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To count and be counted: quantification in the age of American slavery
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Wierda, Meagan. To count and be counted: quantification in the age of American slavery. Retrieved from https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/t3-45kw-mm71

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TitleTo count and be counted: quantification in the age of American slavery
NameWierda, Meagan (author); Bay, Mia (chair); Delbourgo, James (member); Pietruska, Jamie (member); Brown, Kathleen M. (member); Rutgers University; School of Graduate Studies
Date Created2022
Other Date2022-10 (degree)
SubjectAmerican history, Science history, Black history, Antislavery movements -- United States -- History -- 19th century, African American abolitionists -- United States -- History -- 19th century, United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- African Americans, United States -- Race relations -- History -- 19th century
Extent1 online resource (287 pages)
DescriptionThis dissertation, which spans the period between the 1820s and the Civil War, uses debates about slavery and citizenship to explore how and to what end African Americans incorporated quantification within their activism. It argues that numbers were an important site of empowerment for Black activists, and that when deployed by the latter, quantification became an anti-racist tool. “To Count and Be Counted” challenges us to think of antebellum African Americans not just as the objects of quantification, but as quantifying subjects in their own right. Black activists mobilized numerical data to critique the demographic fearmongering of the white-led American Colonization Society; used population figures to convey the insurrectionary potential of the African diaspora; marshalled statistics to communicate fitness for citizenship in the face of disenfranchisement; and produced statistical tables to quantify the fatal violence of slavery. By drawing from the Black intellectual tradition as well as from feminist and postcolonial interventions within the field of science and technology studies, both of which challenge narrow parameters of knowledge production, my dissertation deepens our understandings of a vibrant culture of anti-racist protest by asking “who counted?”
NotePh.D.
NoteIncludes bibliographical references
Genretheses
Persistent URLhttps://doi.org/doi:10.7282/t3-45kw-mm71
LanguageEnglish
CollectionSchool of Graduate Studies Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Organization NameRutgers, The State University of New Jersey
RightsThe author owns the copyright to this work.
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