of social power,4 is discernable in a host of written accounts and artistic depictions of the period’s operating theatres. In Thomas Eakins’s The Gross Clinic (1875) and The Agnew Clinic (1889), seeing is a subject of the medical paintings—both depict operating theatres as crammed full of active, largely silent observers—and the method by which we consider them. And yet, as I contend throughout this chapter, nineteenth-century performed surgery was sensorially diverse and excessive. Ernest William Morris, the secretary and house governor of the London Hospital from 1903 to 1930, remembered the “delightful sound of the air whistling” through a young girl’s tracheotomy tube during a successful procedure; British surgeon Berkeley Moynihan recalled from his medical education in Leeds the “ancient frock” physicians donned to keep blood off themselves as being “utterly stiff with old blood.”5 Such accounts render ocularcentric depictions of the operating theatre both insufficient and inaccurate. I therefore wish to move beyond the operating theatre’s landscapes—and even its soundscapes—to detect its smellscapes, which transformed throughout the nineteenth century due to evolutions in surgical techniques; in medical knowledge about human physiologies and pathologies; and approaches to infection and putrefaction. This chapter argues that the smells of the operating theatre contributed in crucial ways to a dramaturgy of Victorian

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surgical performance.6 Smells explicitly marked the operations’ stages (much like the popular theatre’s segmented evening programs), cued audience responses, and provided clues about the surgery’s progress or the patient’s condition. For historians of medicine and performance, smells can help us to situate surgeries in their time and place and widen our investigative field past the magnetic pull of the century’s surgeon-showmen. In what follows, I will use the foundational discourses of smell studies, a branch of the cultural discipline of sensory studies, to think through how an attention to smells could enrich our analysis of the operating theatre’s medical acts. Ironically, the surgical performances of the nineteenth-century operating theatre come into clearer focus when seeing no longer predominates such analyses. Smells coexist alongside other sensory stimulants—sights, sounds, tastes, tangibles—and most (though certainly not all) humans gather meaning from combining multiple sensory inputs. A whiff of chlorine in a hotel hallway, for example, is given definition by the sounds of children splashing or a placard that reads “POOL” in written text and braille. This chapter seeks to temporarily, rather than permanently, isolate the operating theatre’s smellscape. However, I am less interested in a semiotic analysis of smell-as-signs and more in how smelling, an embodied action that can be both involuntary and purposeful, shaped surgical spectating and possibly even medical procedures themselves. In bypassing an ocularcentric approach to the visually saturated site of Victorian surgical performances, I am first (somewhat gleefully) challenging my own methodologies as a historian of nineteenth-century performance and medicine. Whereas period images fill archival folders, smells cannot. It is therefore unsurprising that historians depend upon iconographic analyses to help give shape and shadow to nineteenthcentury life. And yet, such a dependence can potentially flatten life’s sensorial dimensionality. Second, I write with an awareness that seeing has historically been associated with rational masculinity. As Rachel Devorah asserts, ocularcentrism is an outgrowth of androcentrism that “places seeing and hearing in an oppositional binary that privileges the former. . . . [D]ominant discourse codes seeing as masculine and hearing as feminine, and so as ocularcentrism valorizes cultural prejudice against hearing, it reproduces prejudice against femininity.”7 While smelling perhaps is less overtly feminized than hearing—listening’s reputed passivity inspired the hearing-

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femininity linkage—it is similarly devalued by its perceived limits as a method of knowledge-building (smellscapes shift rapidly and without warning) and its ambiguous connections to the racialized and gendered Other. Although I share Donna Haraway’s desire for a “feminist writing of the body that metaphorically emphasizes vision again,” here I circumvent ocularcentrism as a small act of feminist historiography, not because I believe smell (or any other sense) to be inherently feminine but because the senses’ gendering was and remains artificially constructed.8 Smelling our way around the white, male-dominated Victorian operating theatre, so to speak, exposes and subverts this constructedness.

Studying Smells, Knowing Us Odor. Aroma. Stench. Fragrance. The words we use to describe smells betray our love-hate relationship with the world’s olfactory diversity. “The sense of smell is mired in paradox,” notes Jim Drobnick in The Smell Culture Reader (2006).9 We divide smells into categories like mysterious or conspicuous, seductive or repellent, delicate or heady; such judgments, however, are predicated on personal experiences, spatiotemporal contexts, and cultural biases. The smell of mothballs, cigar smoke, and shoe polish may remind one person of their beloved grandfather and give another a headache. An Ethiopian doro wot smells “exotic” only to those unaccustomed to regularly eating and cooking it; for others, it smells like home. As always, positionality matters. Because smells are ambiguous, ephemeral, and elusive, they cannot always be easily “recorded” and preserved, nor is describing them a simple process. As Constance Classen, David Howes, and Anthony Synnott concede, “We have to say ‘it smells like’ when describing an odour . . . groping to express our olfactory experience by means of metaphors” and a limited assortment of adjectives: mildewy, metallic, floral, fruity.10 The paradox of smell gains complexity from its particular sitedness. Indeed, Drobnick’s proposed term “toposmia,” “place”+“smell,” gestures toward the need for scholarly inquiries that prioritize the “spatial location of odors and their relation to particular notions of place.”11 Emanating from specific environments, buildings, objects, and bodies, smells variously place

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and displace us. They evoke memories of the past.12 So space- and time-bound are scents, in fact, that they have become important atmospheric enhancements in hotel lobbies, shopping malls, spas, and casinos. Smells can also historicize locations, providing clues to a space’s previous functions and occupants. The SensoryCo., a company that makes “proprietary scenting systems [and] aroma generators” for immersive entertainments and training exercises, has installed scenting equipment in historic sites and museums like Washington DC’s recently shuttered Newseum and the Ohio Historical Society.13 In a 2016 article for Future Anterior, Melanie A. Kiechle contemplates both the problematic absence of historic scents at New York’s Lower East Side Tenement Museum and the influence that tenement life’s unpleasant odors might have on museum visitors and their contemporary perspectives on poverty, predatory landlordism, and immigration.14 The SensoryCo.’s services and Kiechle’s related musings, each inspired by the spatiotemporal specificity of smells, are among the most dynamic responses to noted social and medical historian Roy Porter’s lament in 1986 that “[t]oday’s history comes deodorized.”15 Many smells are neither incidental nor organic, nor is the act of smelling always involuntary. Human olfaction is a biological and psychological process, but it is also a sociocultural phenomenon.16 As the foundational smell studies texts—including Alain Corbin’s The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination (1986) and Classen, Howes, and Synnott’s Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell (1994)—make clear, scents often serve to delineate social, cultural, and economic differences, as well as justify discriminatory practices. The “habitation effect” (a phenomenon in which prolonged exposure to a particular smell reduces your ability to perceive it) compels humans to prefer their own individual smellscapes: their homes, cars, and workspaces. The habitation effect consequently distinguishes smells that are unfamiliar or atypical in an environment and amplifies the perceived intensity of “foreign” smells. Smell intolerances and odorphobias, then, tend to reveal and deploy cultural, racial, and class prejudices.17 “Odors are the means by which the boundary between self and other is demarcated,” argues Drobnick, “as well as the supposed basis of prejudicial extensions of such demarcation.”18 To return to Kiechle’s subject of study, nineteenth-century social reformers and nativists alike decried the stenches that emanated from tenement

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dwellings of the urban (often immigrant) poor. Furthermore, the odorous human body is often a source of deep cultural anxieties. “The body may indeed be common to us all,” writes Alan Hyde, “but an almost universal aspect of human behavior is the insistence that one’s own social group is inodorate while others smell.”19 The attributing of objectionable odors to “hated ethnic groups, foreigners, the poor, [or] homosexuals” operates on a set of related assumptions: first, that human difference—be it physical, behavioral, or “moral”—quite literally smells and, second, that those able to detect these smells possess refined senses and sensibilities.20 The Western stigmatization of human body odors, which first emerged in the nineteenth century as part of European and North American sanitary and hygiene reforms, guaranteed that “odorphobia [is] habitually engaged” and fueled the rapid development of personal care, cosmetics, and perfume industries.21 The conviction that healthy, ideal bodies and ill, inferior bodies produced different smells found confirmation in nineteenth-century medical settings, bolstered by emergent, science-based understandings of infection, putrefaction, and contagion as well as medicine’s aggrandizement of the white, male, heteronormative body as the exemplary vessel for human activity and thought. As my “re-odorized” treatment of performed surgery suggests, the Victorian hospital’s smellscape was comprised of (metaphorically) aerosolized values and attitudes. Before entering the Victorian operating theatre, it is important to briefly consider how Euro-American theatrical practice has variously included and excluded smells/smelling as part of its storytelling, aesthetics, and spectatorship in the last two hundred years. As Sally Banes suggests in “Olfactory Performances,” Victorian-era popular theatres at times incorporated olfactory devices as part of the theatrical event, including “scented theatre programs and perfume fountains,” before turn-of-the-century hygiene campaigns equated the odorlessness of indoor and outdoor spaces with improved public health.22 Despite endeavoring to fully replicate the lived human experience on stage, the naturalists’ exploration of “aromatic design” was tepid at best. With the notable exception of Théâtre Libre’s premiere of Fernand Icre’s The Butchers (1888), in which André Antoine hung dripping beef carcasses onstage, smell’s “formlessness . . . its transgressive ability to permeate the atmosphere and dissolve boundaries” was perhaps too enigmatic or unpredictable for the science-minded naturalists.23

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By contrast, the fin de siècle’s symbolists embraced smell as their “sense par excellence,” as Mary Fleischer notes: While the naturalists and realists used detailed descriptions of smell as a literary device to imbue the environment with a moral atmosphere or to enrich the verisimilitude of their works, the Symbolists used smell in suggestive, mysterious, and expansive ways to dissolve barriers between subject and object, individual and environment.24 Likely the most scented of symbolist productions was Paul Napoléon Roinard’s The Song of Songs, staged at the Théâtre d’Art in 1891, in which a sequence of floral smells including lily, orange blossom, jasmine, frankincense, and five others were diffused by way of apparatuses at the proscenium and “hand-held vaporizers” positioned throughout the auditorium.25 Like the deodorized histories criticized by Porter, twentiethcentury commercial theatre commonly disregarded smellscapes (both within the world of the play and in the auditorium) or endeavored to provide audiences with an unchanging, inoffensive, possibly undetectable smellscape. This sensorial oversight was and is far less chronic in postmodern experimental theatre and performance art by artists like Ivo van Hove, Robbie McCauley, Tim Miller, and Theresa May; immersive productions like Punchdrunk and Emursive’s Sleep No More and “4D” attractions like Disney World’s “Philarmagic”; and enduring theatrical rituals like Catholic masses and the Hindu Ganga Aarti.26 While I am less interested in deploying Banes’s semiological framework for decoding olfactory performances, her proposed taxonomy of “theatrical aroma design” nevertheless opens up possible avenues for analyzing the smells that accompanied or punctuated performed surgery in the age of Victorian medicine. This taxonomy “is structured according to the representational function that the odors in the performance are intended to discharge” and includes the following categories: 1. to illustrate words, characters, places, and actions; 2. to evoke a mood or ambience; 3. to complement or contrast with aural/visual signs; 4. to summon specific memories;

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5. to frame the performance as ritual; and 6. to serve as a distancing device. Banes leaves her seventh category, “that of unrecognizable smells,” unexplored.27 This taxonomy, which foregrounds how smells are ambient, commemorative, and co-expressive with other sensory stimuli, proves quite useful in identifying how smells made meaning in the operating theatre.

Toward a Dramaturgy of Smells The hospitals of Great Britain and the United States gradually transformed over the long nineteenth century from “disordered” and “charitable refuge[s] for the sick poor” into “all-purpose medical institution[s]” with trained nurses, specialized physicians, modern technologies, mechanisms for teaching and research, and, for hospitals located in affluent neighborhoods, private wings and patient rooms.28 Still, as with many bustling and transitional community spaces, the nineteenth-century hospital remained a site suffused with theatricality. Medical personnel performed and re-performed their expertise, ministrations, and authority within the hospital’s social hierarchy; visitors and ailing patients alike negotiated their temporary roles within the hospital, including what Brant Wenegrat categorizes as a patient’s “illness role,” or the “purposive behavior pattern consistent with a character in poor health” that “involves giving proper responses to various prompts and contingencies.”29 From ward to ward and hallway to hallway, hospitals boasted an ever-developing repertoire of mundane rituals and life-altering happenings that commingled the public and private. As London Hospital secretary Morris mused in 1910, the promise of remedies transformed even the hospital’s dispensary into a popular attraction: “At the eight windows of the Dispensary stand long lines of patients, like the queue outside a theatre pit entrance, waiting for their medicines, after having paid their visit to the physician or surgeon.”30 But as with the asylum’s reprehensible practice of admitting curiosity seekers (including professional actors) so that they may witness madness in the flesh,31 the Victorian hospital hosted an indisputably dramatic act with a

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reliable stream of spectators: live surgical demonstrations in the building’s operating theatre. How might an attention to smells help historians understand these popular medical acts? An orientation toward dramaturgy, I suggest, is one way of exposing smells’ capacity to tell stories through performance. As Michael Chemers asserts in suitably sanguinary language, dramaturgy refers to both the aesthetic architecture of a piece of dramatic literature (its structure, themes, goals, and conventions) and the practical philosophy of theater practice employed to create a full performance. Together, dramaturgy is the very blood coursing through the veins of any theatrical production.32 If we regard public surgeries as performances (if not a “theatrical production[s]”), then the smells permeating the nineteenth-century operating theatre are dramaturgically significant. Smells and smelling shaped medical knowledge and practices, contoured the operating theatre’s physical space and helped distinguish between its major players, cued spectator responses, and marked surgical phases and changes to patients’ conditions. In this chapter’s final pages, I would like to suggest how incorporating smells into our historical analyses of operating theatres might open up new understandings of surgery-as-performance. For Banes, “To carry out the task of analyzing ‘the senses in performance’ is also to carry out bio-political investigations of the many critical thresholds where the corporeal meets the social, the somatic meets the historical, the cultural meets the biological, and imagination meets the flesh.”33 We might begin this “bio-political investigation” by regarding olfaction and smells as deeply meaningful to nineteenth-century medical practitioners and, by extension, to historians of medical performances. Smelling was (and remains) a credible diagnostic tool. In discrete, physician-patient interactions, smelling could confirm the presence of necrotic tissue or determine whether a patient’s incoherent speech was medically consequential or the result of a night’s heavy drinking. At a systems level, the miasmatic theory of disease—which enjoyed wide acceptance before being supplanted by germ theory in century’s final decades— proclaimed noxious air the primary culprit for many of society’s deadliest illnesses, including cholera and consumption. Atypical

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bodily and environmental odors were of considerable interest to the medical community as presagers or emissaries of ill health, but they could also be signs of healing; early Victorian doctors mistakenly interpreted the appearance and smell of “laudable pus” as an indication of a wound repairing itself.34 In the context of the operating theatre, then, medical personnel pressed the involuntary process of smelling into service as a deliberately diagnostic exercise that in turn shaped the structures of surgical performances. Odors suffused operating theatres even without the distinctive smells of active surgeries, a fact evidenced by the historical record. The mid-1800s theatre typically featured semicircular wooden galleries that raked steeply down to a floor-level stage.35 (Its design, perhaps not surprisingly, mimicked the Greek outdoor amphitheatre’s theatron—the “seeing place”—and orchestra— the “dancing place”—albeit at a much smaller scale.)36 Attempts to sweep the galleries clean of accumulated dust and dirt were rarely successful. Dust “hung in the air,” commingling with the smoke from the coal fire that burned in the corner of the room.37 The high-legged wooden operating table, “resembl[ing] a crude workbench” with a wedge to support the patient’s head, occupied the center of the stage.38 Nicks from the surgeons’ scalpels scored the table, allowing blood and other body fluids to repeatedly seep into the cracks and stain the wood. Sawdust, a cheap and common material for absorbing blood, was preemptively scattered about the floor or sat waiting underneath the table in a shallow box (itself caked with a blood-and-sawdust paste from prior procedures). Gas lamps hanging from the ceiling augmented any natural light entering the room via windows or a skylight.39 On the hospital’s weekly operating days, assistants (known as “dressers”) readied on small cabinets and tables an instrument tray, bandages, and a bowl of water for the surgeon’s hands and laid a woolen blanket on the operating table.40 Wood, dust, smoke, sawdust, gas, wool, the olfactory ghosts of spilt body fluids: the constant odors of the mid-century operating theatre formed the ambient smellscape for surgical performances. A theatre must have its actors, and on the hospital’s weekly operating days an ensemble entered the theatre to execute, undergo, or spectate surgeries. Primarily a space of white middle-class masculinity, the operating theatre’s weekly public demonstrations elevated the stature of the surgical arts and legitimized the

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theoretical and practical knowledge of Victorian-era medical men: the “virtuoso surgeons,” their assistants, and medical students.41 Before late-century sanitation reforms, germ theory and the advent of aseptic techniques transformed how the medical community understood smells, the surgeon often wore the pungent odors of his profession as a badge of honor. The operating theatre’s lack of ventilation and ever-burning fire (necessary for heating cauterizing irons) made high-stakes surgery a sweaty trade, especially in the summer months. Surgeons layered rarely laundered surgical aprons over their street clothes before operating, and at one hospital, surgeons shared one blood-encrusted coat that hung in the operating theatre, a materially unyielding symbol of their collective labors. Not yet in the habit of changing clothes or washing their hands between the operating theatre and the dissection room, surgeons often shuttled the fetid odors of postmortem dissection into the spaces of live surgeries.42 Familiar as they were to the “sickening odor [that] permeated every surgical ward,” doctors were not immune to its olfactory offensiveness and could be seen holding handkerchiefs up to their noses as they made their rounds. “It was this affront to the senses,” historian Lindsay Fitzharris offers, “that most tested surgical students on their first day in the hospital.”43 The widespread adoption of antiseptic techniques introduced a new odor to the operating theatre and to the surgeon’s body. Chicago physician Franklin H. Martin recalled of an amputation he observed in the mid-1870s: Professor Andrews took his instruments from a large black satchel, laid them in order, and immersed them in a five per cent solution of carbolic acid, which it was duly explained would render them antiseptic. The surgeon took off his coat, rolled up his shirt sleeves, and dipped his hands into a two and one-half per cent solution of carbolic acid. . . . It was all very impressive to the junior members of the audience, and it was with bated breath that we awaited the first bloodshed that we were to witness of our own volition.44 “Junior members” were medical students who, along with related professionals and a smattering of esteemed guests and members of the general public, comprised the operating theatre’s audience. “[P]acked like herrings in a basket” in the wooden stalls, the

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spectators were also an odoriferous bunch.45 This was particularly the case for the “brawling, boozing, boisterous” mid-century medical students, who often arrived at the operating theatre in street clothes redolent of cigar smoke and last night’s alcohol.46 But the audience didn’t just smell, it actively smelled the operating theatre’s odors, and these olfactory experiences pepper the reminiscences of former medical students: the “ether-saturated” room, the vomit of neophytes witnessing their first amputation, the metallic scent of blood.47 Ill and injured bodies, of course, emitted some of the operating theatre’s most distinctive and medically critical smells. Patients were critical figures within the dramatis personae, equal to the physicians in their indispensability to surgical performance, and yet the men and women who died on the table or from postoperative complications or infections proved just how vulnerable sick, hurt, and disabled people were within pre-aseptic surgical practice.48 Operating theatre patients often lacked authority, body sovereignty, and—for those whose surgeries were conducted under anesthesia— the ability to participate consciously in their own spectacularization. Still, period accounts indicate that some patients did in fact assert their humanity and subjectivity before, during, and after their public surgeries.49 The writings of physicians Benjamin Ward Richardson, William A. Lindsay, and John Collins Warren document patients who articulated their pain, shared personal stories, or sang beloved songs while coming under the influence of inhalants. In one almost unthinkable exchange, a woman “brave[ly]” suffering through a “severe operation” without anesthesia declared to her surgeon: “‘I hope, sir, it will not be long.’ ‘No, indeed,’ replied [her surgeon], with great feeling; ‘that would be too horrible.’” If doctors smelled as part of their diagnostic practice and audiences took in surgical odors as part of their social acts of witnessing, patients at the mid-century smelled to lose consciousness, inhaling vaporized anesthetics to avoid the pain of their procedures. In spite of most odors’ evanescence (not to mention olfaction’s subjective nature), smells and smelling cannot be unmoored from their spatiotemporal contexts. As Thomas Schlich notes, the operating theatre staged medical events guided by the “prevailing technical, social, and moral conditions” of the period and of the locale.50 Because of this, operating theatre smells can be used by the historian to plot surgical performances on temporal, geographical,

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and cultural trajectories. The major technological innovations that impacted surgical approaches in the Victorian period, including anesthesia, antisepsis, and asepsis, were each accompanied by signature odors that suddenly or gradually transformed the operating theatre’s smellscape. Indeed, whether the “sickly sweet smell” of diethyl ether, chloroform, or nitrous oxide suffused the air of the operating theatre depended upon the specific procedure, the year, the hospital’s location, and the medical school at which the surgeon trained, among other variables.51 (The odor of such anesthetic inhalants outside of medical buildings indicated their private, presumably recreational use.)52 Whereas the pre-anesthetic operating theatre overloaded its occupants’ senses with an abundance of sights, sounds, and smells, the “modern operating theatres” of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries “are generally quiet places that smell of disinfectant.”53 Hospitals now equate the relative absence of organic odors—those generated not only by bodies but by substances like mold, mildew, and creosote—and the presence of inorganic, chemical odors with a sterile, safeguarding environment. To be dramaturgically guided by olfaction is to detect changes in the air. Smells are also directional. In the operating theatre, they indexed a series of events as they unfolded, helping to sensorially mark different preoperative, intraoperative, and postoperative stages and shape the surgical performance’s dramaturgical structure. The telltale burning, acrid smell of flesh being cauterized, for instance, signaled the conclusion of amputation.54 From the smells present in—or absent from—the operating theatre, the dramaturgically minded historian can also infer an array of social and surgical choreographies. Medical assistants trained in Lister’s antiseptic techniques wielded hand sprays or “donkey engines,” both designed to pump a “toxic” yellow mist of carbolic acid into the air.55 Patients subdued by ether and their unanesthetized predecessors (who received little more than a swig of whiskey to dull the pain of surgery) were in possession of disparate gestural vocabularies. In the days of sawdust, blood-stiffened aprons, and “good old hospital stink,” hospital staff maintained the operating theatre in ways incomprehensible to the germ-conscious custodians of 1900.56 Toward the end of the 1800s, when hospitals launched sterile conditions for surgical procedures, some hospitals affixed to their operating theatres separate rooms for anesthetizing patients and

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for surgeons’ washing and dressing. As one hospital administrator relayed, such anesthetic rooms ensured that “no patient may see the theatre,”57 but they also blocked the attending public from witnessing these preoperative rituals. The operating theatre’s smellscape was created by the proliferating, commingling, and ordering of different odors, including bodily fluids like sweat, pus, and vomit; the lingering traces of cigars and alcohol; chemical gasses and liquids; and other environmental sources of smells, like sawdust and fireplace smoke. Because they emanate from an array of sources, the smells that odorized Victorian public surgeries encourage historians to expand their circle of concentration beyond the surgeon himself and to the many human actants and inanimate materials that crowded such rooms. There is still the ever-present danger of objectifying the patient in olfactory analyses of surgical performances, and the extant archive of the Victorian operating theatre remains overwhelmingly written by white men of privilege. Nevertheless, the tracing, cataloguing, and assessing of the operating theatre’s manifold smells have the potential to recalibrate and add dimensionality to traditional readings of surgical performances.

