Elizabeth Polcha

“Redacting Desire” offers an alternate reading of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century naturalist print culture by demonstrating how sexual desire, intimacy, and domination were entwined with observational science in the Caribbean natural world. This project foregrounds the centrality of women of color to the writings of colonial scientists, analyzing the ways in which interracial sexual encounters, while important to the experiences of men of science, were redacted from the production of transatlantic travel narratives and natural histories. Each chapter considers modes of literary redaction, such as coded diaries and edited manuscripts, as systems of knowledge creation within enlightenment-era observational science. Interdisciplinary in scope, this research places gender and sexuality at the forefront of the history of New World science.

In the Enlightenment era, European men and women of science accumulated wealth and status by assembling naturalist knowledge in colonial sites across Atlantic and Pacific worlds, a set of relations that marshaled gendered violence. Within these sites of scientific study, African and Indigenous women theorized their own knowledge and relationality with the natural world beyond the records of naturalists. “Venus in Transit” argues that natural history became an institutionalized discipline in the eighteenth century through a culture of sexual exploitation and domination in the Atlantic World. A primary inquiry that animates the book is: how might we read beyond naturalist practices of documentation for the elisions, paraphrases, and narratives of women who were central to the development of natural science? Eighteenth-century naturalist writing is characterized by embedded narratives that offer a window into Indigenous and African knowledge systems. Each chapter locates archival fragments where women’s recorded experiences, speech acts, and movement bend the rules of naturalist recordkeeping, despite the white authorship and Eurocentric circulation of these writings. Broad in geographic scope, the book examines print and visual culture across the Caribbean, West Africa, the South Pacific archipelago, and North and South America.