Science and Whiteness as Property in the Dutch Atlantic World: Maria Sibylla Merian's Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium (1705)

Kinukawa, Tomomi

doi:10.1353/jowh.2012.0031

Cited by 33 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 38 publications

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“…Like male naturalists in the colonial Atlantic, Merian drew on these women's knowledge and expertise while minimizing their contributions and asserting her own authority as a knower. As Tomomi Kinukawa has argued, drawing on Cheryl I. Harris's concept of “whiteness as property,” Merian participated in a broader process of constructing scientific knowledge as a racialized possession (Harris, 1993; Kinukawa, 2012).…”

Section: Weaving Women Into the Narrativementioning

confidence: 99%

Teaching women's work and thought in undergraduate history of science courses

Yale

2023

History Compass

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As a rich field of scholarship now demonstrates, from at least the early modern period, women have consistently contributed to natural philosophy, science, and medicine in Europe and the Anglo‐American world. Their participation in these fields, like men's, has been shaped by gendered social and cultural expectations. It has risen and fallen on cyclical waves of effort to exclude them or minimize their contributions. In historical accounts, until recently, women's roles have been neglected or forgotten. Even today, in both scholarly and popular histories, women in science are often presented as surprising rediscoveries. Women are persistently perceived as newcomers in the sciences. Unless women's contributions are consistently integrated into mainstream narratives in the history of science, women could easily become invisible again. To counter this possibility, I first examine the structural factors shaping women's participation in the sciences and their historical visibility from the early modern period through the 19th century. I then suggest ways to include women in undergraduate surveys in the history of European and Anglo‐American science that encourage students to engage with women's ideas and with women as complex, multi‐valent historical actors. I show how we can situate women's contributions in a narrative that invites students to examine the history of science as a history of ideas, people, and practices and to explore history as a resource for understanding the role of scientific knowledge and authority in the present. Though my own examples are limited to the history of science in Europe and the Anglo‐American world from the early modern period, I argue that a similar thematic approach could be explored and implemented in other historical contexts, given appropriate secondary and primary sources.

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Section: Weaving Women Into the Narrativementioning

confidence: 99%

Teaching women's work and thought in undergraduate history of science courses

Yale

2023

History Compass

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Caribbean Literature in Transition, 1800–1920

Donnell¹,

O’Callaghan²,

Watson³

2020

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This volume examines what Caribbean literature looked like before 1920 by surveying the print culture of the period. The emphasis is on narrative, including an enormous range of genres, in varying venues, and in multiple languages of the Caribbean. Essays examine lesser-known authors and writing previously marginalized as nonliterary: popular writing in newspapers and pamphlets; fiction and poetry such as romances, sentimental novels, and ballads; non-elite memoirs and letters, such as the narratives of the enslaved or the working classes, especially women. Many contributions are comparative, multilingual, and regional. Some infer the cultural presence of subaltern groups within the texts of the dominant classes. Almost all of the chapters move easily between time periods, linking texts, writers, and literary movements in ways that expand traditional notions of literary influence and canon formation. Using literary, cultural, and historical analyses, this book provides a complete re-examination of early Caribbean literature.

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