Notes 1 David Cerna, “Original Communications: Phenol (Carbolic Acid), Its Poisonous Effects, and the Soluble Sulphates as Antidotes,” Philadelphia Medical Times, September 13, 1879, 592. 2 “Thymol, the New Rival to Carbolic Acid,” Scientific American, May 25, 1878, 324. 3 Ether was first used as a general anesthetic in 1842 on James M. Venable, whose neck tumor was removed by Georgia physician Crawford Williamson Long. “Ether and Chloroform,” history​.com​, August 21, 2018. 4 Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage Books, 1994). 5 E. W. Morris, A History of the London Hospital (London: Edward Arnold, 1910), 6; and Berkeley Moynihan, qtd. in Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity (New York: Norton, 1997), 373. It is unclear from Morris’s writing

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whether the young girl’s tracheotomy was performed in the operating theatre. 6 I use the term “Victorian” to describe a time period (1837–1901) rather than a place (Great Britain). This chapter draws on primary research from Britain and the United States. 7 Rachel Devorah, “Ocularcentrism, Androcentrism,” Parallax 23, no. 3 (2017): 305–15, 305. 8 Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (Autumn 1988): 575–99, 582. 9 Jim Drobnick, “Introduction: Olfactocentrism,” in The Smell Culture Reader, ed. Jim Drobnick (New York: Berg, 2006), 1–9, 1. 10 Constance Classen, David Howes, and Anthony Synnott, Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell (London: Routledge, 1994), 3. 11 Drobnick, “Preface to Part II, Toposmia,” in The Smell Culture Reader, 85–8, 85. 12 Certain artificial fruit smells immediately call to mind my 1980s Strawberry Shortcake scented figures. What are your strongest scent memories? 13 “The Sights, the Sounds, and the Smells? Using Sensory Effects in a Museum Setting,” Sensoryco, https://sensoryco4d​.com​/using​-sensory​ -effects​-in​-a​-museum​-setting. 14 Melanie A. Kiechle, “Preserving the Unpleasant: Sources, Methods, and Conjectures for Odors at Historic Sites,” Future Anterior 13, no. 2 (winter 2016): 22–32. 15 Roy Porter, “Foreword,” in Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination (Leamington Spa, 1986), v. 16 Classen, Howes, and Synnott, Aroma, 3. 17 Porteous, “Smellscape,” 90. 18 Drobnick, “Preface to Part I: Odorphobia,” in The Smell Culture Reader, 13–17, 14. 19 Alan Hyde, “Offensive Bodies,” in The Smell Culture Reader, 63–58, 56. 20 Ibid. 21 Drobnick, The Smell Culture Reader, 15. See also Frank Thorpe’s short blog posts on body odor in modern Britain, “#Deodorant: Soap and Deodorant Advertising and Medical Authority from the Nineteenth Century to the Present, February 12, 2019, and “Smelling Injustice: Body Odour, Stigma, and Health Inequalities,” March 25,

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2019, both available at https://med​ical​huma​nitieshub​.wordpress​ .com. 22 Sally Banes, “Olfactory Performances,” in The Senses in Performance, ed. Sally Banes and Andre Lepecki (New York: Routledge, 2007), 29–37, 29. 23 Mary Fleischer, “Incense and Decadents: Symbolist Theatre’s Use of Scent,” in The Senses in Performance, 105–14, 107. 24 Ibid., 105. 25 Ibid., 112. 26 Banes, “Olfactory Performances,” 31–2. 27 Ibid., 30–1. 28 Porter, Greatest Benefit to Mankind, 380. 29 Brant Wenegrat, Theater of Disorder: Patients, Doctors, and the Construction of Illness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 4. For an analysis of how nineteenth-century actors played illness roles on stage, see Meredith Conti, Playing Sick: Performances of Illness in the Age of Victorian Medicine (London: Routledge, 2019). 30 E. W. Morris, A History of the London Hospital (London: Edward Arnold, 1910), 16. 31 See Benjamin Reiss, Theaters of Madness: Insane Asylums and Nineteenth-Century American Culture (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008) and Andrew Scull, Charlotte MacKenzie, and Nicholas Hervey, Masters of Bedlam: The Transformation of the Mad-Doctoring Trade (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016). 32 Michael Mark Chemers, Ghost Light: An Introductory Handbook for Dramaturgy (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2010), 3. 33 Banes, “Olfactory Performances,” 1. 34 Lindsey Fitzharris, The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine (New York: Scientific American, 2017), 120. 35 This description is based on the author’s own observations of the Old Operating Theatre Museum and Herb Garret in London, Richard Hollingham’s sketch of the University College Hospital, London’s operating theatre in 1842, and Lindsey Fitzharris’s prologue to The Butchering Art, also set at the University College Hospital. Hollingham, Blood and Guts: A History of Surgery (New York:

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Thomas Dunne Books, 2008), 31–3; and Fitzharris, The Butchering Art, 3–6. 36 The operating theatre in Philadelphia’s Jefferson Medical College was called “The Pit.” Rebecca Rego Barry, “Inside the Operating Theater: Early Surgery as Spectacle,” JSTOR Daily, December 9, 2015. https://daily​.jstor​.org​/inside​-the​-operating​-theater​-surgery​-as​ -spectacle/. 37 Hollingham, Blood and Guts, 31. 38 Ibid., 32. 39 Depending on its location and the year, a nineteenth-century operating theatre could be candlelit or illuminated by oil lamps, gas lamps, or incandescent bulbs powered by electricity. 40 Hollingham, Blood and Guts, 32. 41 Porter, Greatest Benefit to Mankind, 360. One such virtuoso of the early 1800s, Scottish surgeon Robert Liston brazenly commanded spectators to time his amputations, speed being a lifesaving surgical skill in pre-anesthetic, pre-antiseptic medicine. 42 According to Hollingham, the operating theatre at London’s University College Hospital was centrally situated but separated “from the public areas by thick walls and a long corridor”; the architecture helped to muffle the vocalizations of non-anesthetized surgery patients before they reached the ears of visitors. It was, however, next to the hospital’s mortuary, meaning “that the surgeons could move easily from operation to post-mortem, often with the same patient.” Hollingham, Blood and Guts, 31. 43 Fitzharris, The Butchering Art, 46. 44 Martin, Fifty Years of Medicine and Surgery, 26. 45 Fitzharris, The Butchering Art, 4. 46 Ibid., 31. 47 Martin, Fifty Years of Medicine and Surgery, 27. 48 Surgeon William A. Lindsay journaled dozens of early nineteenthcentury procedures and documented his patients’ outcomes; some were successful, some not. Lindsay told of a thirteen to fourteen-yearold girl whose abdomen and legs were “tap[p]ed” and drained to treat her “Abdominal Dropsy” and who seemed to have recovered well but later died after being “caught in a shower of rain” on a visit to her neighbors’ house. The Journals of William A. Lindsay: An Ordinary Nineteenth-Century Physician’s Surgical Cases, ed. Katherine Mandusic McDonell (Indianapolis, IN: Indiana Historical Society, 1989), 22.

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49 See John Collins Warren, The Influence of Anaesthesia on the Surgery of the Nineteenth Century (Boston, 1900), 4–5. See also Journals of William A. Lindsay and Benjamin Ward Richardson, Vita Medica: Chapters of Medical Life and Work (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1897). 50 Thomas Schlich, “‘The Days of Brilliancy Are Past’: Skill, Styles and the Changing Rules of Surgical Performance, ca. 1820-1920,” Medical History 59, no. 3 (2015): 379–403. 51 Fitzharris, The Butchering Art, 8. 52 Chemistry lecturers took advantage of nitrous oxide’s humorous effects as the closing demonstration, while medical students enjoyed “ether frolics.” Warren, The Influence of Anaesthesia on the Surgery of the Nineteenth Century, 11–13. 53 Arnold van de Laar, Under the Knife: Remarkable Stories from the History of Surgery (London: John Murray, 2018), 6. 54 In May 1847, members of the Massachusetts Medical Society observed operations under ether at Massachusetts General Hospital, one of which was on “a delicate female, laboring under a disease of the spinal marrow, with general neuralgia, [who] subjected to the actual cautery.” As regions of her back were “cauterized by redhot irons,” the anesthetized patient was untouched by pain. “An eye-witness to this event informed the writer many years ago that when the assembled physicians saw and smelled the cloud of smoke ascending to the roof of the operating-theatre while the patient was slumbering peacefully, all doubts as to the efficacy of the new method vanished forever.” Warren, The Influence of Anaesthesia on the Surgery of the Nineteenth Century, 23. 55 “Joseph Lister’s Antisepsis System,” sciencemuseum​.org​.u​k, October 14, 2018. 56 Fitzharris remarks of early Victorian surgeons’ hygiene practices: “The surgeon, wearing a blood-encrusted apron, rarely washed his hands or his instruments and carried with him into the theater the unmistakable smell of rotting flesh, which those in the profession cheerfully referred to as ‘good old hospital stink.’” Fitzharris, The Butchering Art, 50. 57 Morris, A History of the London Hospital, 21.

Creative Interlude Mōrehu & Tītī David Geary

Author’s Note Mōrehu & Tītī premiered on November 22, 2015, at Studio 1398, Granville Island, Vancouver, Canada. Dirt Road Theatre presented it as part of International Climate Change Theatre Action. It starred Kathleen Duborg as Tītī, Thrasso Petras as Mōrehu, a puppet as Al Gore, and the actors directed themselves brilliantly. I went on to write two other plays for subsequent Climate Change Theatre Actions, an ongoing artist- and activist-led movement. For each manifestation, fifty or so playwrights from around the world are commissioned to write five-minute plays; these are then produced globally by whoever wants to pick them up. You can learn more at: http://www​.cli​mate​chan​geth​eatr​eaction​.com/. I am happy to discuss the play, cuts, edits, additions, and production details with anyone who is interested. My stage and design directions are suggestions to give the spirit of the piece; feel free to elaborate on them however you see fit. Contact me at gearsgeary​@yahoo​.c​om.

Characters Mōrehu, an ancient male tuatara in the form of an old punk rocker. In the Māori language of the Indigenous peoples of Aotearoa

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New Zealand, Mōrehu means survivor or remnant. Tuatara means “spiny back.” Tuatara are rare, medium-sized reptiles found only in Aotearoa New Zealand. They are the last survivors of an order of reptiles that thrived in the age of the dinosaurs. Tītī, a young female sooty shearwater bird, muttonbird, Puffinsus griseus, or tītī (pronounced Teetee). The young of these birds are a traditional food source for Māori, preserved in copious amounts of their own fat and salt. So though they may perish in large numbers before reaching adulthood, the tītī can rest assured those who eat them regularly will die prematurely of heart attacks. AG/Aurora Australis, a famous person and the Southern Lights.

Setting Darkness. Wind. The wild Southern Ocean off the coast of Aotearoa New Zealand. Sound of waves and creaking of a raft at sea.

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Scene One Mōrehu shelters under some bad makeshift cover. He stares, unblinking, out at the audience/his eggs for a long time before speaking to them. He mostly moves and speaks slowly but can snap and surprise us with a brief burst of movement or dialogue. Mōrehu (long pause)  I . . . had . . . sex . . . once . . . for the first time . . . when I was 115 years old. We tuatara, we are slow . . . but we get there. Been here 200 million years. Humans, with their divine spark . . . (he spits, then spits again as if he can’t get rid of a bad taste in his mouth) . . . a mere 200,000—a blink of eternity’s eye. We saw the dinosaurs come and go, but we are not of them—Don’t make that mistake! (spits) My tamariki, my poor children, are you seasick too? Do you—(Mōrehu pukes into a large bucket-like shell. When he has finished he yells to outside) Tītī! Bucket! Tītī! Tītī enters in a bad chicken suit, like the sort that would be the mascot for a fast-food chain. She is sprightly, energetic, an eternal optimist. Tītī looks in the shell. Tītī  Not much. Mōrehu  I puke blood. Tītī  Red flecks, not necessarily blood. Mōrehu Empty! Tītī  You have legs. Mōrehu  I can’t – Tītī  You need to keep moving. Were you talking to your eggs? I – Mōrehu  No, I was rehearsing my speech for the United Nations. Tītī  Oh. Have they moved to Antarctica, too? (Pause.) Gallows humour, it’s a good sign of –

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Mōrehu  I need a proper cave, like my cave, with – Tītī  You mean my burrow? Mōrehu  My cave. Tītī Your—You—(Turns to address audience directly.) Who are we kidding here. He was the worst flatmate, roommate, evah! Talk about Single White Female, try Single Spiny Lizard – Mōrehu  I am not a lizard! Tītī (to audience)  Moves in, uninvited, to my lovely burrow, where I’m hatching my – Mōrehu  Was a dunghole. Tītī  You’re the one who dunged in it! Mōrehu  That improved it. That was renovations. That added value. Tītī  The smell – Mōrehu  – Brought the bugs. You and your perky offspring ate the bugs and – Tītī  And then you bit their heads off. Mōrehu (pause. To audience/eggs)  I need quiet. I have no teeth left. It was hard to bite their heads off with no teeth. My gums bled – (Gags.) Bucket! Tītī doesn’t move. Mōrehu struggles to swallow down the rising bile as Tītī confides in the audience/eggs. Tītī  He has a third-eye – Mōrehu  Skin grows over it –

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Tītī  – On the top of his head. Mōrehu  – As you get older. Tītī  – Can you see the lump? Mōrehu  Originally, the eye could see birds flying above – Tītī  I am not responsible – Mōrehu  To prey on us – Tītī  – For the skua – Mōrehu  – On our tamariki – Tītī  – For the sea hawks – Mōrehu  – Our children – Tītī  – The – Mōrehu  Now my inside eye lets me see the future. Tītī (pause)  They say with age comes wisdom but sometimes age comes alone. Mōrehu  I foresaw that we needed to build a boat and move my eggs to Antarctica before our island was flooded. Tītī  The third-eye, it’s not connected. I heard one of the scientists say it was a useless bunch of gristle, a relic, just like – Mōrehu  I am Mōrehu—a remnant, the survivor. The Māori, they respect us, our powers. Tītī  They ate you. Mōrehu  To get our powers.

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Tītī  And their rats ate you. And then the whiteskins’ rats ate you, and – Mōrehu  I am the new Noah. Tītī  Where’s your wife? Mōrehu  You ate her! Tītī  Not me, the skua. They have no souls. Not me. Mōrehu  She was laying our eggs. Tītī  Slow . . . Mōrehu  And when you are starving – Tītī  – ly. Mōrehu  You, Tītī – Tītī  Too – Mōrehu  Will come – Tito  – slow . . . Mōrehu  – Eat my tamariki – Tītī  – ly. Mōrehu  Then tear me apart with your birdy beaks and scaly claws. I know – Tītī  Not me. Mōrehu  You! That’s why you agreed to help me! We are your reserve food supplies.

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Tītī  No! No, I felt sorry for you. And how the earth was too warm now and so all you had was girls. (aside to audience) The temperature of the ground determines the sex of tuatara. Hotter more females. Colder more males. It’s very . . . old . . . school . . . primitive. (to Mōrehu)  But I still don’t understand, why you couldn’t breed with your own offspring? Mōrehu  It’s not . . . right. Tītī  The royal families of Egypt and Hawaii inbred all the time no probs. If the genes are strong they just reinforce. And look at Oedipus and Jocasta, their kids turned out . . . okay . . . ish . . . for a while. Mōrehu pukes. Tītī takes pity on Mōrehu and takes the bucket outside. Tītī Mōrehu! Mōrehu, come look! Mōrehu strains to look out but can’t see anything in the dark. Tītī flies back in. Tītī  Look outside! Mōrehu moves slowly to the entrance. He looks out. There is a distant glow, then a playing of lights. Mōrehu  Antarctica! I foresaw it with my third eye and there it is! How can you ever – Tītī  Um, it’s – Mōrehu  – Doubt my powers now? Tītī  An iceberg. Mōrehu  But – Tītī  And Aurora Australis –

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Mōrehu  No – Tītī  – The Southern Lights playing on them. Pretty, but – Mōrehu  It’s Antarctica. Tītī  You don’t know what Antarctica is, do you? Mōrehu  I – Tītī  You lived your whole life on that island and – Mōrehu  It’s a sign! It means we’re close. Tītī  Maybe – Mōrehu Right? Tītī  Maybe it is Antarctica? (Suddenly fearful.) Maybe that’s all that’s left? Mōrehu  We need to get onto it. Let it carry us to our new home. Tītī  No, it’s heading North, to the Equator, melting. It wants to die. Mōrehu  No, we can sing to it, turn it back. Tītī Sing? Mōrehu  If you listen really hard you can hear icebergs sing their songs. Tītī  Is this a Māori thing . . . or mad old desperate-slash-death’s door-reptile thing? Pause. They listen but hear nothing. Suddenly there is an almighty crack, crash and splash. Water is thrown from a stagehand’s bucket

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onto Mōrehu and Tītī in a very clumsy, but hopefully funny, way. Tītī squawks and tries to flap the water off. Mōrehu stares in awe. AG (a booming voice sings from off)  I’m calving . . . calving . . . calving! Mōrehu  The iceberg, it sang to me! AG (off)  Hello, my name is Al Gore, and I’m a calving iceberg. Mōrehu  That’s Al Gore? Tītī (aside to audience)  Sorry, couldn’t afford the real one. (Refers to bad costume.) I mean, if I’m wearing this, you think we could get the real Al Gore. Al Gore enters in a bad iceberg costume, perhaps an actor wrapped in white paper holding a tray of ice cubes or holding a cocktail with ice cubes in it. He addresses the audience in stern tones. AG  Hi, I’m the real Al Gore, a calving iceberg, and I might have been singing before, but now that I have your attention, I have an important announcement for the whole world . . . I told you so. AG walks off. Pause. Mōrehu is baffled. Tītī tries to salvage the situation. Both the actors surreptitiously check offstage as AG makes a quick, and noisy, costume change offstage during the following. Tītī  It’s a mirage. Mōrehu  Yes, a siren. Tītī  A trick – Mōrehu  – Sent to – Tītī  – Of the – Mōrehu  – Sink –

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Tītī  – Light – Mōrehu  – Us. Tītī  We must sail on. Mōrehu On. Tītī  On and . . . on. Mōrehu  To the end of the world. Tītī  The end. Mōrehu  The end . . . Tītī/Mōrehu  The End . . . unless – Al Gore makes a dramatic reentrance as Aurora Australis—a fabulous Australian drag queen, complete with fairy lights. She reworks “Let it Go” from Frozen. Tītī and Mōrehu join in to help sing and be backup dancers. Halfway through it takes a punk turn and they transition to a stirring punk protest finale. It should be the best and worst excesses of Glee, Priscilla Queen of the Desert, and the Ramones, all at the same time. Aurora Australis (spoken) Folks, I’m Aurora Australis, The Southern Lights, But lately I’ve not been feeling very bright. Because we’ve all been dozing soon the only thing frozen will be our cold, cold hearts Tītī and Mōrehu join Aurora. Tītī/Aurora/Mōrehu: But this is where (Pointing to hearts.) the revolution starts

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NB: Aurora and Tītī can take turns singing a duet together. The snow glows white on the mountain tonight Not a scientist to be seen A kingdom of misinformation, and it looks real, but is green screen The ice is melting like this frozen heart inside Couldn’t ignore the thaw, heaven knows I tried! Mōrehu takes over to transition into a fast punk version of the rest of the song, Aurora and Tītī join in singing, pogoing, and encouraging the audience to join them. Mōrehu (spoken)  Who cares about polar bears? Aurora/Tītī We do! We do! Mōrehu (punk singing) Don’t let them win, don’t let them be Be the eco-warrior you always have to be Protest, don’t rest, let’s let them know Let our voices grow! Mōrehu/Aurora/Tītī Let it go, Let it go! Can’t hold us back anymore Let it go, Let it go! Turn on, kick open the door! I don’t care What Climate Deniers say Let the storm rage on, The cold never bothered me anyway! The song crashes to a stop. Final curtain.

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PART THREE

Experimentation, Exhibition, and Ethics

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7 Anatomical Acts Minstrelsy and NineteenthCentury Performances of Popular Anatomy Mia Levenson

The Fraternity of Dissectors In a photograph from 1898, five white, male students at the Medical College of Virginia (MCV; now known as the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine in Richmond, Virginia) stand over a partially dissected cadaver. Recalling Shakespeare’s iconic line, “WE HAVE SHUFFLED OFF HIS MORTAL COIL” is crudely written on the slab underneath the body. The tableau gestures to how dissection— the “harrowing ritual of initiation” into the medical profession—gave these men command over both anatomical science and the deceased body in front of them.1 The cadaver’s apparent anonymity belies the fact that almost all bodies supplied for MCV came through robbing the graves of local Black cemeteries.2 The carved inscription echoes the minstrel parodies popular on the nineteenth-century stage, parodies which blended high and low culture, science, and white supremacist

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agendas.3 Just as this photograph documents a cultural exchange between science and theatre, this chapter maps how anatomy, racial science, and performance collided in the nineteenth century. This chapter confronts the unsettling history of using human bodies—and oftentimes those of Black people—in medical education. Although the writing that follows does not detail how these cadavers were used in the anatomical laboratory, I engage with how institutional medicine and popular culture enacted violence on and through these bodies. In his study of anatomy and social identity in the nineteenth century, Michael Sappol argues that physicians in the United States used the anatomized body to perform their professional status. Through acts of dissection, the scientific class scripted, rehearsed, and staged performances of knowledge, prestige, and power.4 With the rise of evolutionary theory5 and the contentious debate over slavery, nineteenth-century anatomical discourse entered a sociopolitical sphere where white physicians used comparative anatomy to support racial dimorphism and justify the continued subjugation of Africans. Simultaneously, anatomy emerged as an unexpected attraction in the panoply of middle-class entertainments. Audiences enjoyed museums, lecture series, public dissections, books, pamphlets, and periodicals that offered anatomical knowledge as the key to moral uplift. The mass dissemination of anatomical science, or “popular anatomy” as it was known during this era, brought anatomy out of the medical school and into the public imagination. In this chapter, I explore how the anatomized body became a site of racial, ethnic, and gender tensions within nineteenthcentury US popular culture and how this was enacted by and for the white American public. I look to minstrelsy to map how popular anatomy became intertwined with theatre, focusing on a collection of what I call “anatomical minstrels.” In these short, comic, theatrical afterpieces, the threat of dissection terrorizes the blackface character to the delight of the white audience. Written between 1876 and 1898 (and performed into the first decades of the twentieth century), anatomical minstrels represent several parallel historical threads: emancipation, the Civil War, high profile bodysnatching incidents in the 1870s and 1880s, and the proliferation of state legislation (known as Anatomy Acts) that donated indigent bodies to medical colleges for dissection.

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I follow three themes: how the cadaver trade and the traveling minstrel show profited from the commodification of dead Black bodies, how anatomical discourse permeated popular culture, and how popular anatomy facilitated the development of white, middleclass identity. In her chronicle of African American subjection to medical experimentation, Harriet Washington reveals that physicians regularly documented the subjugation of Black bodies in scientific discourse.6 In this study, I examine how the lay populace performed and consumed this same knowledge. How did public performances of anatomy mitigate and stoke racial and socioeconomic tensions? How has minstrelsy been intertwined with anatomical science? How were Black communities’ fears of anatomization performed as sites of joy for white publics?

The Anatomical Minstrel Anatomical minstrels never asked the audience to sympathize with the blackface character. Instead, they presented what Saidiya Hartman calls a “stage of sufferance,” where spectators’ enjoyment derived from the blackface character’s farcical panic in the face of potential postmortem mutilation.7 In analyzing these plays, I begin from Douglas A. Jones’s contention that blackface minstrelsy was “a performance form for, by, and about the white community.”8 Under the anatomical minstrel’s politics of pleasure, white performers used the blackface character as a surrogate for the Black body to alleviate fears of body-snatching. Although white people—particularly the poor and working class—were susceptible to graverobbing, white spectators to the anatomical minstrels could imagine themselves in opposition to the blackface character: in the theatre, whites were not dissection material.9 Just as the anatomical laboratory converts the deceased body into a cadaver, the anatomical minstrel transformed the Black body into the eternally (and humorously) dissected “thing.”10 In creating this taxonomy, I rely on Danielle Bainbridge’s invocation of the “future perfect archival verbal tense” to consider this collection of works alongside pockets of popular culture that reverberated, reflected, and recirculated anatomical minstrelsy’s delight in dissection and terror. Together, they perform an archive that implicates performers and audiences as participating—with pleasure—in a larger system that abuses Black bodies.11

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Although physicians, medical students, and resurrectionists did not target African American gravesites exclusively, dissection emerged as a terrorist strategy. During the Middle Passage, slave traders dismembered the corpses of insurgent captives.12 Following Nat Turner’s execution, rumors spread that his body had been sent to a Virginia medical school. In her memoir, Annie Burton recalled that during her childhood enslavement in Alabama, she saw the skeleton of a man who was lynched hanging in a physician’s office.13 As Washington writes, Black bodies on anatomists’ tables, blacks’ skeletons hanging in doctors’ offices, and the widespread display of purloined black body parts constituted the same kind of warning to African Americans as did the bodies of lynched men and women left hanging on trees where blacks would be sure to see them, or cut up as souvenirs of racial violence.14 White anatomists dissected Black cadavers as a reminder of the American racial hierarchy. Just as dissection photographs memorialize white male medical students’ homosocial bonding over a presumably Black cadaver, anatomical minstrels formed an embodied souvenir, constantly rehearsing and gesturing to dissection as racial terror.15 I have identified three anatomical minstrels. On April 5, 1876, in Gloucester, Massachusetts, Charles Duprez and Lew Benedict’s Minstrels premiered One Night in a Medical College: An Ethiopian Sketch in One Scene. Written by company member Frank Dumont, the sketch opens with a medical student, Esculapius Scalpel, standing over a cadaver on the slab. His resurrectionist arrives with “another one”—that is, another body to dissect.16 After a traveler, George, arrives to stay the night and refuses to leave, Scalpel declares he “will put up a job upon him” so George will “never want to sleep another night in a medical college.”17 The play devolves into pure farce when a second traveler, Peleg, turns up. As the night continues, the cadavers on stage reanimate to torture the men, stealing cake out of Peleg’s hands and smashing bread with “smear kase” onto George’s face.18 The play ends with great sensation, including flashes of fire and other ghostly figures emerging to frighten the travelers. The final stage direction cues a tableau, “Picture of horror!”19 This finale delighted the audience. The Times Union wrote that “the

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struggles of two lightning-struck individuals with midnight ghosts and lively cadavers, keeps the audience in a shout of laughter.”20 The sketch toured the country with several minstrel troupes. In New York’s Bowery district, the Miner’s Theatre performed the sketch in their 1883–4 season, the same year they presented the blackface burlesque, A Subject for Dissection. A script is not extant, but its earliest recorded performance was in 1882 at the Bowery’s London Theatre where it played for three straight seasons.21 The sketch continued throughout the 1890s to 1910s, traveling as far west as Olympia, Washington. One newspaper advertisement offers insight into its basic plot as well as its appeal: “the blackface, becomes the involuntary subject at a proposed inquest, but he escapes after a series of amusing incidents.”22 At least one advertisement attests that the show was family-friendly fun, beckoning, “Come and laugh at the Negro fright,” followed by ticket prices for a “Children’s Matinee.”23 The third anatomical minstrel, Dr. Baxter’s Servants: Farce in One Act, had fewer recorded performances, but the script remains available and was heavily advertised. Written in 1898 by Patrick C. Lindon, the play centers on the blackface character Zeb, who is terrified of a physician’s dissection room. The stage directions indicate that Zeb trembles when Dr. Baxter explains that “when any one dies with a disease that the doctors don’t understand, I get their bodies and cut them in that room there.”24 When he is ordered to drag a recently deceased patient into the adjacent room, Zeb loudly performs his terror: he jumps, he squeals, he runs back and forth on the stage before bolting off. The piece was well received at a Vermont ladies aid society event in 1911.25 Following the Civil War, tripartite minstrel shows that concluded with a comedic afterpiece, such as One Night in a Medical College, became less common than multipart variety shows, which showcased blackface sketches such as A Subject for Dissection and Dr. Baxter’s Servants alongside other acts.26 These three sketches thus suggest how the anatomical minstrel paralleled shifts in blackface minstrelsy as the form faced competition from emerging performance genres such as vaudeville. Anatomical minstrels were performed by everyone from homegrown amateurs to professional companies, in rowdy theatres, and in more family-friendly venues like museums and opera houses. They traveled to urban centers and smaller cities along the vaudeville circuit. This wide range

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of performers, spaces, and audiences speaks to the anatomical minstrel’s acceptability; almost everywhere these plays went, they were well received and, in some places, called back for more.

