Event

Natural Science under Partus Sequitur Ventrem

This talk draws on the first chapter of my forthcoming book, Venus in Transit: Gendered Violence and the Production of Natural history, which employs the interpretative methods of literary analysis to demonstrate that the epistemological processes of capturing nature in the Atlantic World were articulated through systemic gendered violence.

      Specifically, this talk considers German Dutch botanical illustrator and entomologist Maria Sibylla Merian's Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium (1705), or “Metamorphosis of the Insects of Surinam,” as a text about the brutality of reproductive politics under colonialism and slavery. African and Indigenous women and men guided Merian’s research for this magnificently engraved book for nearly two years in colonial Suriname. Metamorphosis is notable for its inclusion of an embedded collected narrative about an herbal abortifacient called the peacock flower. While references to abortifacients were not uncommon in seventeenth and eighteenth-century herbalist writing, the peacock flower narrative is unusual in its depiction of the reproductive strategies women collectively determined under slavery. Entomological sources focused on caterpillars and moths like Merian’s may seem removed from the legal realms of the Atlantic World, however, the women quoted in the peacock flower narrative demonstrate how they utilized plant medicine to escape the gendered and reproductive exploitation of partus sequitur ventrem—or that which follows the womb, a juridical restriction on enslaved women’s reproductive lives that claims a child’s enslaved or free status is the same as their mother’s.

        This talk will analyze this embedded narrative as well as multiple engravings from Metamorphosis to explore how the text frames reproduction as an environmental condition, where plants and insects inhabit the naturalistic landscapes of Suriname without the infrastructures of the colonial project. Metamorphosis' engravings demonstrate how the systemic violence of the plantation is most effectively circulated in eighteenth-century Atlantic print culture when it is hidden in plain sight.