Graveyard Economies Saidiya Hartman regards minstrelsy as engaging in an “economy of enjoyment” where white audiences pleasurably consumed violent spectacles against Black bodies.27 In the anatomical minstrel, not only is the live Black body commodified but the deceased Black body as well. The terrorization of the blackface character proves integral to and is rooted in an offstage, clandestine economy: the cadaver trade. Before the mid-nineteenth century, Christian resistance to desecrating the dead meant that cadavers could only be legally supplied from executions.28 However, this source’s insufficiency conflicted with physicians’ belief that medical education demanded dissection and thus the graveyard economy was born. While medical students often procured their own material, professional resurrectionists received payment for locating, retrieving, and shipping bodies to medical colleges. This economy traversed local, state, and national borders just as minstrel troupes took their shows on the road and traveled the country. Ultimately, at an intersection of these economies, anatomical minstrels “restaged the seizure and possession of the black body for [white audiences’] use and enjoyment.”29 By the nineteenth century, the American medical institution had expanded dramatically. Subsequently, the graveyard economy boomed. In the first half of the century, the number of medical schools jumped from five to sixty-five.30 Anatomy was “the groundwork, the very alphabet of that education.”31 For the 15,000 New England medical school students who graduated during the nineteenth century alone, thousands of bodies would have been needed for dissection.32 To meet the staggering demand for cadavers, medical colleges looked to vulnerable communities to source bodies. For example, in 1810, Harvard professor John Collins Warren petitioned to move the medical school from Cambridge to Boston for better access to anatomical subjects.33 However, demand continued to exceed the available supply. Upper classes could afford deterrents such as grave watchers to guard recent burials while

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those without wealth were at the mercy of the resurrectionist. A Black newspaper suggested a cheap option for protecting a corpse: adding straw in the grave to prolong the time it took to empty.34 Body-snatchers learned early on which communities were more vulnerable. In 1787, a group of African American freemen petitioned the New York City Council to stop the robbing of gravesites in the Negro Burial Ground. The petition went unacknowledged. The following year, the city witnessed the infamous Doctors’ Riot after a group of medical students taunted a young white boy by waving a woman’s arm—supposedly belonging to his mother—outside a window. For two days, mobs attacked doctors and medical students throughout the city, leaving six dead.35 This racial disparity was conspicuous enough for English travel writer Harriet Martineau to acknowledge it during a visit to Baltimore decades later: “the bodies of coloured people exclusively are taken for dissection, because the whites do not like it, and the coloured people cannot resist.”36 Even amid major body-snatching incidents, white audiences delighted in anatomical minstrels. One well-received performance of A Subject for Dissection illuminates this legacy. In 1911, performers Jack Williams, James Thompson, and Carl Copeland staged the piece during the Kalamazoo, Michigan, stop on the Majestic vaudeville circuit. At audiences’ requests, the troupe performed A Subject for Dissection at least four times during their weeklong engagement.37 Critics deemed the piece “the funniest sketch of their repertoire.”38 But, why Michigan? In relatively recent memory, the Midwest had witnessed multiple graverobbing scandals involving white gravesites. For instance, rioters threatened the University of Michigan for using stolen bodies in 1874.39 Perhaps the most infamous graverobbing scandal anywhere in the country occurred in 1878 when the body of congressman John Scott Harrison, son of former president William Henry Harrison, was stolen from an Indiana cemetery and found in an Ohio medical school’s dissection room.40 In 1879, both Indiana and Ohio passed an Anatomy Act but not before Duprez and Benedict’s Minstrels brought One Night in a Medical College to the same city where Harrison’s body was found. Michigan followed with its own Anatomy Act two years later.41 White outrage over dissection shaped legislation. Black fears provided fodder for the pleasure of white audiences. Twelve years before A Subject for Dissection was performed in Kalamazoo,

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a group of Black body-snatchers were arrested for stealing and selling thousands of bodies to Midwestern medical colleges.42 The sketch, thus, flips the script. As a “signifier” for power relations— to borrow Eric Lott’s terminology—the blackface mask solidifies the dynamic between anatomist and anatomized. Rehearsing Black terror, anatomical minstrels staged and reinforced the racial hierarchy to mitigate anxieties around Black resurrectionists stealing white bodies. The graveyard economy extended beyond the Midwest, proving a national (and sometimes international) trade. As noted earlier, in the South, the bulk of dissection material came from enslaved or recently emancipated populations.43 Pickled in liquor or brine, bodies were often shipped South to North and occasionally North to South.44 As late as the 1890s, a New England anatomy professor imported Black bodies from the South in barrels labeled “turpentine.”45 Warren sought cadavers from as far north as Montreal.46 As medical schools expanded into rural areas, the Industrial Revolution provided efficient means to transport bodies to all corners of the nation. A rural Massachusetts college professor proclaimed in 1847, “the material of Anatomy is abundant and can be transported any where and every where—that Railroads, and Steamboats, and Transportation Lines, and Expresses, and the like, make the movement of the materiel [sic] . . . a matter of the least difficulty.”47 The trade paid well. Sappol estimates that medical colleges paid between $10 and $35 for a cadaver.48 Details about this economy were common knowledge to the extent that One Night in a Medical College correctly identifies the price of cadavers. In Dumont’s burlesque, the resurrectionist earns $10 for a fresh corpse. While most resurrectionists avoided public scrutiny when they could, others were more flamboyant. Vigo Jansen, the self-styled “Resurrectionist King,” worked primarily between Washington, DC, and Maryland in the late nineteenth century. On May 18, 1884, he gave a lecture on graverobbing at the Theatre Comique in DC, where he reenacted a body-snatching in front of an allwhite audience (a young Black boy ran out when he realized what was happening) using a makeshift grave covered with excavated earth and a Black performer in the role of the corpse. During the disinterment, the ticklish actor broke character, prompting the audience to join in the laughter.49 Although the humor of Jansen’s

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mock graverobbing seems unintentional, the white audience’s joy recalls that of the anatomical minstrel; both pleasurably told stories of Black bodies being stolen and exploited for dissection as well as delighted in the discomfort and terror they created.

Anatomical Science and the Body Politic White supremacy, anatomical science, and spectacle were intertwined long before the emergence of anatomical minstrels. Most famously, P. T. Barnum curated the dissection of Joice Heth in 1836 at New York’s City Saloon in front of an audience of 1,500 spectators to “prove” that she was 161 years old. When the anatomist, a white physician, declared her no more than eighty, the penny press publicized, disputed, and debated the doctor’s findings, with one newspaper claiming that aging is a racially dimorphic characteristic and, thus, the physician had misinterpreted Heth’s decaying anatomy.50 Just as with the anatomical minstrel, spectators to Heth’s dissection consumed Black postmortem mutilation both as entertainment and as validation of racist science. Minstrelsy as a stage genre represented an “anatomical theater.”51 Since the days of T. D. Rice’s Jim Crow, woolly wigs, coal-black makeup, and overdrawn red or white lips along with distorted physical gestures made a mockery of Black anatomy for white audiences. Blackface tropes corresponded to the work of American comparative anatomists who claimed that anatomical science could prove the alleged biological inferiority of Africans. While anatomy turned spectators’ gaze inwards, minstrelsy turned the gaze outward, making tangible the racist science taught in medical schools. For instance, in an 1851 essay, physician and enslaver Samuel Cartwright wrote extensively on the supposed physiological distinctions between white and Black bodies. In addition to the physiognomy parodied on the stage, notably “thick lips and woolly hair,” he cited anatomists who had “dissected the negro” to scientifically establish anatomical differences such as darker blood, flat feet, and smaller brains.52 In a follow-up article, Cartwright seemingly referenced minstrelsy when he (inaccurately) claimed that Northern medical schools were teaching that “the negro is a white man . . . painted black.”53 For Cartwright and like-minded anatomists, racial difference went deeper than skin: it was woven

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into the viscera and justified the continuation of chattel slavery and white supremacy.54 This sentiment was shared by minstrel performers such as T. D. Rice, who gleefully rejoiced in 1837 that his performances “proved that negroes are essentially an inferior species of the human family, and they ought to remain slaves.”55 The archive maps this reciprocal cross-cultural exchange. An 1853 anatomy textbook uses a “popular American song” to claim that Black people are flatfooted, “De hollow of his foot / Make a hole in de groun.’”56 According to the textbook, the song is anatomically accurate: “The deepest part of his footstep is exactly there where the European foot does not touch the ground.”57 For the author, the minstrel verse provided evidence for racial dimorphism, thus validating minstrelsy’s representation of Black anatomy. The song reemerged four decades later in the minstrel farce, Plantation Bitters, when a blackface character performs a musical interlude featuring a variation on this tune, “And when she walks de street aroun’ de hollow ob her foot make a hole in de groun.’”58 The song’s jump from minstrelsy, to medical science, back to minstrelsy gestures to how the minstrel stage consumed and produced scientific racism. The entanglement of minstrelsy and scientific racism in the midnineteenth century corresponded with an emerging Black physician class. Before the war, Southern medical colleges uniformly rejected Black applicants while their counterparts in the North admitted only a few. In 1868, Northern reformists, with assistance from the Freedmen’s Bureau, established the first fully integrated medical program at Howard University. Following their example, several other schools opened in the South to cultivate a generation of Black physicians. Black physicians’ presence in the medical sphere subverted the claims of racist science. In 1847, James McCune Smith—the first African American to hold a medical degree in the United States— challenged a white doctor to debate Africans’ supposed biological inferiority. When McCune Smith’s exceptional oratory skills won out, some white spectators lamented that “their side was not fairly represented.”59 In defeat, the embarrassed white physician fled New York. As a public figure, McCune Smith cultivated an image of the Black intellectual physician that challenged white supremacy’s hegemonic hold on anatomy. As Daphne Brooks notes, minstrelsy ridiculed rising visible Black professionalism to “attack, deflate, and discount African American class mobilization.”60 For instance,

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the blackface medical student in One Night in a Medical College appears as a trickster—not an intellectual. Undermining physicians like McCune Smith, the blackface anatomist does not participate in the bourgeois art of anatomical science but in ghosts, reanimation, and superstition. The sketch’s supernatural element also reveals how Black anxieties around white medical institutions were subjected to parody. White physicians believed that African Americans’ apprehension toward white medicine was proof of their intellectual inferiority.61 Oral historian Gladys-Marie Fry argues that it was white Southerners who encouraged stories of “night doctors,” clandestine figures who killed and sold Black bodies to medical colleges, to prevent formerly enslaved communities from migrating northward.62 As this folklore spread across the country from the 1880s to 1920s, it not only reinforced African Americans’ fear of white medicine but also marked medical colleges as sites of horror. The play finds humor in this fearful prospect; the anatomist terrorizes the travelers (comedically) after they refuse to heed his warning and leave. While A Subject for Dissection and Dr. Baxter’s Servants present a petrified blackface character to symbolize his irrationality and low intelligence, One Night in a Medical College shifts the narrative by performing the product of the African American physician class: the Black dissector, who could potentially have power over deceased white bodies. To subvert this threat to racial hegemony, the medical student becomes a boogeyman who chooses to torment others using his spectral abilities. For white audiences, the Black body can only be the subject, never the commander, of anatomical science.

Configurations of Whiteness in Popular Anatomy Consumers purchased tickets to both anatomical attractions and minstrel shows to buy into a unified whiteness. For minstrel audiences, this coalescence came from the genre’s Manichean division of race while purveyors of middle-class entertainments claimed whiteness through education and hygiene in contrast to freakishness and deformity. The anatomical minstrel, sitting at the intersection of these two genres, bears Blackness as pathology

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to unite its audience in white self-making. As David R. Roediger argues, minstrel performers were the “first self-consciously white entertainers” who used the burnt cork mask to “emphasize that those on stage were really white and that whiteness really mattered.”63 With nativism gaining ground in immigrant-heavy metropoles, immigrant communities used (the imitation of) Blackness to stake their claim to white society. While a lack of wealth placed immigrants at risk of anatomization—Warren noted that in 1847, he received an “ample supply” of cadavers from “the influx of Irish paupers”64—under the burnt cork mask, tensions between rich and poor, immigrant and citizen, were mitigated as performers and spectators fostered a “common whiteness.”65 Anatomical science also authenticated and substantiated whiteness. For instance, in Crania Americana (1839), Samuel Morton placed the Teutonic race—including the native Irish—near the top of the hierarchy of cranial size alongside Anglo-Americans.66 Books like Thomas Scott Lambert’s 1846 Popular Anatomy and Physiology brought Morton’s “science” into the domestic sphere. With its reiteration of Morton’s cranial hierarchy (and at a much cheaper price), Lambert’s book spawned multiple editions and critics proclaimed that it deserved “a place in every school and in every family.”67 The dime museum constituted another space where white Americans could define themselves in opposition to Othered bodies. Although museums served as entertainment venues, managers advertised their educational value to claim them as “rational amusements” that would afford the upwardly mobile white middle class a “symbol of respectability.”68 Alongside freak shows and other anatomical oddities, A Subject for Dissection was performed at two Boston museums, the Grand Museum in 1890 and then Austin and Stone’s Museum in 1909.69 The sketch’s performances at these venues provide evidence that the script was geared toward family viewing.70 While the anatomy museum, a subset of the general dime museum, was less family-friendly because it spectacularized deformed genitalia and exhibited venereal diseases’ effects, it had a place in the middleclass entertainment cosmos. Catering to a male-only clientele, popular anatomy museums claimed to introduce spectators to “the wonders of the human structure.”71 Once inside, these museums warned male spectators about the dangers of masturbation and syphilis, reinforcing middle-class ideologies around sex.

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More respectable entertainment came from professional anatomical museums. Originally housed at Ford’s Theatre, the Army Medical Museum proved an attraction for visitors to DC.72 Formed to educate on war wounds, the museum eventually turned to Freedmen’s hospitals for specimens during Reconstruction.73 Although the museum’s founders hoped to “imbue the war dead with a sense of national importance,” its expansion made the museum similar to those owned by medical colleges.74 As Christopher Willoughby notes, the curation of university medical museums provided an unmediated space for spectators to engage with scientific racist thought, making them a powerful tool in constructing racial dichotomies.75 White women in particular found great value in anatomical science. The conviction that anatomy was a masculine enterprise hindered women’s entry into the medical profession. One Boston physician warned in 1858 that while fulfilling her “domestic duties,” a woman “shines the ornament and glory of the race,” but when she “enters the fœtid laboratory of the anatomist . . . she loses all her feminine loveliness.”76 Here, the collision of racial and gender tensions becomes tangibly connected to the un-sexing of the anatomical laboratory. When organizations such as the Ladies Physiological Institute of Boston brought anatomy to women using wax figures and skeletons, they allowed their middle-class white female audience to learn and experience anatomical science without entering the dreaded “fœtid laboratory.” Works like Catherine Beecher’s 1841 A Treatise on Domestic Economy, which sought to prepare women “to take rational care of the health of a family,” ultimately asserted anatomy as vital to supporting middle-class white womanhood.77 Anatomical science curated for white women also drew on minstrelsy. Popular women’s magazine Harper’s Bazaar referenced a familiar “Ethiopian song” to justify how the “natural arch of the foot” distinguished whites as “a superior race.”78 As this song was recycled and repurposed, it created an intricate web that entangled medical literature, women’s periodicals, and blackface performances. This amalgamation extended into enactments of anatomical minstrels—indeed, the only recorded performance of Dr. Baxter’s Servants was at a ladies’ aid society meeting. The anatomical minstrel’s acceptance by mixed company reflects its position as morally acceptable, respectable, and an astutely middle-

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class entertainment. White women were not immune to feelings of ownership or entitlement over Black bodies. In fact, they were participants, producers, and performers in the act of perpetuating images of Black bodies as anatomical specimens. As white women were admitted to medical schools beginning with Elizabeth Blackwell’s admission to Geneva College in 1847,79 they—like their male counterparts—confronted the dissection of Black bodies. In Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner’s 1873 episodic novel, The Gilded Age: A Tale of To-Day (adapted for the stage the following year), a young Quaker woman encounters a Black male cadaver in a dissection room. In her imagination he scolds her, “Haven’t you yet done with the outcast, persecuted black man, but you must now haul him from his grave, and send even your women to dismember his body?”80 Notably, this scene was not included in the stage adaptation.

The Precariousness of the Black Body Today During an episode of Late Night with Seth Meyers on April 13, 2020, comedian Amber Ruffin warned Surgeon General Jerome Adams against speaking about the disproportionate effects of Covid-19 on Black communities: “[I]f you tell Americans it mostly affects Black people, folks will be outside in a big pile, Frenchkissing strangers tomorrow. No one would care!” Two weeks later, as protests against lockdowns and mask mandates became the norm, Ruffin returned to gloat. “I do not like to have called it,” she smirked. “But called it, I did.”81 In her buoyancy, Ruffin obfuscated a crucial point: those flouting the concerns over the coronavirus pandemic were performing their blatant disregard for communities of color. While the anatomical minstrel may seem an anomaly, these performances and their cultural context reveal the long and storied history of white Americans joyfully consuming Black mutilation and terror while Black bodies are simultaneously exploited to produce medical knowledge for the benefit of whites. More so, like the anatomical minstrel, Ruffin’s joke is within the public consciousness to the extent that it can be told to (and laughed at by) a national audience. Recalling

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Bainbridge’s future perfect tense, the archiving of anatomical minstrels anticipates the contemporary weaponization of whiteness against the health and well-being of Black people.

Notes 1 John Harley Warner and James M. Edmonson, Dissection: Photographs of a Rite of Passage in American Medicine, 1880–1930 (New York: Blast Books, 2009), 22. Image is on 104. Michael Sappol also discusses the “fraternity of dissectors” in A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in NineteenthCentury America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 1–9. 2 See Todd L. Savitt, Medicine and Slavery: The Diseases and Health Care of Blacks in Antebellum Virginia (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978), 282–90; Daina Ramey Berry, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation (Boston: Beacon Press, 2017), 178–81. 3 Ray B. Browne, “Shakespeare in American Vaudeville and Negro Minstrelsy,” American Quarterly 12, no. 3 (Autumn 1960): 381–2. 4 Sappol, A Traffic of Dead Bodies, 8–11. 5 English biologist Herbert Spencer’s theory of “social Darwinism” proffered that biological evolution could be extended to human populations, undergirding much of American scientific racism in the latter half of the nineteenth century. See Kirsten Shepherd-Barr, Theatre and Evolution from Ibsen to Beckett (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 9–14. 6 Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Anchor Books, 2006). 7 Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and SelfMaking in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 27. 8 Douglas A. Jones, The Captive Stage: Performance and the Proslavery Imagination of the Antebellum North (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2014), 52. 9 I am drawing heavily on Joseph R. Roach’s concept of “surrogation.” See Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 2–3.

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10 Eric Lott, Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, 20th-Anniversary ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 143. 11 Danielle Bainbridge, “The Future Perfect, Autopsy, and Enfreakment on the 19th-Century Stage,” The Drama Review 64, no. 3 (Fall 2020): 103–4. 12 Sowande’ M. Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2016), 127. 13 Annie L. Burton, Memories of Childhood’s Slavery Days (Boston: Ross Publishing Company, 1909), 5–6. 14 Washington, Medical Apartheid, 135–6. 15 See Harvey Young’s definition of “souvenir” in Embodying Black Experience: Stillness, Critical Memory, and the Black Body (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 170. 16 Frank Dumont, One Night in a Medical College: An Ethiopian Sketch (New York: Robert M. DeWitt Publisher, 1877), 3. 17 Ibid., 5. 18 Ibid., 8. 19 Ibid., 9. 20 Times Union, May 2, 1876, 6. 21 In his Annals of the New York Stage, George C. D. Odell notes that the London Theatre performed A Subject for Dissection during their 1882–3, 1883–4, and 1884–5 seasons. See George C. D. Odell, Annals of the New York Stage, vol. 12: 1882–1885 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1940), 147, 364, 582. I have found three cast lists for A Subject for Dissection, all with four characters. All share a blackface character and a white physician. See San Antonio Light, November 28, 1885, 1; Kentucky Advocate, February 7, 1912, 1; TCS 65, Houghton Library, Harvard University. Most records indicate that it was a three-person cast. All versions may be related, although without a script it is hard to say. 22 Kalamazoo Gazette, May 25, 1911, 3. 23 Trenton Evening Times, October 29, 1894, 8. For more on minstrelsy in children’s literature about anatomy, see Sappol, A Traffic of Dead Bodies, 238–73. 24 Patrick C. Lindon, Dr. Baxter’s Servants. Farce, in One Act (Clyde, OH: Ames’ Publishing Co., 1898), 4. 25 Vermont Phoenix, November 24, 1911, 5. 26 Robert C. Toll, Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in NineteenthCentury America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 12.

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27 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 26. 28 Frederick C. Waite, “Grave Robbing in New England,” Bulletin of the Medical Library Association 33, no. 3 (July 1945): 274. Dissection was illegal in the South until Virginia passed an Anatomy Act in 1884. For a list of anatomy laws, see Sappol, Traffic of Dead Bodies, 123–4. 29 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 31–2. 30 Sappol, A Traffic of Dead Bodies, 48. 31 Massachusetts Medical Society, Address to the Community on the Necessity of Legalizing the Study of Anatomy (Boston: Perkins & Marvin, 1829), 3. 32 Waite, “Grave Robbing in New England,” 276. 33 “Memorial and Petition for Removal of Med. Lect. to Boston,” February 20, 1810, John Collins Warren and Aaron Dexter, John Collins Warren Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society (MHS). 34 Freedom’s Journal, March 30, 1827, 12. 35 Sappol, A Traffic of Dead Bodies, 107–9. 36 Quoted in Edward C. Halperin, “The Poor, the Black, and the Marginalized as the Source of Cadavers in United States Anatomical Education,” Clinical Anatomy 20, no. 5 (July 2007): 492. 37 Kalamazoo Gazette, May 21, 1911, 17. 38 Kalamazoo Gazette, May 25, 1911, 3. 39 Martin Kaufman and Leslie Hanawalt, “Body Snatching in the Midwest,” Michigan History 55, no. 1 (1971): 30–5. 40 There were multiple episodes of body-snatching in 1878. See Ibid., 32–5. 41 Thomas Dwight, Anatomy Laws versus Body-Snatching (New York: Forum Pub. Co., 1896), 498–501; Cincinnati Daily Gazette, August 6, 1878, 2. 42 Kaufman and Hanawalt, “Body Snatching in the Midwest,” 39. 43 See Todd L. Savitt, “The Use of Blacks for Medical Experimentation and Demonstration in the Old South,” The Journal of Southern History 48, no. 3 (August 1982): 331–48. 44 David C. Humphrey, “Dissection and Discrimination: The Social Origins of Cadavers in America, 1760–1915,” Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine 49, no. 9 (September 1973): 823; Robert L. Blakely and Judith M. Harrington, Bones in the Basement: Postmortem Racism in Nineteenth-Century Medical Training (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), 5.

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45 Waite, “Grave Robbing in New England,” 284. 46 Moses Shaw to John Collins Warren, November 11, 1839, John Collins Warren Papers, MHS. 47 Chester Dewey, Introductory Lecture Delivered to the Medical Class of the Berkshire Medical Institution (Pittsfield: Charles Montague, 1847), 25. 48 Sappol, A Traffic of Dead Bodies, 320. 49 The Evening Critic, Washington DC, May 19, 1884, 2. 50 New York Transcript, March 1, 1836; Benjamin Reiss, The Showman and the Slave: Race, Death, and Memory in Barnum’s America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001) 153–4. 51 Britt Rusert, “The Science of Freedom: Counterarchives of Racial Science on the Antebellum Stage,” African American Review 45, no. 3 (Fall 2012): 294. 52 Samuel A. Cartwright, “Report on the Diseases and Physical Peculiarities of the Negro Race,” The New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal (May 1851): 692. 53 Samuel A. Cartwright, “The Diseases and Physical Peculiarities of the Negro Race,” New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal 7 (September 1851): 189. 54 See Rana A. Hogarth, Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780–1840 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2017). 55 Quoted in Jones, The Captive Stage, 67. 56 Hermann Burmeister, The Black Man: The Comparative Anatomy and Psychology of the African Negro, trans. Julius Friedlander and Robert Tomes (New York: W.C. Bryant & Co., 1893), 7. Accessed at MHS. 57 Ibid. 58 Mary B. Horne, Plantation Bitters: A Colored Fantasy in Two Acts (Boston: W.H. Baker, 1892), 24. The history of this song is fascinating. Burmeister’s textbook does not reference a title, but Horne’s play refers to it as “Clare de Kitchen by T. Rice” (presumably T. D. Rice, the infamous inventor of the Jim Crow character). However, Thomas W. Talley, a chemistry professor at Fisk University, published in his collection Negro Folk Rhymes another variation of the song with the title “Bad Features.” See Thomas W. Talley, Negro Folk Rhymes: Wise and Otherwise, with a Study (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1922), 100.

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59 The Emancipator, September 15, 1847, 4. 60 Daphne Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 28. I have written previously on the presence of physicians in minstrelsy. See Mia Levenson, “Theatre in the Time of Cholera: Health, Medicine, and the Physician’s Role on the American Stage,” MA thesis (Tufts University, 2020), 48–80. 61 Sappol, A Traffic of Dead Bodies, 14; Savitt, Medicine and Slavery, 283. 62 Gladys-Marie Fry, Night Riders in Black Folk History (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1975), 171–205. 63 David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, Third Edition [1991] (London: Verso, 2007), 117. 64 Edward Warren, The Life of John Collins Warren, M.D. Vol. I (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1860), 410. 65 Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness, 117. 66 Samuel G. Morton, Crania Americana: or, A Comparative View of the Skulls of Various Aboriginal Nations of North and South America (Philadelphia: J. Dobson, 1839), 260–1. 67 Liberator, July 3, 1846, 2. 68 Andrea Stulman Dennett, Weird and Wonderful: The Dime Museum in America (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 41. 69 Sunday Herald (Boston), November 9, 1890, 11; Boston Herald, September 28, 1909, 12. 70 Dennett, Weird and Wonderful, 103. 71 Ibid., 63–5. 72 John S. Billings, Museums, with Special Reference to the Army Medical Museum at Washington (New Haven: Tuttle, Morehouse, & Taylor, 1888), 370. 73 Lisa Marie Herschbach, “Fragmentation and Reunion: Medicine, Memory and Body in the American Civil War” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1997), 256–60. 74 Shauna Devine, Learning from the Wounded: The Civil War and the Rise of American Medical Science (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 52. 75 My thanks to Christopher D. E. Willoughby for sharing a partial draft of his book manuscript.

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76 Dan King, Quackery Unmasked (Boston: David Clapp, 1858), 214. 77 Catherine Beecher, A Treatise on Domestic Economy for the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School, Revised ed. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1845), 69. 78 “The Foot,” Harper’s Bazaar 1, no. 17 (February 22, 1868): 258. 79 Rebecca Lee Crumpler would become the first Black woman admitted to a medical school (New England Female Medical College) in 1864. 80 Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, The Gilded Age: A Tale of To-Day (Hartford: American Publishing Company, 1874), 148. 81 See Late Night with Seth Meyers, “Amber’s Minute of Fury: Jerome Adams, Surgeon General of the United States,” April 15, 2020, video, 4:42, https://youtu​.be​/DsyhhFj3lto; “Amber Says What: Stanley Tucci’s Cocktails, Trump’s Cleaning Products Comments,” April 29, 2020, video, 5:17, https://youtu​.be​/AeMPdUf0zxw.

8 Staging Science and Humanity in Manjula Padmanabhan’s Harvest Radhica Ganapathy

In January 2021 it was reported that many slum dwellers in India were unwitting participants of the clinical trials of Covaxin, a vaccine developed in India to fight Covid-19.1 They were enticed with a cash sum of 750.00 rupees ($10.12) under the guise of receiving a vaccine that would offer protection from Covid. Some participants were given the vaccine and many were given a placebo. More importantly, they were unaware that this was part of a third phase trial for Covaxin, developed by Bharat Biotech International Limited.2 The vaccine was approved for distribution from January 3, 2021, even before the trials were complete.3 Writing about Manjula Padmanabhan’s Harvest amid India’s battle with a horrific second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic reaffirms the play’s core themes of stark disparities that deeply, and relentlessly, continue to divide our world between the haves and the have-nots. The failed healthcare infrastructures of countries such as India expose the disproportionate impact on populations based on wealth and color. Safety protocols that restrict the spread of a deadly virus are best suited for those in privileged positions and spaces. Science and technology organizations and institutions work tirelessly to reveal progress in North America

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and Europe, yet access remains problematic, and lacking, for Black and brown nations. Even basic survival has been challenging as rich nations seize a large majority of vaccines causing a depravity in poorer countries.4 The imbalances of power and the suffering of the have-nots are especially evident as the world battles the pandemic. In Postcolonial Plays: An Anthology, Helen Gilbert describes Harvest as “a cautionary tale about the possible (mis)use of modern medical and reproductive science but also a reflection on economic and social legacies of Western imperialism.”5 Harvest echoes the old historical pattern in which the “first world” continues to advance forward, always managing to reestablish privilege, while the marginalized “third world” and its communities remain disposable. The play’s grim portrayal of the commodification of brown bodies disrupts popular notions of global technological advancements and progress made at the cost of those most vulnerable. While showcasing science and technology onstage as a prosperous extension of a nation’s burgeoning development, this cautionary tale borrows from offstage realities to orchestrate an intervention to challenge mainstream misrepresentations of progress that examine human loss on the path to progress. Padmanabhan, in her introduction to Harvest, claims that the writing was inspired from actual news reports in 1995 about the illegal trade of human organs in India.6 The play, as social commentary, is both prologue and epilogue in its performative duality that stretches beyond meaning and probability in that it stages a future that is here and happening. Harvest happens in an imagined future of the year 2010. Globalization has divided the world between the exploiter and the exploited. The world has witnessed these story lines in various capacities since the play’s inception and premiere in 1997, and tragically continues to do so. Organ Trafficking and Migration: A Bibliometric Analysis of an Untold Story, published in 2020, states that trafficking of human beings for the purpose of organ removal remains largely absent from policy debates, its crime hardly detected, reported, or researched—and the victims continue to be vulnerable populations.7 What insights does Harvest continue to provide three decades later? The answer lies in the ever-inspiring ending of the play, where Harvest undertakes enormous social responsibility. The play stages a humanitarian crisis of ethics by centralizing the impact of progress made at the cost of fringe nations and communities by those in power—individuals, corporations, and nations.

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While the oppression by the West is undeniable, Padmanabhan does not shy away from her critique of the unsettling conditions at home. The hierarchical trappings of the haves and the havenots explore oppression that stretches in all directions. Members of marginalized groups internalize the oppression, often muting their own suffering and instead inflicting oppressive behaviors upon other members of their persecuted group.8 Paulo Freire’s idea of “horizontal violence” is staged often in Harvest as oppressed members strike out at each other due to their sociocultural politics, historical relationship to trauma, and a poverty-stricken outlook that focuses on short-term gains.9 To draw attention to the many connections between the proposed realities onstage with those occurring offstage, this chapter explores the art-imitating-life narrative of Harvest. How do brown bodies become commodities for the West? What is problematic about survival tactics available for marginalized communities? In examining how science and technology have problematized the performance of ethics and the survival of fringe communities in India, this chapter investigates the presentation and performance of brown bodies as contested spaces that become the site of resistance. Through Harvest, I contend that the playwright makes room for critical engagement with resistance which grants authority and ownership of the individual to her body. Political theory has traditionally concerned itself with the public sphere, often lacking to fully acknowledge feminist scholarship that has consistently claimed that the public sphere gains its meaning and significance in contrast and opposition to the private world.10 Harvest models an intersectional feminist critique that recognizes historical contexts for a greater understanding of political and social inequities.11 Kimberle Crenshaw states that intersectional subordination need not be intentionally produced, but it is frequently the consequence of the imposition of one burden that interacts with preexisting vulnerabilities to create yet another dimension of disempowerment.12 The downward spiral of disempowerment is central to the Harvest narrative, which traps the characters. Categories of race, ethnicity, sexuality, culture, nation, and gender not only intersect but are mutually constituted, formed, and transformed within transnational power-laden processes such as European imperialism, colonialism, and neoliberal globalization.13 Yet, while taking in the many macro issues at hand it is also necessary that we not lose sight of the bodies, cultural nuances,

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their micro effects, the specificities that bring us to the threshold of this complex engagement and ultimately weave us together into the fold of a broader cultural narrative about the human condition. Harvest details the life of Om Prakash who falls prey to trading his poor brown body to wealthy white consumerists. His decision entangles the fate of his family and the majority of them succumb to a fatalist end—except Jaya, his wife. Jaya emerges as the sole survivor who stages a resistance. The representation of brown bodies as contested spaces that ignite resistance is inherent to India’s colonial history. Harvest comes from a long line of works that speak to themes of oppression experienced by brown bodies. Modern Indian theatre’s tradition of representing colonial struggle dates as far back as 1860 with Dinabandhu Mitra’s play, Neel Darpan (The Indigo Mirror), which focused on the forced system of indigo cultivation in Bengal. The East India Company encouraged a (European) planter class to grow indigo, which was valued in European markets, and the indigo from India fetched the highest remittance for the company.14 Little was done to enforce laws in support of the native laborers, whose oppression included physical violence, detention, nonpayment, and forcible planting of indigo seeds in their lands.15 Sukanya Banerjee reports that the planters’ violence took up considerable stage-time at the opening of the National Theater in 1872, the first professional Bengali theatre company in Calcutta.16 A prominent social reformer Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar apparently flung a shoe at the actor playing the character of Rogue, an Englishman.17 Further still, the play’s staging in Lucknow in 1875 would unsettle Indian and European spectators alike. Rogue’s depiction reportedly annoyed a few Englishmen; they then tried to beat up the actor who stands up to Rogue’s villainy in the play.18 The performance of Neel Darpan was disrupted, and audiences and performers were escorted out of the theatre.19 Neel Darpan’s commentary about colonial oppression revealed theatre’s ability to incite thought and action. I draw upon this connection between Neel Darpan and Harvest to highlight the historical legacy of sociopolitical theatre in India as an ongoing site of resistance. Deidre Heddon states that performance is particularly suited to a political agenda because it is capable of staging a direct and immediate address to the spectator.20 Padmanabhan through Harvest makes global and transcultural links out of the old anticolonial processes of intervention and lands on the brown female body as

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a critical contested space. The politics that wish to control Jaya’s body echo old strategies of colonial domination. Jaya’s body is the site of patriarchal power and subaltern resistance. She seeks liberation and mobilizes herself, and by extension sparks collective mobilization. She does the unexpected by challenging the arrogance of the West for assuming passivity of the poor masses. Jaya creates space for marginalized voices to carve out their agency to perform social change and make possible a feminist future. Donna Haraway writes that stories are not “fictions” in the sense of being “made up” but devices to produce certain kinds of meaning.21 Harvest is a crisis narrative that connects with the larger public crisis of global human trafficking and its impact on economically and politically marginalized communities and nations. In attempting to bridge the gap between fact and fiction, the play offers audiences an opportunity to reflect on many meaningful connections. The text draws alliances with resistance literature because it emerges from an arena of struggle that is identifiable in the public. For instance, the theme of poverty that is dominant in the play is also an extreme everyday reality in India. Mumbai is home to Dharavi, one of the largest slums in the world. The text is performative due to its insistence on acting as an agent for change via its engagement with current social and political concerns. In the play, InterPlanta Services, a rich US-based multinational corporation, provides hightech gadgets aimed at making the poverty-stricken lives of the characters more comfortable. InterPlanta has a large set-up that utilizes brown bodies as commodities for its wealthy members who desire organ transplants and whole-body transplants to eradicate illnesses and aging. The transactional exchanges are conducted exclusively via the use of technology that does not require their privileged clientele to set foot in poverty-stricken regions. Organs are purchased, and harvested, from destitute brown communities and nations, while the rich West continues to reap the benefits of biomedical progress. Brown bodies are characterized as anonymous collectives, instead of individuals. The poor are depersonalized, as Zoe Detsi-Diamanti points that issues of identity, race relations, and culture are determined purely by economic qualifications.22 Ideologies of race and the disposability of individuals are entangled with capitalist profiteering. Om Prakash and his wife Jaya live in a compact one-room space in a Mumbai chawl, a type of residential building that arose in the

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early twentieth century to house the labor class. Several hundred residents reside in these buildings. Restrooms are typically located in communal areas, such as inner courtyards, and shared by all residents.23 Om’s aging mother, Ma, also lives with them. Together they represent a joint family system, a traditional set-up consisting of multigenerations under one roof. Om also has a younger brother, Jeetu, who comes and goes as he pleases. The play opens with Ma and Jaya awaiting the return of Om. Ma has her ear glued to the wall trying to hear conversations happening next door. This simple gesture informs audiences of their mundane every day. Despite being the matriarch, Ma’s power is limited—partially due to her widowed position. A woman loses social rank with the death of her husband. Ma bickers over little details, and most of this is directed at her daughter-in-law. She intimately mimics the cultural stereotype of a mother-in-law in her exchanges, and attitude, toward Jaya. MA . . . You’ll suffer in your next life. See if you don’t! You’ll be made into a cockroach and I’ll have to smash you—(lifts her bare foot and stamps hard) just like this one. (shows Jaya the underside of her foot) See? Do you see your fate?24 The domestic life for the two women trapped in their tiny space is ground zero for building resentment. Ma’s bitterness is also targeted at Jeetu—who she considers as “rude, insolent, ungrateful.”25 Her behavior toward Jeetu is diametrically opposed to how she treats Om. MA Nah! The gods left a jackal in my belly by mistake when they made him—maybe that’s why you like him—he’s just like you, rude, insolent, ungrateful.26 Ma’s bitter disposition reflects her joyless reality. She is lucky that her beloved son Om has not abandoned her, which is the fate of many widows in poverty. Ma intricately understands that winning Om’s love is critical to her survival. Meanwhile, Jaya is trapped in a loveless marriage and continually fights for validity within the family structure. Jaya has little influence over her husband’s

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decisions and Ma’s ruthless sarcasm. In her attempt to seek validation in her personhood, Jaya is drawn closer to Jeetu. She is not a typical daughter-in-law. Like Om, she, too, is trapped in a cultural construct that continually limits her. The gender construct restricts equity to members in a familial structure. But Jaya’s rebellion is growing. Her interactions with her husband and mother-in-law often expose her as bold and outspoken, and her affair with Jeetu complicates her stance even deeper. Both Jaya and Jeetu rebel in their pursuit of independence. Jeetu’s rebellion is more public and Jaya’s largely private. Their struggle is gendered. Jeetu is punished by the family but is never fully disowned for his work as a male prostitute. His position as male gives him access to privilege and freedom to take risks. The situation is dire from the onset as Om, the only earning member of the family, has lost his job. Shital Pravinchandra rightly claims that globalization has engaged the poor in multiple areas of production and re-production in the service and advancement of the rich.27 The desire to overcome poverty is overwhelming, which makes them succumb to the seduction of wealth. There is not much exposition about why Om lost his job or pondering over what other alternatives he could pursue. Poverty directly impedes Om’s ability to make life decisions, and he succumbs to InterPlanta’s faux narrative. Om enters the stage having accepted employment with InterPlanta. The company has agreed to provide for him and his family in exchange for his organs. Om does not display confidence in this choice and speaks in covert ways that make it harder for Ma to grasp the true nature of his new job. InterPlanta quickly takes over the one-room chawl space via clinical procedures to sanitize and install a “contact module” that monitors the family-like specimens in a laboratory.28 In colonizing the one-room chawl space, InterPlanta also colonizes the behavior and relationships between the family members. There emerges a direct parallel, a mimicking of historical traditions and practices of colonization. Through InterPlanta we observe how the colonizer operates to unsettle the space, bodies, and minds of the colonized. Multicolored pellets, or “goat shit” as Jaya claims, are their assigned source of food.29 The entire family must follow a regimented lifestyle to ensure the well-being of their health and their internal organs. Through the “contact module” appears Ginni, a white, blond, American woman and client of InterPlanta. The trope of the

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white savior asserts itself, for the family becomes mesmerized by Ginni’s technological presentation as beautiful and giving. This can be approached as another colonized response. She holds the key to their survival—when in fact, it is the other way around. Ginni suffers from certain medical conditions and is expected to receive Om’s organs. Through the “contact module,” Ginni monitors and instructs the family on appropriate safety and health measures as dictated by the program. The presence of technology is InterPlanta’s method to police the bodies, to coerce them to do as needed based on a systematic, machine-like manual that strips away all humanity at the cost of capitalist investments. InterPlanta has invested in Om, and he carries the weight of this debt. Om’s response is reflective of his colonized behavior. He has adopted InterPlanta’s outlook and internalized his oppression. Om recognizes his body and existence as disposable. He undervalues the ultimate sacrifice he has made by signing away his body, and although he experiences some momentary respite from his dire situation he lacks the insight to fully comprehend his colossal error. Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks describes colonized people as not simply those whose labor has been appropriated but those who have embedded in their souls an inferiority complex created by the death and burial of their local and cultural originality.30 British colonialism oppressed the body and the psyche of the colonized collective of India. There is much ongoing discourse about the colonized body and its relationship to the colonizer from a historical standpoint which continues to impact and inform relationships between wealthy white nations and poor brown (and Black) countries across the globe.31 The monetizing of bodies is integral to the historical development of Western countries that are economically thriving. As noted by Zoe Detsi-Diamanti, Harvest lives in the insidious power of neocolonialism.32 Instead of colonialism’s direct rule of power, neocolonialism impacts countries like India via economic, cultural, and political infiltration. Indian donors, as stated by Gilbert, are constrained by their limited access to capital and knowledge whereas the American receivers position themselves all too easily as the beneficiaries of the world’s human and material resources.33 Capitalist ventures protect white/rich clientele and operate without any social and moral responsibility. The burden of humanity is instead on the shoulders of the somewhat unwitting brown participants who fail to see, or question, the

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full extent of the crises at hand. The character of Ma serves as a fitting example in this framework as she aligns herself with her capitalist oppressor. With no considerations for her family and their collective one-room chawl space, she summons her inevitable doom by authorizing InterPlanta to install for herself an ultimate top-ofthe-line multimedia experience called Super Deluxe Video Couch model XL 5000. AGENT 1 Uhn—This is the Super Deluxe Video Couch model XL 5000! We are certain it will provide you, our valued customer, with every satisfaction! This is the organic-input interface—the hydration filter—the pangrometer! Here you see the Lexus Phantasticon which is programmed to receive seven hundred and fifty video channels from all over the world! There are ten modes, seventeen frequencies, three sub-strate couplers, extrasensory feedback impulses and cross-net capturing facilities! All media access—satellite, bio-tenna, visitelly and radiogonad. Manual control panel, neuro stimulator and full body processing capacities—all other queries will be answered online from within the VideoCouch self-training program.34 InterPlanta’s occupation of Om’s family, representative of marginalized communities and nations, is reminiscent of British colonial legacy and their practice of “divide and rule.” Divide and rule was the conscious effort of an imperialist power to create and/ or turn to its own advantage the ethnic, linguistic, cultural, tribal, or religious differences within the population of a subjugated colony.35 Lord Elphinstone said, “Divide et impera was an old Roman maxim, and it shall be ours.”36 A systematic policy of fomenting separate consciousness among Hindu and Muslim communities was launched. The basic tactics of divide and rule served colonial interests within the colonized population, and sadly the politicization of the enhancing communal differences spilled well into the postcolonial period.37 Divide and rule continues to serve neocolonial foreign powers and political groups vying for power on the domestic election(s) front. The historical legacy of divide and rule has created a deep-rooted mistrust within oppressed communities whose members lack faith in the collective, and, as

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Fanon states, “the colonized is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country’s cultural standards. He becomes whiter as he renounces his blackness, his jungle.”38 The family in Harvest betrays each other in attempts to carve out their individualistic survival paths. The corruption begins from the outside, but the insiders are also culpable of damage. The divide and rule emerges as members begin to act in fear, prioritizing their needs as individuals rather than the collective whole. The preexisting familial cracks deepen, and hostility builds, when they are exposed to wealth. The dog-eat-dog philosophy leads Om to submit to his fears to the gross extent that he freezes when InterPlanta comes to harvest him and so they take Jeetu instead. Om is unable to speak up, to intervene on behalf of his brother and rescue him from the clutches of death. Jeetu becomes a sacrificial lamb, and the theme of brown bodies being disposable and interchangeable comes to further fruition onstage. In the case of Ma, she demonstrates little interest in anyone or anything besides television. She is literally consumed by the high-tech Super Deluxe Video Couch model XL 5000 via the physical insertion of her body in a coffin-like machine. Ma and machine are forever united until death, or malfunction, do them part. Technology and the human body are no more separate entities, appearing more resolved in/with each other. Ma participates in what Arjun Appadurai calls technoscapes and mediascapes. These scapes are global configurations of technology related to landscapes of images.39 They refer to the distribution of the electronic capabilities to produce and disseminate information, which involve complicated inflections depending on their mode (documentary or entertainment), their hardware (electronic or preelectronic), their audiences (local, national, or transnational), and the interests of those who own and control them.40 Mediascapes provide many complex repertoires of images and narratives, and through this neocolonialist lens we view the world of commodities and the world of news and politics as profoundly mixed. There lies a direct parallel with Ma as the lines between the realistic and the fictional landscapes are blurred. As Appadurai asserts, the farther away these audiences are from the direct experiences of metropolitan life, the more likely they are to construct imagined worlds that are chimerical, aesthetic, even fantastic objects, particularly if assessed by the criteria of some other perspective, some other imagined

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world.41 Ma exits out of her real world to participate more fully in a virtual reality. Om’s fate is bleak. Accountability and male privilege share a skewed relationship here. The system that values his position as male also sets him up for failure. Om is positioned as the ideal son who has been burdened with responsibilities while also battling poverty, much of which had already fractured his personhood and his destiny. He is so spiritually empty, as characterized by Gilbert, that he becomes easily seduced by wealth.42 His final exit in the play can also be seen as an exit out of his narrative. It is unknown whether he submits to InterPlanta as he desires to do during his final moments onstage or if he loses courage and disappears deep into the city. Either way, we are led to believe that people like Om are not survivors. In the end, Jaya discovers that Ginni was a computer-animated version of the reality generated by InterPlanta. Ginni is actually Virgil, an older white male residing in the United States who has already undergone four whole-body transplants in the span of fifty years. The body is no longer special, it is a mere shell that just needs organ replacement. At this point, technology is clearly advanced and valuable for it makes this possible. Virgil shares that Om was just a path to get to the others and although he claimed Jeetu’s body, ultimately all bodies were disposable because he wanted to get to Jaya. The pursuit of Jeetu’s body was solely derived from the fact that Virgil had knowledge of Jaya’s affection for Jeetu. Hence, the end goal was always Jaya because of Virgil’s desire to have a biological child through her. The interesting aspect pertaining to Virgil as a cyborg displays his choice as a white male vis-à-vis the absence of choice in the case of the brown bodies.43 Jaya’s role as a potential surrogate illuminates the ethics of international surrogacy. Legalized in 2002, India is among the leading providers of commercial surrogacy in the world. Despite its increasing significance, commercial surrogacy has largely been unregulated in India.44 The surrogacy bill was amended in 2018–19 to regulate the industry by placing a ban on commercial surrogacy and limiting services to altruistic surrogacy for infertile Indian couples.45 The bill limits LGBTQ+ families, single parents, unmarried couples, foreign citizens, and people outside specified age groups from seeking surrogacy.46 In February 2020, however, the bill was modified to include any “willing” woman to become a surrogate. There is debate that focuses on issues of morality and ethics because of

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commodification of reproductive labor, sale of babies, as well as racial and class inequities that exploit vulnerable women.47 Science and technology will continue to provide convenience to Virgil as he hopes to impregnate Jaya via artificial insemination. She is a mere surrogate. However, Jaya’s questioning increases as she grasps the depth of Virgil’s catastrophic revelation. Virgil opts for artificial insemination because he fears physical contact. He does not wish to risk his skin by traveling to a “third world”: VIRGIL Zhaya, I’d love to travel to be with you, but I can’t – JAYA You who are so powerful—you can travel from body to body – VIRGIL The environment you live in is too polluted for me, Zhaya.48 Jaya demands that Virgil must risk his skin, just as she is risking her body. Virgil must now decide how he wishes to negotiate risk. He cannot have it all. Jaya stages her protest by challenging Virgil. The play comes full circle here as Virgil is presented with an option. Jaya has the power to negotiate. Jaya’s final protest is a response to the trauma inflicted on bodies, collective memory, and history of colonized bodies. Her actions reach out to the community beyond the immediate, an imagined community that exists beyond racial and political boundaries. These are negotiations, as Appadurai suggests, between sites of agency and globally defined fields of possibility.49 This imagined community idea is also articulated by Chandra Talpade Mohanty, who foregrounds “third world women” as an analytical and political category. She furthers Benedict Anderson’s concept of “imagined community,” which proposes that a nation is made of a community of people that connect despite limitations. Mohanty explores feminist links between the histories and struggles of third world women against racism, sexism, colonialism, imperialism, and monopoly capital.50 Mohanty’s use of “imagined” does not equate to unreal; instead, it relates to potential alliances and collaborations across divisive boundaries. In addition, her use of “community”

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suggests a significant commitment, a horizontal comradeship between people despite internal hierarchies. Imagined communities, according to Mohanty, consist of women with divergent histories and social locations woven together by the political threads of opposition to forms of domination that are not only pervasive but also systemic.51 The individual and the body become metaphors for the larger community, region, and nation that have experienced colonization. However, Jaya’s actions move past metaphor. By engaging her body as the location of protest, Jaya initiates a process of decolonization to take back her body, her space, a process of repatriation and recovery. What will Jaya’s future look like? What will the consequences be for Jaya and Virgil? As Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor” states, these questions are important and that decolonization is not obliged to answer them.52 Nonetheless, this moment of defiance is a manifestation of purposeful action that challenges the status quo. Actions go further in the process of decolonizing. Her actions emanate from the personal and transfer to the public arena to influence a broader cultural narrative. A decolonizing body negotiates its identity as separate from the colonizer. JAYA No! You listen to me! I want to be left alone—truly alone. I don’t want to hear any sounds, I don’t want any disturbances. I’m going to take my pills, watch TV, have a dozen baths a day, eat for three instead of one. For the first time in my life and maybe the last time of my life, I’m going to enjoy myself, all by myself. I suggest you take some rest. You have a long journey ahead of you and it’s sure to be a hard one. Lights dim out as JAYA settles down comfortably in front of the television, bolstered by cushions. She looks happy and relaxed. She points the remote and turns the sound up loud. Rich joyous music fills the room. The end.53 For the first time, there are no preset notions for what the future holds, and this is her moment of emancipation. Her awareness is at a critical juncture because she is finally on her own, free to dictate terms and conditions. She is not seeking balance but an alternate reality

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that is elsewhere. Choosing to situate her body front and center draws greater significance to the female body as the ultimate source of power. The power of one is reinstated with Jaya. Her actions are symbolic of oppositional agency that is capable of illuminating the female body’s oppression, resistance, and radical possibility. Harvest is a cultural text that intervenes in the critical discourse of complex geopolitics that engage in the social, political, and ideological struggles. In exposing the trauma of neocolonial markets that thrive on the exploitation of brown bodies, Harvest demonstrates subaltern agency and activism. As Rajeshwari Sunder Rajan claims, if we are to avoid cultural determinism then we must also locate the liberatory space for resistance from the premise that what is made can be unmade or made differently.54 Through Jaya’s individual action, and representation of shared oppression of brown bodies, it lays emphasis on the possibility of collective participation. Jaya’s onstage disruption presents an opportunity to capture the imagination of the offstage collective; this power cannot be underestimated. Harvest highlights the intertwined relationship between aesthetics and politics. In the final moments of the play, our static participation is transferred to active witnessing. This critical shift contributes to meaning for how we see ourselves in the crisis. Harvest paints a world that weaves together local, national, and international discourses in its attempt to keep oppression of marginalized communities in the public arena. Audiences recognize Jaya’s onstage narrative as bound to the offstage world that envelopes it. This social engagement makes room for acknowledgment and accountability as attention is redirected to an alternate consciousness and awareness for what is possible. Agency claimed by Jaya is also possible for those witnessing her emancipation. We root for her strategic action beyond compassion as she rises against the machine.

Notes 1 Eshra Mitra and Julia Hollingsworth, “More Than a Dozen Slum Residents in an Indian City Say They Thought They Were Being Vaccinated. They Were Part of Clinical Trials,” CNN, February 26, 2021, https://www​.cnn​.com​/2021​/02​/25​/asia​/india​-vaccine​-trials​-covid​ -ethics​-intl​-dst​-hnk​/index​.html.

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2 Produced in India, Covaxin and Covishield were the first two vaccines to be approved by the government for distribution in India. Covaxin was locally produced in India by Bharat Biotech International Limited, while Covishield was developed by the Serum Institute of India under license from AstraZeneca (FE Online, “Covaxin: India’s First COVID19 Vaccine Candidate from Bharat Biotech to Begin Human Trials,” Financial Express, June 30, 2020, https://www​.financialexpress​.com​/ lifestyle​/health​/covaxin​-bharat​-biotech​-coronavirus​-vaccine​-india​-first​ -covid19​-vaccine​-latest​-updates​/2008500/). 3 Soutik Biswas, “Covaxin: What Was the Rush to Approve India’s Homegrown Vaccine?” BBC, January 5, 2021, https://www​.bbc​.com​/ news​/world​-asia​-india​-55534902. 4 Alexander Winning, “South Africa Warns of ‘Vaccine Apartheid’ If Rich Countries Hog Shots,” Reuters, May 10, 2021, https://www​ .reuters​.com​/world​/africa​/south​-africa​-warns​-vaccine​-apartheid​-if​-rich​ -countries​-hog​-shots​-2021​-05​-10/. 5 Helen Gilbert, “Manjula Padmanabhan: Introduction,” in Postcolonial Plays: An Anthology, ed. Helen Gilbert (London; New York: Routledge, 2001), 216. 6 Manjula Padmanabhan, Harvest (1997), revised and expanded edition (Gurgaon: Hachette India, 2017), 40, Kindle. 7 Juan Gonzalez, Ignacio Garijo, and Alfonso Sanchez, “Organ Trafficking and Migration: A Bibliometric Analysis of an Untold Story,” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 17, no. 9 (2020): 3204. 8 Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, New Rev. 20th Anniversary ed., Trans. Myra Bergman Ramos (New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group, 1993), 62. 9 Ibid. 10 Josephine Donovan, Feminist Theory: The Intellectual Traditions. (New York: Continuum, 1985), 202. 11 Kimberle Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991): 1241–99. 12 Ibid., 1249. 13 Vrushali Patil, “From Patriarchy to Intersectionality: A Transnational Feminist Assessment of How Far We’ve Really Come,” Signs 38, no. 4 (2013): 847–67. 14 Sukanya Banerjee, “Who, or What, Is Victorian?: Ecology, Indigo, and the Transimperial,” Victorian Studies 58, no. 2 (2016): 213–23.

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15 Ibid., 215. 16 Ibid., 213. 17 Amiya Rao and B. G. Rao, The Blue Devil: Indigo and Colonial Bengal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 136. 18 Sudipta Chatterjee, The Colonial Staged: Theater in Colonial Calcutta (Calcutta: Seagull, 2007), 225. 19 Nandi Bhatia, Acts of Authority/Acts of Resistance: Theatre and Politics in Colonial and Postcolonial India (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 2004), 2. 20 Deirdre Heddon, Autobiography and Performance (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008), 6. 21 Donna Haraway, Modest Witness: Second Millennium: FemaleMan meets OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience (New York: Routledge, 1997), 230. 22 Zoe Detsi-Diamanti, “Bio-Slavery, or the Cannibalistic Quest for Longevity: Harvesting for Human Organs in Manjula Padmanabhan’s Futuristic Drama,” in Biotechnological and Medical Themes in Science Fiction, ed. Domna Pastourmatzi (Thessaloniki: University Studio Press, 2002), 113. 23 Naresh Kamath and Neha Seth, “There’s Room for Everyone: How Mumbai’s Chawls Have Been Housing People for 117 Years,” Hindustan Times, April 20, 2017, https://www​.hindustantimes​.com​ /mumbai​-news​/there​-s​-room​-for​-everyone​-how​-mumbai​-s​-chawls​ -have​-been​-housing​-people​-for​-27​-years​/story​-ISM​yYhg​Y2BQ​ZzDN​ TcpG1sI​.html. 24 Padmanabhan, Harvest, 9. 25 Ibid., 8. 26 Ibid. 27 Shital Pravinchandra, “Body Markets: The Technologies of Global Capitalism and Manjula Padmanabhan’s Harvest,” in Science Fiction, Imperialism and the Third World, ed. Ericka Hoagland and Reema Sarwal (Jefferson: McFarland, 2010), 87–98. 28 Padmanabhan, Harvest, 13. 29 Ibid., 32. 30 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 2008), 18. 31 Caroline Elkins, Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2022).

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32 Detsi-Diamanti, “Bio-Slavery, or the Cannibalistic Quest for Longevity,” 112. 33 Gilbert, “Global Technoscapes,” 5. 34 Padmanabhan, Harvest, 77. 35 Richard Morrock, “Heritage of Strife: The Effects of Colonialist ‘Divide and Rule’ Strategy upon the Colonized Peoples,” Science & Society 37, no. 2 (1973): 129–51. 36 Neil Stewart, “Divide and Rule: British Policy in Indian History,” Science & Society 15, no. 1 (1951): 49–57. 37 Morrock, “Heritage of Strife,” 131. 38 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 18. 39 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 34. 40 Ibid., 35. 41 Ibid. 42 Gilbert, “Global Technoscapes,” 215. 43 Suchitra Mathur, “Caught between the Goddess and the Cyborg: Third World Women and the Politics of Science in Three Works of Indian Science Fiction,” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 39, no. 3 (2004): 128. 44 Manya Gupta and Shiromi Chaturvedi, “The Indian Ban on Commercial Surrogacy,” Gender Policy Journal, June 19, 2020, https://gpj​.hkspublications​.org​/2020​/06​/19​/the​-indian​-ban​-on​ -commercial​-surrogacy/. 45 Virginie Rozée, Sayeed Unisa, and Elise de La Rochebrochard, “The Social Paradoxes of Commercial Surrogacy in Developing Countries: India before the New Law of 2018,” BMC Women’s Health 20, no. 1 (2020): 234. 46 “The Surrogacy (Regulation) Bill, 2019,” PRS Legislative Research, June 30, 2021, https://prsindia​.org​/billtrack​/the​-surrogacy​-regulation​ -bill​-2019. 47 Gupta and Chaturvedi, “The Indian Ban on Commercial Surrogacy.” 48 Padmanabhan, Harvest, 88. 49 Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.” Public Culture 2, no. 2 (1990): 1–24.

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50 Chandra Talpade Mohant, Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 46. 51 Ibid. 52 Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012) 1–40. 53 Padmanabhan, Harvest, 92. 54 Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Real and Imagined Women: Gender, Culture and Postcolonialism (London: Routledge, 1993), 130.

9 Do Goats Have a Right to Cigarettes? A Cross-Disciplinary Investigation of the Ethics of Nonhuman Animal Performances Jennifer A. Kokai and Lauren Kokai

Frank Tolbert never meant to start a fad, but after his November 9, 1969, feature column on Aquarena Springs, central Texans began mailing their unwanted cigarettes to a goat named Guillermo. Tolbert wrote a weekly column called “Tolbert’s Texas” in the Dallas Morning News and among other general interest stories documented Aquarena Springs’ claim to have the world’s largest goat. Aquarena Springs, a theme park that ostensibly centered on its geographical feature of the natural springs, existed in San Marcos,

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Texas, from 1946 to 1991. Animal performances were one of the main attractions, with Ralph the Swimming Pig the inadvertent star of a hodgepodge of entertainments including rides, a submarine theatre with a mermaid show, chicken bingo, and supposedly the World’s Largest Goat. Tolbert’s story sets out to verify this last claim but gets sidetracked; Guillermo the large goat had apparently developed quite a cigarette addiction. Tolbert wrote: At the sight of a humanoid with a pack of cigarets [sic] visible (or even at the sound of a cough, sometimes), Guillermo will brush aside his companions, the nervous or scare goats, and he will stand with forefeet on the railing of the corral and nod his shrewd face, which Ybarra [the goat’s keeper] says is his way of “begging” for a cigaret. He eats them.1 Tolbert reports that Mr. Ybarra “despairs” of keeping Guillermo in cigarettes, as they are quite costly.2 A couple of weeks later, on November 18, the story continues. Mrs. A. J. Lephakis sent Guillermo her cigarettes and a note informing him that she and her husband had quit smoking, leaving them with “$11 worth of smokes on hand. The plight of your keeper, Mr. Ybarra, of trying to provide for your nasty habit got the better of me, and so it is with great pleasure we are sending you enough cigarettes to keep you and Mr. Ybarra happy for a while, we hope.”3 On January 6, Tolbert completed his Guillermo trilogy with a column reporting that sending the goat cigarettes has become a fad in central Texas and that “Lephakis’ gesture seems to have spurred to action people all over the state who’ve quit smoking or are trying. They . . . seem to get some therapy or satisfaction from watching the goat gulp them.”4 He concluded the saga with a catchy, albeit very specific, spin on a classic nursery rhyme: “Baa baa black goat, have you any smokes? Yes, mam, yes mam, thanks to you kind folks.”5 Unlike most of the other animal performers at Aquarena Springs, Guillermo did not do anything. He did not perform in shows, he did not play bingo, and he didn’t even faint like his pen companions. As a nontraditional performer, this makes his anthropomorphization different than Ralph the Swimming Pig’s and the public’s impulse to send cigarettes and letters to a goat peculiar. For central Texans in the late 1960s, Guillermo was clearly not thought of as worthy of

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the concern shown to humans; nobody worried about the effects of cigarettes on him. But they also did not think of him as a mere beast because they respected and encouraged his preference for cigarettes. Guillermo was an adult and it was his right—like any Texan—to indulge in his negative habit. In this chapter, we will argue that Guillermo’s personality and stature created group affiliations for him outside the normal notions of what constitutes “goat” and fundamentally altered his community relationships rendering him a not-human/not-beast. Guillermo is implicated in a long genealogy of science performance, including that of zoology and natural history, complicated by his residence in a Texan theme park. We will consider the ethics of supplying Guillermo with cigarettes and argue that if we view Guillermo as an independent actor, we must view him as an end in himself and respect his autonomy. If Guillermo chooses to indulge in a bad habit, it would be negatively paternalistic to disallow him this option. To arrive at this claim, we bring together the unlikely pairing of performance studies and biomedical research. While the biomedical research lens helps us understand the impact of cigarettes on the goat’s body and well-being, the performance studies lens helps us identify assumptions a scientist might take for granted. There are well-defined principles that scientists use to guide animal research policy. First and foremost, these principles are designed with the understanding that animal research is critical to advancing scientific knowledge, developing medical therapeutics, and improving human health. Therefore, animal research is conducted with the explicit understanding that advancing human health is of highest priority. Once participation in animal research is initiated, ethical principles dictate that use of animals should be minimized by replacement with computer models or in vitro (outside of life) investigation, reduced to the lowest possible phylogenetic species and number of replicates, and refined to minimize pain and distress. Therefore, scientific study utilizing animals is rigorously regulated and delicately conducted with respect for both the animal and the greater value that the animal sacrifice will have toward advancing scientific progress. But Guillermo was not facilitating medical research; he was performing in an amusement park. While biomedical research views animals through their use value for humans, the tendency in performance studies is to understand

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animals largely as metaphors, instead of attending to the actual physical animal as an individual being.6 These works are valuable in their illumination of why performances include animals and what these inclusions might mean. However, our question is not about human perspective. It is about the goat. Our conclusion, drawing upon both disciplines, has real-world implications for other nonhuman performers, as the standard conception of animal performance ethics stresses optimizing health and well-being, prizing longevity of life above preference. The example of Guillermo helps illuminate the threads of paternalism undergirding many cultural beliefs in the United States that shape informal and formal decisions about how identity groups may control their own lives.

Guillermo as a Performer Aquarena Springs theme park was built in 1950 in San Marcos, Texas, on Spring Lake. It was an expansion of a resort hotel constructed by Arthur Rogers in 1928. Spring Lake, which houses numerous endangered species, is the headwaters of the San Marcos River and is in the Edwards Aquifer. The springs were always the major draw, as the attraction’s evolution indicates. Ralph the Swimming Pig was the breakout attraction of the park and became synonymous with Aquarena Springs. While the park’s first pigs were lightly anthropomorphized, the renamed Ralph developed an extensive repertoire of human behaviors and roles. “Ralph” was cast in the Submarine Theatre shows with a specific character, represented by a costumed human in a mascot uniform for photographs and guest visits, and featured in painted murals in the park and marketing materials dressed in a variety of costumes. The other animals in the park, including Guillermo, were not as heavily personified as Ralph and not nearly as popular or beloved; their reputations hinged upon their ability to do tricks (bingoplaying chickens) or their status as dangerous predators (alligators). Guillermo was likely rendered dull by the fact that Aquarena Springs housed him with fainting goats. “Nervous goats,” as Tolbert labels them, or myotonic goats as they are formally known, suffer from stiffness and rigidity when startled as a result of a hereditary genetic disorder.7 Whether it was due to breed difference or genetic mutation, Guillermo was clearly different from the outset and so did not have

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the same appeal where “children delighted in clapping their hands to elicit this strange response.”8 As a performer, Guillermo lacked the affective or physical “hooks” of the other animals in the park, and his display at first seems more in line with zoological displays. Aquarena Springs advertised itself as a nature-centered park, but just how was “nature” incorporated or presented within its boundaries? In the book Reading Zoos: Representations of Animals and Captivity, Randy Malamud argues that cultural attitudes from Western society’s past continue to shape our attitudes toward nonhuman animals.9 Humans experience “biophilia,” an inherent interest and connection with other living beings, but “the more pervasive zoos become as a mediating institution between people and animals, the more impoverishment and degradation we can expect to characterize any of our numerous cultural practices that interact with the realm of animals.”10 For many people, zoos are the primary location they see or interact with animals, and so their understanding of and relationships with nonhuman animals are inevitably shaped by the artificial and often science-focused framing of the modern zoo. In Aquarena Springs, the theme park framing attended even less to representing the animal in the wild; the park instead used animals as entertainment in order to increase revenue through attendance. While Guillermo’s origins are unknown, Aquarena Springs’ management clearly found it advantageous to find a hook to market him. The park’s first attempt highlighted his large size, which even allowed him to transport humans, but what inadvertently caught Tolbert and then the public’s imagination was his addiction to cigarettes. While some might argue that Guillermo’s cigarette addiction was not a performance but rather a behavior or habit, scholars such as Lynda Birke, Mette Bryld, and Nina Lykke draw upon Judith Butler to contend that we should see “non-human otherness as a doing or becoming, produced and reproduced in specific contexts of human/non-human interaction.”11 Just as gender is produced through social-cultural interactions and is thus performance, they argue, so too can the observed ways that nonhuman animals behave be more fairly regarded as constructed performances than some sort of “natural” behavior. With this framework, all of Guillermo’s actions could be considered as performances constructed through his relationship with human beings, his cigarette consumption being apparently the most interesting to the audiences.

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It is possible to argue that Texans’ sympathies or emotional connection lay not with Guillermo himself but rather with Al Ybarra, his keeper. To be sure, the journalist interviews Ybarra and it is his voice we hear and not Guillermo’s. Tolbert also uses hyperbolic language, stating that Ybarra is “in despair” over the costs of keeping Guillermo in cigarettes and suggesting he might have to add additional manual labor to his job by rolling the goat’s cigarettes instead of feeding him ready-made ones.12 However, other aspects of the newspaper stories suggest Guillermo is very much being ascribed a more human-like character. Lephakis’s letter that accompanied the cigarettes was not addressed to Ybarra but rather Guillermo directly. And Tolbert clarifies that Guillermo, like humans, refuses to eat “pure tobacco” but will only accept rolled cigarettes and “an occasional cigar.”13 The materiality of this observation connects Guillermo to both contemporary discourse around smoking and Guillermo’s own actual health. The first antismoking coalition was formed in 1964.14 Guillermo’s costly habit was mentioned in passing playfully by Ybarra to criticize the state government, “especially after what that taxing legislature did to us.”15 In 1961, a 2 percent sales tax on cigarettes was introduced, which steadily rose to 3 ¼ percent by 1969 when Guillermo’s addiction hit the papers. For Texans, the increasing woes of Guillermo’s habit were familiar. At the same time, as a goat, his cigarette addiction was unusual and thus uncanny. An animal performing unnatural or anthropomorphic behaviors as part of a show, such as Ralph the Pig diving upon command or Guillermo’s pen mates fainting when children clapped, signifies differently to audiences than an animal which seems to be spontaneously performing an unnatural or anthropomorphic behavior. Lourdes Orozco writes in Theatre & Animals (2014) that control is the most common point to performances with animals. As Orozco argues, “The control exercised by trainers over animals that is at the centre of wild animal acts—and to different degree, all performances that involve live animals—has become a public demonstration of humans’ dominance over the natural world.”16 Because Guillermo’s actions were not trained, and because they were presented as being contrary to the keeper’s wishes, Guillermo appeared to have more agency. Perhaps this seeming agency helped smokers identify with Guillermo; they too understood what it was like to not fit in and to have a habit that others around them

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complained about or penalized them for. His status and his habits made him a hybrid figure, neither fully goat nor human, allowing Texans to sympathize with his habit enough to send him their cigarettes but not enough to worry about the potential costs to his health. This is supported by Tolbert’s third column, which describes quitting smokers bringing and watching Guillermo consume their cigarettes as “sort of like primitive sacrificial rites.”17 If Guillermo’s plight as a cigarette addict in an increasingly cigarette-hostile society engendered empathy, it is important to look at other aspects of his ascribed identity and how they might have influenced Tolbert’s Texan readers’ perceptions of him. As historians have documented, the late 1960s and early 1970s represented a shift in the perception of many identity categories, including that of Texan masculinity.18 There is extensive historical documentation of the Texan self-mythology as one that prized independence, “simple” ways, and nostalgic glorifying of the notion of a “wild west.” In the 1960s, much of this identity was represented nationally and internationally by Lyndon Baines Johnson, who strategically played up his Texan identity by performing a plain-spoken, land-rooted, rugged masculine independence. This notion of “The Texan” dated back to the white American takeover of Mexican and Indigenous lands.19 Though not unique to them among even Americans, Texans fiercely prized independence and so curtailing things like smoking, even for public health reasons, infringed upon their sense of identity. Guillermo, as a down-home goat of the earth, could well be included as an outraged Texan. Guillermo was a goat, but he was also a Texan, a performer, a minor celebrity, and a named and personified creature with preferences.20

The Ethics of Feeding Goats Cigarettes Given the morass of Guillermo’s ascribed identity positions, some of which may encourage paternalism and some of which may grant autonomy, we asked ourselves whether scientific knowledge could provide ethical insight into Guillermo’s human-sustained cigarette habit. The study of biomedical ethics involves a systematic approach to deconstructing scenarios, applying universal principles, and making judgments about the “rightness” or “wrongness” of human behavior. Using conventions of biomedical ethics, we

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defined the nature of the ethical issue; identified stakeholders; listed all relevant facts, both known and unknown; clarified underlying values; applied guiding ethical principles like respect for persons and utilitarianism; and determined the best outcome. In short, we needed to not just analyze the social and cultural characteristics ascribed to Guillermo (that which a performance studies methodology reveals) but also ascertain the extent to which Guillermo’s health may have been impacted by his cigarette habit and if Guillermo’s caretaker was educated on these factors. To determine these facts, we consulted scientific publications and the prevailing scientific knowledge available at the time. Literature reporting acute toxicity in children from tobacco ingestion predates the period of Guillermo’s addiction. In a 1953 article, Ake Gyllenswärd and Folke Nordbring published a case report of an eighteen-month-old child with symptoms of sino-auricular block (failure of electrical stimulus to leave sinoatrial node resulting in fainting, altered mental status, chest pain, hypoperfusion, and signs of shock), vomiting, drowsiness, tachycardia (accelerated heart beat), and pallor (pale skin color) following ingestion of 0.2 cigarettes.21 Therefore, published toxicology literature evidences the potential health costs to Guillermo’s addiction and suggests that by 1969 (sixteen years after Gyllensward and Nordbring’s case report) awareness of these costs had likely grown. While literature on human toxicity of cigarettes described acute exposure, Guillermo had long-term, repetitive exposure to cigarettes, a scenario akin to farm animals permitted to graze in tobacco fields. It was also known at the time that tobacco, even when dried, is toxic for livestock and that tobacco’s toxin nicotine, an alkaloid, irritates the stomach, intestines, and the nervous system.22 In the study of toxicology, chemical toxicity is determined by administering a range of doses usually measured in milligrams (mgs). The “lethal dose” required to exterminate 50 percent of the test population (LD50) is described per 100 grams for smaller animals like rodents, or per kilogram (kg) for bigger test subjects. Nicotine toxicology information suggests that a dangerous dose of nicotine is roughly 0.8  milligram/kilogram. Considering that an average cigarette contains between 6.17 and 12.65  milligrams nicotine, the LD50 of orally consumed nicotine would correlate with approximately 0.06–0.13 cigarettes per animal weight in kilograms. However, for adults or larger animals, it is thought that the low pH in the

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stomach impairs the release of nicotine from ingested tobacco plant material, reducing estimated nicotine absorption to 4–8 milligram per cigarette and increasing the nicotine LD50 to 0.1–0.2 milligram (mg) per kilogram of animal weight. Assuming we believe Tolbert that Guillermo was “as big as an average yearling cow” or about 850 lbs[6] (363 kilograms), Guillermo would need to consume at least thirty-six cigarettes in a short period of time to show the symptoms of nicotine toxicity described earlier. Given the described costs associated with cigarettes, Guillermo’s consumption would not likely reach levels considered to pose immediate risk to his viability. Other components of cigarettes include variable concentrations of arsenic, cadmium, copper, lead, and zinc.23 Environmental factors, production practices, and soil characteristics significantly impact the accumulation of metals within the tobacco leaf and therefore it is difficult to determine how much, if any at all, of the metals listed were present in Guillermo’s cigarettes. Further, for many of the listed metals, only a small percentage of ingested material is actually absorbed into the body (2–6 percent of cadmium, for example).24 Therefore, the toxicities of other cigarette dry components are likely subsequent to those described for nicotine. In short, Guillermo’s health was not likely impacted in any significant way by eating the cigarettes. To further determine if enabling Guillermo to consume cigarettes was unethical, it is also necessary to assess the degree to which the behavior affected his quality of life. The concept of quality of life (QOL) dates back to a 1947 definition of health by the World Health Organization (WHO) as a “state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease and infirmity.”25 In contemporary health care, QOL metrics include subjective measurements of mood and attitude; general feelings of well-being; and activity, appetite, and the alleviation of distressing symptoms such as pain, weakness, and dyspnea.26 If Guillermo’s caretakers or the public observed negative health consequences from ingestion of cigarettes, continued cigarette feeding would be unethical. Therefore, to determine the ethical implications of feeding Guillermo cigarettes, we performed a line-drawing analysis to identify the likelihood that Guillermo’s QOL was impacted by cigarette consumption. In this exercise, we created a list of several possible scenarios enabling caretakers to

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recognize a negative impact of cigarettes on Guillermo’s QOL and drew a line between the observable evidence that would indicate if the outcomes were “probably unknown” or “probably known.” Each factor was considered in the context of available knowledge at the time and marked by an “X” between the negative and positive continuum indicating the most likely outcome for each factor. The overall assessment of Guillermo eating cigarettes on his QOL was then determined by visual summation of all possible factors (Figure 10). Apart from immediate loss of life, symptoms of nicotine toxicity like high blood pressure and elevated heart rate would go unnoticed absent regular physicals, which the keeper likely did not perform. We therefore conclude that the impact of his consumption could not have been immediate or direct, because the most noticeable side effect, diarrhea, would have been extremely unpleasant to guests. With no obvious downside, allowing him cigarettes would have likely produced better behavior and a more amiable goat than would any attempt to wean him from his addiction. Aquarena Springs’ primary goal was revenue (hardly the basis for an ethical

FIGURE 10  Visual representation of moral reasoning used to

determine the likelihood that Guillermo’s caretakers saw immediate negative health consequences from cigarette ingestion. The moral line-drawing method places two paradigm scenarios on the left and right, with an “X” marking a reasonable expectation of what occurred.

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standard), yet the entertainment value of his cigarette consumption anthropomorphizing added to his value as a spectacle and attraction. Using utilitarian principles, enabling Guillermo’s cigarette habit is justified as a means to promoting the greatest benefit for the most people. Ecotourism scholars Amir Shani and Abraham Pizam argue that there are three contemporary stances on the ethical care for nonhuman animal performers.27 On one end of the spectrum is the view that animals are subordinate to humans and thus deserve no special consideration; from this vantage point, providing Guillermo with cigarettes was ethical simply because it kept them away from people. The other extreme is the position of philosopher Peter Singer, who argues that animals should not be kept or put in performance situations under any circumstances.28 The moderate position, most publicly embraced, is that it is acceptable to keep and display animals as long as they are provided a healthy diet, medical care, and intellectual engagement, and that their captivity does not actively harm them.29 Guillermo’s care would fail to meet these standards, as by 1969 information campaigns educated the public that smoking cigarettes was bad for health (though his caretakers were likely less familiar with toxicity through ingestion). However, the position that it would be ethical to deny Guillermo cigarettes constructs a paternalistic relationship between the keepers and Guillermo, wherein Guillermo’s desire for cigarettes is less important than their assessment that he would be better without them. Although a more traditional view of nonhuman performers might suggest that goats lack the desire for liberty in a meaningful sense, a critical approach to paternalism may still be valuable. In this case, the actions of an animal such as Guillermo can be seen as a performance, a doing or becoming based upon his relationship with humans, and Guillermo primarily a performer. What is optimal care for a wild goat is meaningless and what is relevant are the performances of this goat in these unusual circumstances. Just as smoking makes some humans happy, consuming cigarettes presumably made Guillermo happy. Denying him cigarettes on the grounds of scientific abstractions (such as the impact on his estimated length of life) ironically renders him the “thing,” subject to the human domination that animal rights activists advocate against.

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Within the United States, paternalistic efforts are often viewed as unavoidably oppressive, despite (or perhaps regardless of) the intentions that motivate them. As the economists Ted O’Donoghue and Matthew Rabin argue, “Heavy-handed policy interventions, such as banning purchases of goods that some people are prone to mistakenly consume, can cause significant harm in those for whom the behavior is rational.”30 Prevailing economic theory has long centered on the idea that all humans are rational actors who, given the opportunity or education, make choices that most benefit them. More recent work indicates that humans, like goats, have “a tendency to pursue immediate gratification” in a way that may be harmful or regrettable.31 Is it fair or ethical to hold an adult performer to a higher standard than we hold ourselves, simply because he is a goat? Many scholars of paternalism argue that the root goal is never truly caretaking: after all, if it were about serving disenfranchised people, members of the group could express their own preferences. Paternalism is instead a mechanism to uphold the status quo of power.32 Even though there are no observable health risks, basing the decision of whether or not to provide cigarettes on the possibility of shortening his life would still be privileging the public’s benefit of his performances over his own happiness. Discourse on paternalism traditionally focuses on its relevance to humans, where the ethical principle of respect for persons requires that “all individuals should be treated as autonomous agents, and persons with diminished autonomy are entitled to protection.”33 Furthermore, the primary ethical framework used by researchers, the Belmont Report, describes informed consent as a necessary aspect of showing respect for persons and states that all subjects, to the degree that they are capable, should be allowed informed consent. According to the report, informed consent requires three elements: information, comprehension, and voluntariness.34 We recognize that Guillermo is not a human but also that we have no way to judge Guillermo’s knowledge or comprehension. We could argue that as a goat he cannot meaningfully consent to his cigarette addiction and that in his case paternalism (aka “protection”) is justified. The counterargument is that this understanding of goats, and animal performers in general, denies their decision-making autonomy even while ascribing them a human personality and a job as an entertainer.

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Looking at Guillermo as an individual echoes Bruno Latour’s call in The Politics of Nature to think of the planet as a collective and that nothing, not a “whale, river, climate, earthworm, tree, calf, cow, pig, brood,” be thought of as means to an end but rather as an end in itself.35 In doing so, we configure Guillermo’s relationships to his Aquarena Springs’ keepers and to those providing him with cigarettes as relationships that foreground Guillermo’s agency, irrespective of human use value. Therefore, there is no reason to critique Mrs. A. J. Lephakis for her impulsive generosity in sending Guillermo and Mr. Ybarra her cigarettes nor Ybarra for passing them on. Either we ascribe Guillermo agency as a performer, which gives him the autonomy to make choices about his cigarette consumption, or we recognize Guillermo as a nonhuman animal that exists outside the purview of human social frameworks. It is Guillermo’s gray-area status between performer and asocial being that prompts people to ask an ethical question about his cigarettes in the first place.

Conclusion While scientists look to eliminate “bias,” humanities scholars argue that true objectivity is not possible. Identity and culture shape how we see and understand each other, who we consider to be autonomous beings, how we recognize body sovereignty or determine ethical cross-species interactions, and how we make and perceive performances. Bias shapes what scientific questions are asked in any given time and (often) assumes human lives are the most valuable. A scientist may be able to answer whether eating cigarettes will harm a goat, but they are less equipped to evaluate why a goat was named Guillermo, why Guillermo was fed cigarettes, why eating cigarettes counted as a performance, and what on earth about this performance resonated enough with central Texans in the late 1960s to merit a trilogy of newspaper articles. While our field-specific training is typically put into practice for divergent projects, our study of Guillermo’s cigarette habit (and the human behaviors that enabled it) models a potential interdisciplinary approach to understanding science performances. Using scientific analysis, we assessed Guillermo’s relationship with caretakers and the wider public by identifying evidence of pain,

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distress, or discomfort. Using performance analysis, we conceived of Guillermo as a person—something science would generally not permit—and considered how Guillermo’s performances constructed his identity and rights. Therefore, instead of asking, “is it okay to harm an animal?” or even “is it ok to allow an animal to harm himself?” we were able to ask: “how much harm was Guillermo causing himself and is there a greater benefit derived from this for society, a society defined as including performing goat persons?” Indeed, by reframing the initial question, articulating and dissecting the underlying assumptions of our respective disciplines, and quantifying pertinent ethical concepts, we could reach an unexpected conclusion: that there was a positive benefit to enabling Guillermo’s habit of eating cigarettes for all involved.

Notes 1 Frank Tolbert, “Tolbert’s Texas: Encounter with a Giant Goat Named Guillermo,” The Dallas Morning News, November 9, 1969, A39. 2 Ibid. 3 Frank Tolbert, “Tolbert’s Texas: Guillermo the Goat Gets More Cigarettes,” The Dallas Morning News, November 18, 1969, A19. 4 Frank Tolbert, “Tolbert’s Texas: Smokers Swamp Goat with Surplus Cigarettes,” The Dallas Morning News, January 6, 1970, A15. 5 Ibid. 6 For an excellent overview of theatre’s historical consideration of animals, we point to Lourdes Orozco’s Theatre & Animals (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Moving beyond metaphor and considering the actual animal’s experience or perspectives is a relatively newly developing thread of performance scholarship fostered by Una Chaudhuri, Catherine Young, and others. 7 Tolbert, “Tolbert’s Texas: Encounter with a Giant Goat Named Guillermo,” A39. 8 Ibid. 9 Randy Malamud, Reading Zoos: Representations of Animals and Captivity (New York: Macmillan Press, 1998), 33. 10 Ibid. 11 Lynda Birke and Nina Lykke, “Animal Performances: An Exploration of the Intersections between Feminist Science Studies

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and Studies of Human/Animal Relationships,” Feminist Theory 5 (2004): 169. 12 Tolbert, “Tolbert’s Texas: Encounter with a Giant Goat Named Guillermo,”A39. 13 Tolbert, “Tolbert’s Texas: Smokers Swamp Goat with Surplus Cigarettes,”A15. 14 J. L. Hamilton, “The Demand for Cigarettes: Advertising, the Health Scare, and the Cigarette Advertising Ban,” Review of Economics and Statistics 54 (1972): 401–11. 15 Tolbert, “Tolbert’s Texas: Encounter with a Giant Goat Named Guillermo,”A39. 16 Orozco, Theatre & Animals, 57. 17 Tolbert, “Tolbert’s Texas: Smokers Swamp Goat with Surplus Cigarettes,”A15. 18 For more on this, see Jason Dean Mellard, “Cosmic Cowboys, Armadillos, and Outlaws: The Cultural Politics of Texan Identity in the 1970s” (PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2009). 19 Ibid., 83. 20 There is more to be said about the choice of Guillermo as a name. The nuances of Latine identity in mid-century Texas exceed the scope of this chapter but may have encouraged white visitors to further other him. 21 Ake Gyllenswärd and Folke Nordbring, “Tobacco Poisoning with Sino-Auricular Block,” Acta Paediatrica 42, no. 4 (1953): 356. 22 S. D. Feurt, J. H. Jenkins, F. A. Hayes, and H. A. Crockford, “Pharmacology and Toxicology of Nicotine with Special Reference to Species Variation,” Science 127 (1958): 1054. 23 M. C. Jung, I. Thornton, and H. T. Chon, “Arsenic, Cadmium, Copper, Lead, and Zinc Concentrations in Cigarettes Produced in Korea and the United Kingdom,” Environmental Technology 19, no. 2 (1998): 237–41. 24 US Department of Health and Human Services, Public Health Service, Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, “Hazardous Substances Emergency Event Surveillance Report” (1997), http://www​ .atsdr​.cdc​.gov​/hs​/hsees​/annual97​.pdf. 25 Jerome Bickenbach, “WHO’s Definition of Health: Philosophical Analysis,” in Handbook of the Philosophy of Medicine, ed. T. Schramme and S. Edward (Netherlands: Springer Science + Business Media, 2015), 1.

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26 D. A. Karnofsky and J. H. Burchenal, “Clinical Evaluation of Chemotherapeutic Agents in Cancer,” in Evaluation of Chemotherapeutic Agents, ed. C. M. MacLeod (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949). 27 Amir Shani and Abraham Pizam, “Towards an Ethical Framework for Animal-Based Attractions,” International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management 20, no. 6 (2008). 28 Discussed in Ibid. 29 Ibid., 685. 30 Ted O’Donoghue and Matthew Rabin, “Studying Optimal Paternalism, Illustrated by a Model of Sin Taxes,” The American Economic Review 93, no. 2 (2003): 186. 31 Ibid., 187. 32 See, for example, Joe Soss, Richard C. Fording, and Sanford F. Schram, Disciplining the Poor: Neoliberal Paternalism and the Persistent Power of Race (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011) and Mary R. Jackman, The Velvet Glove: Paternalism and Conflict in Gender, Class, and Race Relations (Berkley, CA: University of California Press, 1994). 33 Bodour Salhia and Victoria Olaiya, “Historical Perspectives on Ethical and Regulatory Aspects of Human Participants Research: Implications for Oncology Clinical Trials in Africa,” JCO Global Oncology 6 (July 2020): 961. 34 Kenneth Ryan, et al., The Belmont Report (1979): 6–10. 35 Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004): 155–6.

Science Communicators Roundtable Raven Baxter, Katherine Inderbitzen, and Sahana Srinivasan

In a facilitated Zoom conversation, Raven Baxter (she/her), Katherine Inderbitzen (she/her), and Sahana Srinivasan (she/they) offered their thoughts on communicating science across media, disciplines, and geographies to young audiences. The three panelists addressed how effective science communication and diverse representations of scientific authority can help to clarify abstract concepts for nonspecialist audiences and empower young women, especially young women of color, to pursue science educations and careers. Meredith Conti: Welcome, and thank you for Zooming today. Could we please begin by asking you to introduce yourselves? Katherine Inderbitzen: My name is Katie Inderbitzen and I am a marine geologist. I currently work as an ESL (English as a Second Language) editor for a multinational company editing scientific papers for non-English speakers. It’s kind of a stopgap, career-wise, but I have been doing casual science communication for probably more than twenty years at this point. I also do some boots-on-theground outreach at the National Youth Science Camp (NYSC)1 in rural West Virginia, where we host high school students from all over the country. It’s a free summer program that’s been going on since 1963. We do some really cool stuff.

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Sahana Srinivasan: Hi, I am Sahana Srinivasan, and I am an actor, comedian, filmmaker. I mainly do linear storytelling and stand-up, but I did host a kids science show on Netflix called Brainchild2 a few years ago, which I am still reaping the rewards of, which is awesome. I am Zooming from LA but I am originally from Texas. Raven Baxter: Hello, everybody, I am Raven Baxter. I am a doctoral student at the University at Buffalo (UB),3 and I am also formerly a molecular scientist in the corporate world and currently shifting to the fields of science education and science communication. I am also known as “Raven the Science Maven,” and I use music, culture, and sometimes even fashion to tie bridges between science and the public. I am really excited about this interview. Vivian Appler: Our first question is about how you perceive yourself and in what domains do you see your work operating. Do you identify more as a scientist, a science educator, or a science communicator? What would you say are the characteristics that distinguish science practice from science education or science communication, and how might performance help to define these disciplines? RB: In my life I have worn many hats, sometimes many at one time. As far as being a scientist versus a science educator versus a science communicator, I am definitely all three of those things. I have formal training and degrees in molecular biology. And I have also worked as a career scientist doing research for drug discovery and for various cancers and diseases. So that’s the technical practice of having, you know, training and knowledge in an area and being able to carry out research or formulate questions based on that training. I am also a science educator, because of the same reasons that I am a scientist: I am now getting formal training and knowledge in education as a doctoral student. That work looks very different, that type of thinking looks very different. I consider myself an educator because I understand theory and pedagogy. I understand the science that goes into creating a positive learning environment, as well as the psychological and sociological impacts and influences that go along with it. So that’s why I consider myself an educator, but I am also a science communicator in that I am socially and culturally

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aware enough to take my technical knowledge and expertise and combine it with my pedagogical knowledge as an educator to then communicate science and create learning environments that are accessible to large groups of people. So, I consider that a communication skill. I think there is a big, blurred line between science education and communication, but there isn’t a blurred line between the practice of science and the other two. KI: I also have worn all of these hats. I think of myself mostly as a scientist. And then as a science communicator. But right now, at least for me, I am less of an educator, just because I don’t have a formal position. When I think about that blurred line between sci-com and education is when I think about my audience. Am I talking to the entire internet via my Twitter account or am I talking to a group of students, whether I am at camp or if I am in a classroom? Performance-wise, I feel like I have to perform when I am educating in a classroom or a similar “formal” setting. If I am on the Nautilus Live stream describing for young audiences what’s happening on the seafloor, I have the opportunity to be a bit weirder and more relaxed.4 SS: I feel so honored to be on this panel and I am impressed by you all because I am not really a scientist. I have not worn those hats. Growing up I was very focused on art because that is what came naturally to me. It felt like I had to choose art or science. But I have since learned about STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Mathematics) programming and the huge intersections of science and art it helps to illuminate. And I’ve been able to convey science and art’s interconnectedness to young audiences. I definitely am more of a science communicator, as I don’t have the experience or the credentials to be a scientist or a science educator. I think people like me, who are passionate or curious about science but don’t have that actual educational background to be scientists, we show our passion and excitement through performance. MC: We’d love to hear about your favorite performances as science communicators. What have you created or participated in that felt especially effective, unique, or transformational?

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KI: I’ve been particularly proud of being involved with live broadcasts of science to the general public. That started when I was fourteen. I took part in a program called the JASON Project where we were in Hawai’i doing geology, biology, and chemistry and broadcasting it back to museums and schools all over the United States and Europe. We were “Student Argonauts” disseminating science to our peers.5 More recently, I’ve really enjoyed doing educational livestreams while on the research vessels (R/V) Nautilus and Atlantis.6 On the R/V Atlantis, we were using an ROV (remotely operated vehicle) to do subsea observatory work off of the coasts of Oregon and Washington. We had instruments installed in the seafloor, and we were talking to them with computers, downloading data and retrieving instruments. Although it was something less visually interesting for remote audiences, the work was, scientifically, really important. And it was a nice way to talk to audiences about the reasons why we were doing that research. SS: Some of my favorite Brainchild episodes are the ones that show that science is everywhere. Because when kids think science, they often think of goggled scientists working with chemistry beakers in a laboratory. Brainchild helps kids recognize the science behind social media, or the science behind human processes or feelings like motivation. How do you get yourself motivated to clean your room? There is science behind that; there is science behind creativity. The show demonstrates that science doesn’t have to be limited or difficult to understand. Science is fun and cool and everywhere. RB: I tend to communicate science through music frequently, and this wasn’t necessarily something that I knew I would be doing. It kind of popped out of my head. And it just so happened to have been a good idea, and that other people have received it well. It has been really fun for me to challenge these ideas of what people think scientists should look like, how we should be performing in these spaces, how we should be presenting ourselves, or what aspects of our identities we share with people as we are talking about science. It has been fun for me to be really unapologetic about my love for science and show people what it looks like to be confident in who you are, as a scientist or as you pursue a journey of learning science. As Sahana was saying, there are so many preconceived notions of what science or scientists should look like. Those notions act as a

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barrier for people to not only get into science but also stay in science. Now that I understand I do have support as I do these things, like making music and talking about things that are important to me, I am always thinking about new ways that I can visually challenge or musically challenge the barriers that exist in science. VA: In your work as science communicators and educators, you connect with audiences of different ages. What have you learned about effective science communication when working with youth and adult audiences of varied life experiences and educational contexts? And how do you incorporate ideas about representation, diversity, and science expertise in your educational and outreach leadership? SS: I think a lot of educational children’s shows tend to dumb down concepts or present science material in a childish way, with hosts speaking over-enthusiastically in high-pitched voices. But kids are smart and can be challenged. One of the goals with Brainchild is to talk to kids differently, like I am like their sister or best friend and we are learning together. That’s why Brainchild works; the show is really relatable to kids in that it’s found a sweet spot for communicating science. We don’t simplify the material too much, but we also don’t present science through adult hosts using big vocabularies. In regards to representation, I think what we tried to do is not make a big deal out of it. You already see my face on the screen and that itself is a statement. It’s enough. In Brainchild’s “Creativity” episode I wear Indian clothing, and that’s because I just asked. I was like, can I wear a churidar in this episode? And there’s no character in the episode that remarks on it, like “oh, I love your churidar.” Because my clothing goes without comment we help to normalize it. I think another dilemma a lot of Indian Americans face, and Asian Americans as well, is that we are stereotyped as scientists, which is then depicted in popular culture as nerdy and unattractive. But I host Brainchild as this young, hip, cool, and goofy Indian American girl. I got to be myself. That’s what stands out more than me being an Indian American. I feel like that is what was most relatable to young teens of color. KI: I see something similar when I work at the National Youth Science Camp. The camp hosts the top two science students from every US state for an entire month, and it is a 100% free program.

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We get delegates from a variety of backgrounds: some have never been outside their home state, some have been homeschooled, and some have had other non-traditional educations. Part of the reason I continue to return to the camp is because it helps students realize that it’s okay to be smart and science-minded. Sometimes these students get picked on or bullied for being smart in their schools or in their neighborhoods. When I deal with middle school and high school students, I don’t have to really change a lot of what I say because of their age; they get it. VA: Middle school seems like a crucial stage for educators to communicate to students that it’s okay to like science, especially for girls. RB: I am really glad that you brought up middle school girls, because I have taught as a substitute teacher in every grade level, and as a classroom teacher I have taught high school chemistry. I spent so much time deconstructing biases that high school girls developed in middle school. Some of my students would finish their tests early, but then would sit at their desks instead of handing in their tests because they didn’t want everybody to know that they aced it. Then there were other kids who didn’t study and would proudly write the letter “B” for all of the test questions and then slam their tests on my desk and be like, “I don’t know anything.” Our students have been exposed to particular perceptions about smartness and then internalize them, and this influences their behaviors in such obvious ways. There are so many things that are going on underneath the hood, all of these things they think about that influence their behavior. I spent a lot of time as a teacher just breaking those things down. And thank goodness, you know, I hate to kind of pat myself on the back, but thank goodness I was there to facilitate that work. Unfortunately, a lot of students don’t have people there to intervene in their perceptions or behaviors. So Sahana, Katie, and everyone on this chat is doing the work, because we want to provide that example, that representation, and really hit where the mark has been missed throughout the education system. We have to make up for it somewhere. MC: Raven, I’ve been loving the response to your “Antibodyody Antibody” song7 because so many people have said on social media

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“if I had this type of song to study with, I would have gotten this content.” SS: I love that. RB: Thank you so much. My dissertation work revolves around understanding the responses to my music videos when they do go viral. And the first video I put out, I deliberately made it an empowerment music video for Black women in STEM. And I’ve had middle-aged Black women who did not choose STEM careers tell me that, had they seen the video when they were younger, they would have been physicists. Or that it was their first time ever seeing a Black woman scientist in the media. Women who are forty or fifty years old saying “had I had that representation, my life would be completely different.” You know, we have a lot of work to do. So I am happy that we are all doing this work. MC: As performance scholars, we often consider the space or medium in which a performance operates as an essential influence on the work’s content, tone, or form. Science communication happens on film, TV, and social media, but also in museums, zoos, theatres, and classrooms. How do spaces and media impact your processes as a science communicator? KI: The biggest thing I have faced teaching about the ocean is that some people have never seen the ocean, while others are terrified of it, and these fears have been perpetuated by the media. I get really mad every Halloween when ocean accounts post deep ocean “spooky” stuff and “scary” fish pictures. This makes me think, “you’re making my job harder.” So, I genuinely struggle with trying to transport people to a place that 1) they may not have ever experienced before, and 2) is not necessarily around them while I’m teaching. At the science camp in West Virginia, I often talk about scientific ocean drilling and understanding Earth history. We talk about the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, which was a wicked hot period of time. Basically, there were these massive methane burps that completely screwed up global climate for multiple hundreds

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of thousands of years. And we can see those haywire climate conditions recorded in deep sea sediment cores. I bring replica cores for the delegates to study, but some of these students have never seen the ocean before. And as a science educator, I have to help them envision this happening at the bottom of the ocean thousands of miles from where they are in the middle of rural West Virginia. Helping them to think across geographic disparities and incorporating spatial contexts and the concept of geologic time, it’s a difficult job and not something that is really taught. How can I convey the ocean to people who are not there? Especially if they have not seen the bottom of the ocean before. That’s why what the Schmidt Ocean Institute, Nautilus Live, and NOAA’s (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) Ocean Exploration expeditions do with their live-streamed dives is so important. It makes the seafloor publicly accessible to anyone who wants to watch. VA: Katie, there is one video that you made many years ago where you are talking about seafloor science projects, and there is this beautiful moment at the end, where an octopus floats by a science instrument that has been decorated by students and scientists working on the project. To me, that encapsulates so many of the arts-science intersections we discuss with this project in terms of changing people’s perspectives. How does human culture matter in that remote part of the world? Or, I’m thinking of Raven’s video, what does an antibody look like and how can we imagine it in a personally meaningful way? How can art empower people to understand, engage with, and question abstract science concepts? MC: Yes. And what I treasure about the way all three of you articulate your work is there is an expectation that the material is challenging, but the audience is ready for the challenge. Raven or Sahana, on this question of venue and medium and how that affects science performances? RB: That is an interesting question. I used to try to tailor my communication style to the platform that I was communicating on, but in doing that I realized that I was perpetuating the same issues that were preventing me from feeling like I could be my full self in

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any space that I occupied. Right now I am working on a TV show, and we are talking about what my character is going to look like and how she expresses herself. And there was some friction, because I desperately just wanted to be myself and there were some tropes that I scripted that were true to who I was and that were completely appropriate for the context. I presented these ideas to them and they said, “We don’t think that this will be popular with our white audiences. They make up most of our audience base and we don’t want to make them uncomfortable by presenting something they can’t relate to.” They were worried about losing viewership. It took me a month of emails and Zoom meetings with people at different levels at this network to explain how important it was for me to come as myself. It’s important that people see me being accepted for who I am as I talk about science. These constructs are actual systemic barriers that I have had to break down. I’ve had to beat it into people’s heads like, “Hey, you should not stop Black women from being Black, you know, just because it’s going to make somebody uncomfortable. You should set the new norm. We are in a new day. There is no way you could find that acceptable in 2020.” And they are like, “You are right, this is wrong.” I realize the power of my voice and the value of my voice, and so I try really hard to not negotiate my identity within the different channels that I communicate science. MC: Do you do anything differently to your content when you know it has to be a nice little ninety-second nugget versus something that is long form? Is your writing process different because of the length of time? RB: For short form content, I try to eliminate any fluff and make it very to-the-point and accessible. It’s a very intricate process of trimming the fat where I feel like I can afford to trim it while still delivering the information in a way that people can understand. And then after, I try to be available and approachable online for people to be like, “Hey, I saw that video. Can you explain what you meant?” and then I will tie up the loose ends there. SS: I can speak to Raven’s experience pitching a show. I think when we think of diversity we only picture the on-screen talent. And that’s problematic because we also need to be thinking about

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diversity in terms of show runners, producers, and crew. Otherwise, we are pursuing a false, incomplete form of diversity, and then onscreen characters and personalities are saying stuff that doesn’t sound accurate to them, you know. Pharrell Williams executive produces Brainchild alongside producing partner Mimi Valdes, and they specifically wanted to highlight a woman of color on the show. So I feel lucky that we did have those voices off-screen to help make this happen.

Notes 1 NYSC is a program of the National Youth Science Foundation. Its mission is to engage high achieving STEM students from the United States and other countries in an immersive learning community at no cost. For information on the NYSC, see National Youth Science Foundation, https://www​.nysf​.com​/w​/programs​/nyscamp/. 2 Season One of Netflix’s Brainchild premiered in 2018. For more information, see https://www​.netflix​.com​/title​/80215086 and https:// www​.brainchildshow​.com/. 3 Baxter has since received her PhD from the University at Buffalo, SUNY. 4 Nautilus Live is a research and outreach project that allows students, scientists, and members of the general public access to images on the ocean floor via “live-streaming underwater vehicles” (Nautilus Live Ocean Exploration Trust, nautiluslive​.o​rg). 5 JASON Learning is a not-for-profit organization specializing in STEM education through immersive, site-specific, hands-on learning. For more information, see www​.jason​.org. 6 Atlantis is a research vessel operated by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, United States. It is operated in partnership with the US Navy. Atlantis was expressly designed to deploy the human-occupied vehicle, Alvin. For more about these R/Vs, explore Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, www​ .whoi​.edu. 7 Raven the Science Maven, “Antibodyody Antibody Song,” November 27, 2020, https://www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=KBpQg6JMxSc.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Vivian Appler is an associate professor of Performance Studies at the University of Georgia. She is a former fellow of the Fulbright Foundation and the Huntington Library. She has published scholarship on the intersection of science in performance in Comparative Drama, Theatre History Studies and others. Her practice-based research has been funded by NASA’s SC Space Grant Consortium, SC Arts, and SC Humanities. Raven Baxter, aka Dr. Raven the Science Maven, is an internationally acclaimed American educator and molecular biologist known for effortlessly merging science with pop culture. She is the founder of STEMbassy, a science advocacy organization that embraces a diverse and accomplished membership of scientists, engineers, and tech professionals. She is also the creator of Smarty Pants, an online store featuring STEM-inspired apparel. Shelby Brewster is a postdoctoral research associate at Michigan State University and is part of the editorial team of Public Philosophy Journal. Her work has been published in Performance Research, Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction and Theatre Journal. Meredith Conti is an associate professor of theatre at the University at Buffalo, SUNY, and a historian of nineteenth-century performance and popular culture. She is the author of Playing Sick: Performances of Illness in the Age of Victorian Medicine (2019) and the coeditor with Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. of Theatre and the Macabre (2022). Alison L. Dell is a biologist and artist. She is an associate professor of Biological Science and Interdisciplinary Studies and Chair of the Biology Department at St. Francis College in Brooklyn, New York,

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CONTRIBUTORS

as well as being the cofounder of Art in the Lab, an ongoing series of free public events that mix drawing and laboratory work. Armando de la Torre is a San Diego-based visual artist. De la Torre’s long-term involvement in social justice and outreach projects through visual art and music practices complements his work as a puppeteer. He is a recipient of the James Irvine Fellowship and is a puppeteer with the San Diego Guild of Puppetry. Stephanie Dowdy-Nava is an artist, arts administrator, educator, and cofounder of the Sun City Art+Science Festival, in El Paso, Texas, and of the ART±BIO Collaborative, a nonprofit organization that fosters the integration of science, nature, and art. The ART±BIO Collaborative is dedicated to creating opportunities for historically excluded, underrepresented, and marginalized communities through novel collaborations, public engagement, Science Murals, education, and research. Dowdy-Nava has taught Studio Art and Art Education in public school, private school, nonprofit, museum, university, and international settings. Lanxing Fu is a Chinese American theatre artist and codirector of Superhero Clubhouse, an interdisciplinary community of artists creating performance to imagine new futures in the face of the climate crisis and environmental injustice. She also has many years of experience as an arts educator, focusing on socially engaged, community-centered projects. Radhica Ganapathy is an assistant professor of theatre history and criticism at West Virginia University. Her scholarship has been published in Ecumenica: Performance and Religion and Asian Theatre Journal. She began her career in theatre as a professional actor in New Delhi, India. David Geary is of Māori, English, Irish, and Scottish blood. His iwi/ tribe in New Zealand is the Taranaki. Geary is an award-winning playwright, dramaturg, director, screenwriter, fiction writer, and poet. He works at Capilano University in North Vancouver, Canada, teaching screenwriting in the Indigenous Digital Filmmaking program, documentary, and playwriting; Geary also teaches playwriting for PTC Playwrights Theatre Centre in Vancouver.

CONTRIBUTORS

249

Kathleen “Kate” Gillespie is a scientist, published poet, short story writer, and writer in Residence at Renaissance House. Her work has appeared in Gargoyle Magazine and others. Gillespie works as an assistant professor of biotechnology at SUNY Cobleskill in upstate New York and is the creator of “The Science in Poetry” workshop and poet reading series that uses science to inspire poetic scientific communication. Stephanie Heit is a poet, dancer, and teacher of somatic writing and contemplative movement practices. She is a Zoeglossia Fellow, bipolar, and a member of the Olimpias, an international disability performance collective. Her hybrid memoir poem Psych Murders is forthcoming in 2022. Raquell M. Holmes is the founder and director of improvscience, a consulting company that supports leadership development and culture change in scientific organizations. Trained as a computational biologist, she is a sought-after speaker on diversity and inclusion. She offers free STEAM courses in the East Side Institute’s Let’s Learn! The World as Classroom. Katherine Inderbitzen holds a PhD in Marine Geology/Geophysics from the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science. She studies the deep seafloor and hydrothermal systems using human-occupied submersibles, remotely operated vehicles, and scientific ocean drilling. Inderbitzen conducts educational outreach to improve ocean and Earth science literacy. Jennifer A. Kokai is an associate professor of theatre at Weber State University. She is the author of Swim Pretty: Aquatic Spectacles and the Performance of Race, Gender, and Nature (2017) and the coeditor with Tom Robson of Performance and the Disney Theme Park Experience: Tourist as Actor (2019). Lauren Kokai is an assistant professor in the Department of Plastic Surgery and Bioengineering at the University of Pittsburgh and is codirector of the Adipose Stem Cell Center. She holds a faculty appointment with the McGowan Institute for Regenerative

250

CONTRIBUTORS

Medicine. Her research focuses on using tissue engineering, adult stem cells, and controlled drug delivery to improve health. Petra Kuppers is a disability culture activist and a community performance artist. She is the Anita Gonzalez Collegiate Professor of Performance Studies and Disability Culture at the University of Michigan and the artistic director of the Olimpias, an international disability culture collective. Kuppers’s next academic book project, Eco Soma: Pain and Joy in Speculative Performance Encounters, was published in 2022. Mia Levenson is a PhD student and dramaturg at Tufts University studying the intersections of biomedical science, race, and performance. Her work has been published in Theatre Journal and The Journal of American Drama and Theatre. Levenson’s research has been funded by the Massachusetts Historical Society and the Consortium for History of Science, Technology, and Medicine. Saúl S. Nava is a behavioral ecologist, artist, science muralist, Professor of Biology and Life Sciences, and founder of the BioMedia Lab at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. He is a cofounder of the ART±BIO Collaborative, a nonprofit organization that fosters the integration of science, nature, and art. The ART±BIO Collaborative is dedicated to creating opportunities for historically excluded, underrepresented, and marginalized communities through novel collaborations, public engagement, Science Murals, education, and research. Nava is also the cofounder of the Sun City Art+Science Festival in El Paso, Texas. Jem Pickard is the founder and codirector of Superhero Clubhouse, a home base for experimenting with the intersection of theatre and environmental crises. Jem is the co-creator of dozens of eco-theatre works and the author of essays on theatre in the era of climate change. Marlis Schweitzer is a professor in the Department of Theatre at York University. She is the author of several books, including Bloody Tyrants and Little Pickles: Stage Roles of Anglo-American Girls in the Nineteenth Century (2020), and the recipient of the George

CONTRIBUTORS

251

Freedley Memorial Award from the Theatre Library Association. She is the past editor of Theatre Survey and Theatre Research in Canada. Sahana Srinivasan is an actress, comedian, and filmmaker from Texas. In addition to appearances on AMC’s Fear the Walking Dead and HBO’s Insecure, Srinivasan hosted the Netflix original science show Brainchild; for her work on Brainchild she was named one of ESPN’s “Game Changers.”

INDEX

activism  159, 206 grassroots  56 proto-feminist  44 science-art  87 activist(s)  2, 7–8, 58, 60, 62, 67, 72–3, 134, 159, 221 Adams, Jerome  186 Africa  57, 103 African(s)  103, 111, 174, 181–2 African diaspora  6 African bush elephant  123 Agnew Clinic, The  142 Aiken, Henry Thomas  112–13 #AIMHIGHER  1–2, see also women, and empowerment; women in space All Stars Project, Inc.  59, see also Boston All Stars Talent Show Network Alon, Uri  61, 63 Alonzo, Jennifer  64 America  79 American(s)  3, 27, 56, 59, 186, 12 n.11, see also Cherokee; Chicano; Citizen Potawatomi Nation African American  54, 58, 62, 103, 175–6, 179, 182–3 and anatomy  181 Anglo-American  102, 110, 114, 184 and art  2 Asian American  231, 12 n.14 Black American  68 n.3

Chinese American  60 Indian American  231 and medicine  178 Mexican American  65 and music  182 Native American  56 and race  67, 176 and science  1, 13 n.16 and theatre  3, 146 white American  174, 184 and white supremacy  186, 199–200, 217 American Civil War  174, 177 anatomy  9, 174–5 Black anatomy  181–2 and museums  184–5 and science  173–5, 181–6 and theatre  103, 181 Anatomy Acts  174, 179 anesthesia  152–3 animals and behavior  79, 84, 86 performance  212–17, 221, 222, 224 n.6 research policy  213 Anthropocene  37, 47, 122, 128, 133, 125–6 t.1, 136 n.5, 139 n.62, 149 n.63 anthropomorphization  45, 212, 214, 216, 221 antiseptics  142, 151, 153 Antoine, André  146 Appler, Vivian  8, 20, 228, 118 n.31

INDEX

Aquarena Springs  10, 211–12, 214, 215, 220, 223 art, see also performance art contemporary  2 as practice  73, 76 and science  66–7, 87 ART±BIO Collaborative  8, 72–81, see also Shadow Ecologies Art+Bioblitz  80–1 Biocriaturas: Titeres en Sombra  81–4 BioMedia Lab  83, 86 Biomuseo  81 Cultivo Field Residency for Artists and Scientists of Color on the U.S.-Mexico Border  72, 73, 75–7, 79, 87 “DiNaLab Exhibition”  81–2 MassArt BioMedia Lab  83–4 Artemis Program  1–2, 11 n.4, see also women in space artist  1–2, 29, 59, 65, 72, 77, 120 n.72 Asian(s)  3, 103 Asian American Performers Action Coalition  12 n.14 astronomy  5, 49, 57, 50 n.8 asylum  19, 148 Asylum Project  17–19, 21, 32 n.4 Atlanta, Georgia  1–2 Australian(s)  168 Avalos, David  77 Bacon, Francis  50 n.8 Banes, Sally  146–9 Barnum, P. T.  181 Baxter, Raven  10, 227–35 Bay Area Theater Accountability Workgroup  12 n.14 Bee, John  109

253

Beecher, Catherine  185 Treatise on Domestic Economy, A  185 Belmont Report  222 Bendrups, Dan  74 Benedict, Lew  176, 179 Bethlem Royal Hospital (Bedlam)  19, 32 n.3 Bharat Biotech International Limited  193 biological determinism  58, 114 biology  8, 49, 55, 63, 75, 83, 230, see also anatomy; biomedicine field  80 molecular  228 systems  63 biomedicine and ethics  217–23 research  213 biophilia  215 BIPOC  30, see also people of color biracial  54–5, 57 Blackwell, Elizabeth  186 blood  142, 150–3 Boardman, Andrew  110 bodies, see also cadavers; human alt/post-human  6 Black  9, 174–6, 178–81, 183, 186–7 body politic  181–3 brown  10, 194–7, 202–3, 206 colonized  200, 204 ethereal  45 female  158 n.54, 196, 206 ideal  146 ill  146, 152 indigent  174 medical  5 monetized  200 other  49 Othered  184

254

INDEX

parts of  10, 46 physical  45 and smells  153 trade of  178–81, 183 white  181, 183 body-snatching  174–5, 179–81, 189 n.40 Border Art Workshop-Taller de Arte Fronterizo  77–8 Boston, Massachusetts All Stars Talent Show Network  59–60 City Council  58 Public School  84–6 University  62 brain  43, 45, 46, 58, 94, 102–3, 112, 181 Brainchild  10, 228, 230–1, 236 Bread and Puppet Theater  75–6, 89 n.18 BReast CAncer (BRCA) gene  7 Brecon Beacons National Park  22 Brown, Sherry Ann  61 Burton, Annie  176 Butchers, The (1888)  146 Butler, Judith  215, 67 n.2 Cackley, Cecilia  75 cadavers  9, 173–6, 178, 180, 184, see also body-snatching capitalism  48, 133 Capitalocene  47–8 carbolic acid  141–2, 151, 153 Cartwright, Samuel  181 Castillo-Chavez, Carlos  65 Cavendish, Charles  41 Cavendish, Margaret (Duchess of Newcastle)  35–46, 49 Description of the New World, Called the Blazing World, The  35–9, 42, 44–5, 47, 49

Observations upon Experimental Philosophy  36, 42, 43 “Of Many Worlds in This World”  44 Poems and Fancies  44 Sociable Letters  42 “A World in an Eare-Ring”  44 Cavendish, William (Duke of Newcastle)  41 Center for Scholars and Storytellers  12 n.14 Central America  89 n.18 Chaudhuri, Una  6, 224 n.6 Chemers, Michael  6, 149 chemistry  49, 230, 232, 50 n.8, 158 n.52, 190 n.58 Cherokee  101, 109 Chicano  62 Chihuahuan Desert  87, see also US-Mexico Border China National Space Administration  4 Chinese  4, 12–13 n.15 Chthulucene  36–7, 40 cigarette consumption  10, 211–13, 215–24 Citizen Potawatomi Nation  79 Citron, Atay  66, 71 n.28 City Saloon, New York  181 class  5, 9, 46, 104, 123, 50 n.10 African American  182 and entertainment  174, 183–4, 186 and gender  38 and identity  10, 67, 175 and inequities  204 labor  198 and masculinity  150 middle-  10, 103, 109, 175, 183–5 multi-  55

INDEX

planter-  196 and prejudices  145 scientific-  174 upper-  178 white middle-  184 and white womanhood  185, 186 working-  56, 59–60, 65, 175, 69 n.15 climate change  46, 121, 124, 128, 133, 135 crisis  25–6, 30 Climate Change Theatre Actions  159 co-conspirator  2, 18, 28 cognition  18, 36 cognitive science  6, 116 n.16 Collins, Francis  61 colonialism  195, 204 British colonialism  200 and curriculum  78 and imperialism  129 and India  196, 201 neocolonialism  200 and US-Mexico Border  77 colonization  7, 199, 205 Combe, George  102–4, 110–14 Constitution of Man, The  102 System of Phrenology, A  103 communities Black  174–5, 186 Children of Compost  40, 47–8 marginalized  10, 195, 197, 201, 206 oppressed  201 community -based performance  2 -building activity  3, 62 digital  85 imagined  204–5 LGBTQ+  66–7

255

and performance  18 and puppetry  77 contested spaces  77–9, 195–7 Conti, Meredith  5, 9, 17, 227, 156 n.29 Contra Costa College  65 Cook, Amy  6 Cooper, Brittney  129 Copeland, Carl  179 Count 3.0, The  3 Counting Together  12 n.14 Covaxin  193 Covent Garden  105, 108 Covid-19  10, 17, 186, 193 Crane, Mary Thomas  43, 50 n.8 craniology  103 craniometry  58 CreativeIT  63 creative writing  38, 45 crop art  3, 11 n.9, see also earthwork; land art Cultivating Ensembles  55, 64–7, 74 culture and bias  58, 144 disability  22–3, 28 exchange  174, 182 prejudice  8, 61, 143 cyborg  6, 46, 203 dance  4, 19, 29–30, 47, 73, 87 dancer(s)  61, 168 Dance Your PhD  74 Darwin, Charles  74 decolonial/decolonization  41, 46–8, 84, 205 deep time  121–4, 127–8, 133–5 and the Anthropocene  136 n.5 Deep Time  121–2, 130, 133 de la Torre, Armando  73, 75–9, 87 Who Are We Anyways?  77

256

DePace, Angela  65 DePodwin, Rebecca  66 Descartes, René  41 Despret, Vinciane  40 Digital Naturalism Conference  81, 86 dinosaur(s)  121, 123, 124, 127–30, 133, 159, 161 diorama  123–4, 131 disability  6, 8, 17, 22–3, 25, 28 Disney World  147 displacement  8, 73, 76–8 display(s)  84, 132, 134–5, see also fossils and anatomy  103, 176 and animals  221 and choreography  128–9 digital  123–4 and people of color  77 phrenological  111, 113–14 private  106 public  121, 128 zoological  215 dissection  173–6, 178, 181, 186 Diversions of the Morning, The (1747)  108 divide and rule  201, 202 Doctors’ Riot  179 Dougherty, Evelyn  59, 63 Dowdy-Nava, Stephanie  8, 73, 79 DragonMUD  61–2 Dr. Baxter’s Servants: Farce in One Act (1898)  177, 183, 185 Drury Lane  105, 108 Dukovski, Ilija  65 Dumont, Frank  176, 180 Dungeons and Dragons  62 Duprez, Charles  176, 179 Eakins, Thomas  142 Earhart, Amelia  2

INDEX

early modern  8, 35–7, 42, 46 earthwork(s)  1–3, see also crop art; land art East India Company  196 Ebisu Sign Language Theatre Laboratory: An Ensemble of Deaf PerformerResearchers  66 eco-fascism  51 n.21 ecology  5, 8, 36, 78–80 behavioral  78, 86 and loss  37 eco-theatre  8, 20, 31, 32 n.5 Edinburgh Phrenological Society  111 education  5, 62, 64, 66, 75, 80–1, 103, 109–10, 121–3, 222, 232 and empowerment  227 and medicine  142, 174, 178 and outreach  73, 80, 82, 121–2, 231 and science  228–30 and STEM  236 n.5 and whiteness  183–4 electoral politics  54, 58–9 Ellis, Skip  62 El Paso, Texas  79 emotions  25, 27, 54, 56–9, 67, 110, 216 empiricism  38, 43, 50 n.8 Emursive  147 England  35 and Interregnum  37 and Restoration  35, 50 n.10 English Language Learners  84 Enlightenment  38, 48, 93 environment, see also climate and activism  40, 129, 12 n.11 and consciousness  2, 19–20, 23, 131, 133, 135 and disability  22 and ecology  40, 49

INDEX

and factors  219 and identity  83, 86 and justice  8, 21, 27, 73, 77–8, 32 n.5 and learning  60, 84–5, 228–9 medical  144, 153 and odors  145, 150, 154 and performance  147 political  59, 79 and pollution  3, 28, 204 scientific  55–6, 63, 67 and systems  127 equity  5, 8, 17, 199 ether  142, 152–3, 154 n.3, 158 n.52, 158 n.54 ethics  5, 9, 80, 194–5, 203, 213–14, 217–18, 222, see also biomedicine eugenics  58, 68 n.9 Europe  37, 194, 230, 117 n.23 European(s)  102, 146, 182 and citizenship  19 and empire  195–6 Evangelista, Arlene  65 Evans, Leslie  11 n.9 evolution  47, 81, 174, 187 n.5, 81 experiment  9, see also scientific racism; science and culture  63 and medicine  141, 175 and performance  17, 24, 110 and philosophy  36 and science  41, 47, 60, 110 and theatre  20–1, 64, 147 thought experiment  47, 99 extinction  30–1, 41, 121, 124, 134–5, 139 n.62 Fanon, Frantz  200, 202 feminism  37, 39, 144, 195, 197 and cognition  53 n.47

257

intersectional  6, 195, 204, 51 n.21 and materialism  42 proto-  42, 44 and science philosophy  35–6 Floyd, George  67, 71 n.29 Foote, Samuel  107–9 fossil(s)  121–3, 127–31 Foucault, Michel  142 Fox Keller, Evelyn  60–1 France  37, 39 Freedmen’s Bureau  182 Freire, Paulo  195 Fulani, Lenora B.  58–9, 69 n.15 Fusco, Coco  77 Gall, Franz Joseph  102, 113, 115 n.7 Galton, Francis  114 Gandhi, Mahatma  57 Garrick, David  105 gay  58–9, see also LGBTQ+ gender  5, 9, 36, 38, 61, 123, 174, 185, 195, 199, 215, 12 n.12, 13 n.16, 87 n.1 cisgender  61 gendering  42, 144, 119 n.60 and normativity  35 and pronouns  52 n.26 and science performance  5, 215 Geneva College  186 gentrification  77–8 geology  5, 49, 126, 135, 140 n.63 and time  122, 128, 133–4, 230, 234 germ theory of disease  149, 151 Giles, Roscoe  62 Gillespie, Kate  9, 93–6 globalization  194–5, 199 Global South  6, see also “third world”

258

INDEX

Gómez-Peña, Guillermo  77 Goodman Theatre  65 Gould, Stephen J.  58 Mismeasure of Man, The  58 graverobbing, see body-snatching Great Britain  100, 148, 155 n.6, see also England Great Depression  56 Gross Clinic, The  142 Guillermo the Goat  10, 211–24 haenggi, andrea  29 Haraway, Donna  6, 7, 35–7, 39–41, 46–9, 144, 197, 51 n.21, 136 n.12 “Camille Stories: Children of Compost”  36, 39–41, 46–9, 51 n.21 “Cyborg Manifesto”  39 Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature  39 Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene  36–7, 40, 46 Harding, Sandra  6–7 Harrison, John Scott  179 Harrison, William Henry  179 Hartman, Saidiya  175, 178 Harvard  178 Arnold Arboretum  80 Medical School  63 Museum of Natural History  83 University  60, 80–1, 112 Harwell, Todd  66 Haymarket Theatre  107, 109 Heit, Stephanie  17–19, 23–5, 27, 29–30 Henrietta Maria (Queen)  37 Herd, Stan  1–3, 11 n.9 heteronormativity  54–5, 61, 64, 146

Heth, Joice  181 High Performance Computing  62 Hines Family Foundation  1 Hobbes, Thomas  41 homosocial bonding  176 hooks, bell  84 “Teaching New Worlds/New Words”  84 Hove, Ivo van  147 Howard University  182 Hug, Sarah  64 human(s), see also anatomy; Anthropocene; bodies; population activity  30, 40, 122, 146 and agency  4, 43, 135 behavior  46, 48, 104, 146, 214, 216–17, 223, 230 and culture  7, 196, 223, 234 difference  103, 114, 146 and ecology  48, 79, 128 and exceptionalism  135, 221, 223 and heads  58, 99, 104, 107 and health  213, 218 and hybridity  37, 40, 47, 217 and impact  80 non-  215, 217, 222 and odors  146 and performance  154 post-  6 and remains  102–3, 113, 130 representation of  106–7, 146 and resources  200 and science  8 and senses  142, 145 as a species  41, 182 and technology  202 and thought  44 and time  134–5 and trafficking  194, 197 Huygens, Constantijn  41

INDEX

Hyater-Adams, Simone A.  66 hybridity  8, 36–41 Icre, Fernand  146 identity and anatomy  174 Black woman  235 and class  10, 67, 175 and colonization  205 and culture  4, 7, 214, 223 and discipline  61, 63, 65–7, 79, 85 and diversity  4, 197 and ecology  73, 75, 78 and environment  83 Jewish  59, 61 Latine  3, 59–60, 225 n.20 and masculinity  217 and oppression  5, 36 and performance  66 and race  67, 69 n.13 and representation  4 and rights  224 and science  61, 73, 79, 69 n.13 social  67, 174 and stigma  28 and Texas  217 and transformation  55 illness  5, 57, 148, 149, 197, 158 n.54 cholera  149 consumption  149 mental  54, 57, 66 syphilis  58, 184 imperialism  129, 194 “Improvisational Theater for Computing Scientists”  63 improvscience  65, 74 Inderbitzen, Katherine  10, 227, 229–33 India  193–7, 200, 203, 207 n.2

259

Indigenous  3, 67, 103, 109, 116 n.19, see also Cherokee; Citizen Potawatomi Nation; Māori and decolonization  51 n.21 and knowledge  80 and land  47, 217 peoples  109, 159 scientists  5 and ways of life  30 Industrial Revolution  180 Institute for African American e-Culture  62 interdiscipline  5–6, 10, 36, 40, 46, 55, 61, 63, 67, 85, 121, 223 International Climate Change Theatre Action  159 International Day of the Girl Child  1 Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman  6 Jansen, Vigo  180 JASON Project  230 Jim Crow  56, 181, 190 n.57, see also racism Johnson, Lyndon Baines  217 Kemble, Fanny  104 Kemble, John Philip  104 Kimmerer, Robin Wall  79, 80 kin  37, 40, 41, 46–9, 51 n.21 King, Martin Luther, Jr.  55, 57, 68 n.3 Klowden, Jill  58–9 Koch, David H.  121, 133, 134 Korp, Christina  1 Kuppers, Petra  6, 17–20, 22–5, 27–30 laboratory  4, 9, 43, 66, 174–5, 185, 199, 230 as public performance  130–3

260

Ladies Physiological Institute of Boston  185 Lambert, Thomas Scott  184 Popular Anatomy and Physiology  184 land art  1, 2, 12 n.11, see also crop art; earthwork Lanxing Fu  17, 20–1, 27–8, 32 Lasko, Jim  78 Latour, Bruno  6, 223 lecture(s), see also Clara Fisher; scientific racism academic  101, 105 and anatomy  174 and chemistry  158 n.52 and craniology  114, 115 n.7 and gender  110, 119 n.60 and grave-robbing  180 Lecture on Heads (Stevens)  99, 101–2, 104–9, 111–14, 115 n.6, 117 n.26 Lectures on Phrenology (Combe)  110–11, 113–14 and performance  5, 100, 102–5, 108 and phrenology  9, 100–4, 109, 111–13, 68 n.7 and puppetry  107–8 scientific  103, 110–11 LeGuin, Ursula K.  48 Lephakis, A. J.  212, 216, 223 lesbian  44, see also LGBTQ+ LGBTQ+  4, 67, 203 Licensing Act (1737)  108 Lindon, Patrick C.  177 Lindsay, William A.  152, 157 n.48 Lister, Joseph  141–2, 153 Little Haymarket Theatre  101, 105 London Hospital  142, 148 London Theatre, Bowery  177

INDEX

Love, Bettina  2 Lucas, John  41 Lutterbie, John  6 McCauley, Robbie  147 McConachie, Bruce A.  6, 53 n.47, 116 n.16 McCune Smith, James  182–3 McGovern, Porsche  12 n.14 Māori  159–60, 163, 166 Martineau, Harriet  179 materialism feminist  42, 44 vitalist  37, 42, 45 materiality  42, 45–6, 49, 75–6, 107 Mathematical Theoretical Biology Institute (MTBI)  65 media  2, 4, 105, 123, 127, 227, 233, see also BioMedia Lab intermediality  104 multi-  201 -scapes  202 social  83, 114, 230, 232, 233 technologies  6 Medical College of Virginia (MCV)  173 medical performances  5, 103, 106, 143, 149 medical professionals  117 n.23, 142, 148–9, see also physicians medical schools  174, 176, 178, 180–3, 185–6 medical students  151–2, 158 n.52, 176, 178, 179 medicine  5, 142–3, 146, 147, 157 n.41 institutional  148, 174 Victorian  142–3, 147, 153 white  183 mental health  17–18, 66 Mesozoic  124, 127–9

INDEX

metamodernism  36–7, 46–7, 49 n.2 Mexico  8, 72, 77, 79, 89 n.18 miasmatic theory of disease  149 Miller, Tim  147 Miner’s Theatre  177 minstrels anatomical  9, 174–81, 183, 185–7 blackface minstrelsy  175, 177, 181–2 minstrel parodies  173 Mitra, Dinabandhu  196 modernity  46 Mohanty, Chandra Talpade  204–5 Moody, Anna Hickey  18 Morehouse College  1, 2 Mōrehu & Tītī (2015)  159–69 Morris, Ernest William  142, 148 Morton, David  74 Morton, Samuel George  103, 114, 184 Crania Americana  103, 184 Moses, Greg  62 Movement Research, New York City  23 Moynihan, Berkeley  142 Mrs. Salmon’s Waxworks  106–7, 118 n.37 Murphy, Tom  65 museum(s)  9, 73, 77–8, 81, 83, 123–4, 127, 129–34, 145, 174, 177, 184–5, 230, 233, see also display; natural history museums; Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History American Museum of Natural History  133–4 Army Medical Museum  185 Austin and Stone’s Museum  184

261

Biomuseo  81 British Museum  118 n.41 Grand Museum  184 Harvard Museum of Natural History  83 Lower East Side Tenement Museum  145 Montana Museum of the Rockies  127 Newseum  145 Old Operating Theatre Museum and Herb Garret  156 n.35 Victoria and Albert  100, 118 n.41 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)  1–3, 11 n.4, 11 n.5, 12 n.12 National Institutes for Health  61 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration  234 National Science Foundation  3, 62–4 National Society of Black Engineers  62 National Theater (Calcutta)  196 National Youth Science Camp  227, 231–3, 236 n.1 National Youth Science Foundation  236 n.1 Natural History Museum, The (activist group)  134 natural history museums  9, 122–4, 130–1, 133–5, see also museum(s) naturalism  146–7, 120 n.73, see also Digital Naturalism Conference naturalist  79, 81, 106 natural philosophy  36, 38, 41, 48–9, 50 n.8, 106

262

INDEX

nature  4, 7, 9–10, 22, 26, 37, 43, 73, 78–81, 86, 110, 123–4, 127–9, 135, 215–16, 223 and analogy  43–4 and history  73, 81, 86, 122, 128, 213 Nautilus Live  234, 236 n.4 Nava, Saúl  73, 79, 83 Nazi  19, 28 Neel Darpan (The Indigo Mirror, 1860)  196 Negro Burial Ground (New York City)  179 Netflix  10, 228 New England  178, 180 New London Group  86 New Science  38, 50 n.8 New York, NY  20, 23, 29, 110, 182, 115 n.6, see also American Natural History Museum Annals of the New York Stage  188 n.20 Bowery  177 City Council  179 City Saloon  181 Phrenological Society of  110 “Visibility Report: Racial Representation on New York City Stages” (AAPAC)  12 n.14 New Zealand  160 nicotine  218–20 North America  103, 135, 146, 193, 116 n.19, 117 n.23 and mammals  134–5 ocean  25, 102, 160, 233, 234, 236 n.4 oceanography  236 n.6 ocularcentrism  142–4 odorphobia  145–6

Ohio Historical Society  145 olfaction  9, 142–9, 152–3 Olimpias (performance collective)  8, 17–19, 22–3, 25, 28–9 Asylum Project  17–19, 21 Tendings  23 Turtle Disco  19 Water Bodies States of Mind  29 One Night in a Medical College: An Ethiopian Sketch in One Scene (1876)  176–7, 179–80, 183 operating theatres, see also theatre(s) oppression  36, 48, 77, 84, 195–6, 200, 206 outer space  1, 13 n.15, see also NASA; China National Space Administration; women and exploration  7 International Space Station  11 n.5 Johnson Space Center  12 n.11 space race  13 n.16 spacewalk  4 and travel  2, 11 n.7, 12 n.11, 12 n.15 outreach  5, 8, 10, 62, 73, 74, 76–80, 82–6, 121–2, 133, 227, 231, 236 n.4 Padmanabhan, Manjula  193–6 Harvest  193–206 paleontology  131–3 Panama  81–3 Parker-Starbuck, Jennifer  6 paternalism  214, 217, 221–2 people of color  2–3, 56, 62, 67, 186, 193, 231, see also

INDEX

women of color; scientists of color and museums  77 students  60, 65 people with disabilities  18–19, 25, 28, 152 performance  4–9, 12 n.11, 17, 20–1, 25–6, 29, 30, 36, 53 n.47, 54–5, 58–63, 65–7, 74–8, 84, 86, 87, 89 n.18, 90 n.25, 101–2, 104–5, 107, 109–11, 114, 115 n.6, 119 n.60, 122–3, 127–8, 130–1, 143, 147–9, 174–5, 177, 179, 182, 184–6, 195–6, 215, 221, 223–4, 228–9, 233 and community  2, 18, 78 cultural  60, 63, 122, 128 of ethics  195, 214 and group  17 of illness  5 paleontological  9, 122, 132 phrenological  68 n.7, 113, 114 popular  103 as research  18 satirical  9, 104–6, 108, 114 of science  2, 4–10, 36, 39, 56, 65, 67, 73, 74, 101, 128, 130, 174–5, 213, 223, 229, 234 solo  101, 104, 105, 108 street  58–9 performance art  5, 77–8, 147, 90 n.24–5 performance studies  6, 10, 116 n.16, 213, 218 performative writing  36, 44, 46, 197 performativity  2, 8, 37, 39, 45, 48, 55, 67 n.2, 127–30, 194

263

Performers with Disabilities Watchdog Report  3 Performing the World  62 Phrenological Society of New York  110 phrenology  58, 102–4, 109, 117 n.23 and lectures  100, 110–14 physician(s)  61, 102, 148–9, 175–6, 178, 185, 154 n.3 Black  182–3 and nineteenth century  141–2, 151–2, 174, 181, 158 n.54 and theatre  177, 191 n.60 white  174, 181, 183, 188 n.21 Pickard, Jem  17, 20–1, 25–7, 30–1 planet(s)  43, see also climate change and ecology  3, 223 and history  124, 128–30, 133–5 and humans  123 Planet Plays  20 and sustainability  37, 41, 46–8, 51 n.21 Pleistocene  125, 135, 139 n.62 politics, see also activism and colonialism  206 electoral  55, 58 grassroots  58 and oppression  36, 195, 197, 202 and performance  105, 110 racialized  62, 109, 175 and science  60 popular culture  174–5 population(s) and biomedical experiment  218 and colonization  201

264

INDEX

and displacement  8, 73, 75 and emancipation  180 global  40, 48, 51 n.21–3 and specialization  7 and wealth distribution  193–4 Porter, Roy  145, 147 Punchdrunk  147 puppet(s)  73–81, 87, 105–8, 159, 118 n.42, see also shadow puppets Purpose Entertainment  1 quality of life  219–20 queer  6, 19, 28, 54–5, see also LGBTQ+ “Queering Informal STEM Learning”  66 race  2–4, 9, 54–6, 58, 62, 67, 77, 123, 175, 179, 183, 185, 195, 197, 204 and difference  103, 181 and dimorphism  174, 181, 182 and hegemony  183 and hierarchy  103, 176, 180 and identity  67 and inequity  5, 204 and justice  57 and prejudice  145 and science  5, 58, 174, 119 n.63 and stereotypes  109 and violence  176 racialization  28, 103, 104, 109–10, 144 racism  66, 204, see also Jim Crow institutional  68 n.3 scientific  9, 103–4, 114, 182, 187 n.5 Ralph the Swimming Pig  212, 214, 216

Rama and the Worm (2017)  74 Ramayana  74 realism  110, 147 Redmoon Puppet Theater  78 Reilly, Kara  6 remotely operated vehicle  230 R/V Atlantis  230, 236 n.6 R/V Nautilus  230 Rice, T. D.  181–2 Rice University  62 Richardson, Benjamin Ward  152 Rio Bosque Wetlands Park  79 Rio Grande  79 Rogers, Arthur  214 Roinard, Paul Napoléon  147 Rosas y Nopales (Roses and Prickly Pear Cactus)  77 Royal Society, The  38–9, 41, 50 n.8, 52 n.30 Ruffin, Amber  186 Russia(ns)  12 n.15 Saltz, David  6 Sandahl, Carrie  6 San Diego Art Institute  77 San Diego Guild of Puppetry  75–7 Satanta  2 satire  105–6, see also performance Saudade (2015)  75 Schmidt Ocean Institute  234 Schneider, Rebecca  127 Schnorr, Michael  77 Schumann, Peter  75 Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics (STEAM)  55, 229 science  4, 42, 54–8, 60, 62, see also anatomy; astronomy; climate; cognitive science; empiricism; experience; experiment; geology;

INDEX

identity; improvscience; museums; National Science Foundation; National Youth Science Camp; natural philosophy; New Science; paleontology; phrenology; race; technology; women and authority  2–3, 9 biomedical  60, 142, 146 communication of  10, 74, 83, 227–31, 233, 235 and culture  4, 6–7, 61, 63 and education  63, 65, 73, 75, 78, 80–1, 83–6, 227–9, 233 and empowerment  66, 74, 79 and engineering (S&E) degrees  3 and entertainment  227, 230 experimental  41 and fancy  38, 42 history of  5–6 and inclusion  4, 85 interdisciplinary  64 library  56 and mind  102 modern  37 and outreach  73, 84 and patriarchy  39, 49, 55, 64 and performance  36, 39, 67, 73–4, 109 philosophy of  6, 8, 36–7, 39, 44, 46, 48 practice  37, 39 pseudo-  5, 58, 184 reproductive  194 science-arts  49, 67, 73, 80, 83, 86, 234 and theatre  6, 65, 74, 173 and writing  36, 42, 122 and zoos  215 science fiction  21, 36–7, see also speculative fiction

265

science performance  4–5, 7–10, 213, 233–4 scientific racism  7, 9, 103–4, 114, 174, 181, 182, 187 n.5 scientist(s)  7, 22, 41, 46, 55–6, 58, 60–3, 66–7, 74, 79, 103, 110, 112–14, 122, 131–2, 135, 163, 169, 213, 223, 228–31, 234, 236 n.4 Black  233 of color  2–3, 72 and gender  87 n.1 and theatre  105–6 woman  233 Scotland  111 Scoular, William  111 senses  146, 149, 151, 153, see also olfaction; smell(s); smelling hearing-femininity linkage  143–4 SensoryCo.  145 sexuality  5, 146, 195, see also bisexual; gay; LGBTQ+; queer Shadow Ecologies  73–6, 78, 80, 87 as educational outreach  82–6 as public engagement  80–2 shadow puppets  8–9, 73–6, 78, 80–1, 83, 84, 86–7 Shadwell, Thomas  106 Shaughnessy, Nicola  6 Siddons, Cecilia  104 Siddons, Sarah  104 skulls  9, 58, 103–4, 111–14 slavery  174, 176, 180–3 Sleep No More (2011)  147 smell(s) and smelling  9, 141–54 dramaturgy of  148–54 smell studies  143–8 smellscapes  142–7, 153–4

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Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History (NMNH)  121, 123, 127–8, 130–1, 133, 135 Age of Humans Gallery  123–4, 129 David H. Koch Hall of Fossils  121–4, 127–30, 133–5 Deep Time Map  129 FossiLab  122–3, 128–32 Hall of Human Origins  133 Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute  82 Snow, C. P.  6 social Darwinism  187 n.5 social justice  47, 73 social norms  55, 60 somatics  20, 23, 149 eco-  28–9 Song of Songs, The (1891)  147 Space Grant Consortium  1 speculative fiction  49, see also science fiction Spencer, Herbert  187 n.5 Spivak, Gayatri  6 Spurzheim, J. G.  102, 111, 113, 115 n.7 Srinivasan, Sahana  10, 227–30, 233, 235–6 STEM  55, 64, 66–7, 74, 80, 85 Stengers, Isabelle  39 Stevens, George  99, 101, 104–9, 111, 113–14 Story Collider  74 street protest  76, see also activism Subject for Dissection, A (1882–5, 1890s–1910s)  177, 179, 183–4 Sunflowers  2 Superhero Clubhouse  8, 20–1 Hike-Play  21, 25, 26

INDEX

Love Letter to a Seed  27 Planet Plays  20 Tangible Hope  31, 32 n.5 surrogacy  203–4 Susilo, Joko  74 sustainable/sustainability  8, 30, 37, 40, 41, 47–8, 51 n.21 Sustainable Development Goals (United Nations)  40 Synnott, Anthony  144–5 Tapia, Richard  62 Taylor, Valerie  62 Taylor, Willa  65 technology  36, 193–5, 197, 200, 202–4, see also performance; STEM; theatre Terranova, Fabrizio  40 theatre(s)  4, 9, 20, 25–7, 31, 105, 111, 143, 150, 177, see also eco-theatre American  3 amphi-  150 and anatomy  103–4, 174 and animals  224 n.6 and cognition  116 n.16 and design  146–7 experimental  147 and improvisation  8, 63, 64, 66, 74 and India  196 non-  17–18 operating  141–4, 146, 148–54, 155 n.5, 157 n.36, 157 n.39, 157 n.42, 158 n.54 and performance  101, 104, 110 and racism  104, 114 and science  87, 105–6, 174, 233 and studies  5–6

INDEX

submarine  212, 214 techno-  130 toy  76, 77 Theatre Comique  180 Théâtre d’Art  147 Théâtre Libre  146 theatron  150 Thompson, James  179 tobacco ingestion  218–19 Tolbert, Frank  211, 212, 214–17, 219 toposmia  144 transtemporalities  45–9 trauma  77, 78, 204, 206, 90 n.23 Tribble, Evelyn  6 Tropical Field Studies of Art+Nature  81–2 Tuck, Eve  47 Tufts Biomedical School  58 Tufts University  60 Turner, Nat  176 Tuskegee experiment  58, 68 n.9 Twain, Mark  186 Gilded Age: A Tale of To-Day, The  186 Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West (1992), see also Year of the White Bear (1992)  77 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR)  13 n.16 United Kingdom (UK)  18–19, 76 United Nations  1, 40 United States (US)  1, 4, 9, 18–19, 37, 55, 58–9, 79, 102, 111, 123, 131, 148, 174, 182, 197, 203, 214, 222, 230–1, 115 n.6, 117 n.23, 155 n.6, 236 n.1, 236 n.6 United States Public Health Service (USPHS) Syphilis

267

Study, see also Tuskegee experiment   58 University College Hospital, London  157 n.42 University of Connecticut Health Center  63 University of Michigan  179 University of Wisconsin  62 Urshel, John  61 US-Mexico border  8, 77, 79, 89 n.18 Valdes, Mimi  236 van Gogh, Vincent  2 #VanguardSTEM  85 Vidyasagar, Ishwarchandra  196 Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine, see Medical College of Virginia Virtuoso, The (1676)  106 vitalism  37, 42, see also materialism; vitalist Wales  17, 22, 32 n.2 Wankel, Kathy  127 Wankel T. Rex  127–8, 130 Warner, Charles Dudley  186 Gilded Age: A Tale of To-Day, The 186 Warren, John Collins  152, 178, 180, 184 Washington, Harriet  175–6 waxworks  106–7 Welfare State International  76 whiteness  3, 28, 183–7, 202, see also American; bodies; class; identity; race; women in America  67, 174, 183, 186, 199, 217 and audience  100, 103, 174, 178–83, 225 n.20, 235

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and education  84 and gravesites  179 Irish  65 and masculinity  4, 9, 110, 144, 146, 150, 154, 173, 203 and medicine  174, 176, 183 and nations  200 and neighborhood  59–60 and publics  175 and savior  200 and time  129 white-Anglo  61 whiteskins  164 whitewashing  6, 78 white supremacy  7, 28, 114, 173, 181–2 Wider Earth (2018)  74 Williams, Jack  179 Williams, Pharrell  236 Wilson, Stephanie  1–3 Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities in Science and Engineering  3 women, see also lesbian and audience  44 and authority  4, 110 Black  1–2, 55, 233, 235 of color  55, 227, 236 and domesticity  198 and empowerment  1, 37, 39, 41, 227, 50 n.10 and experience  44–5, 56

and friendship  44–5 and literature  185–6 and NASA  12 n.12 and performance  119 n.60 and philosophy of science  36, 42, 44 and reproduction  61, 203–4 and science  3–4, 55, 52 n.1, 87 n.1 in space  1–2, 11 n.4, 13 n.16 in STEM  67, 233 “third world”  204–5 white  185–6 Woodruff Park, Atlanta  1 Wooler, Jonathan  115 n.7 Political Lecture on Heads, alias Blockheads!!, A  115 n.7 World Health Organization (WHO)  219 World Population Prospects (UN)  40 World Space Week  1 Yang, K. Wayne  47 Yaping, Wang  4 Ybarra, Al  212, 216, 223 Year of the White Bear, The (1992) see also Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West (1992)  77

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