Mixed Race Studies

Retrospection: Agassiz’s Expeditions in Brazil

The Harvard Crimson
2016-04-21

Michelle Y. Raji

Louis Rodolphe Agassiz

But for Agassiz, the trip to Brazil was about more than science. Not only was evolution—a process not immediately observable to the human eye—deeply antithetical to Agassiz’s staunch empiricism, evolution was profoundly at odds with his perceived world order.

Three decades after the then-obscure scientist Charles Darwin quietly sketched his now-famous finches aboard the HMS Beagle in the Galapagos, influential Harvard professor Louis Rodolphe Agassiz set out with much greater fanfare on a lesser-known expedition. In 1865, Agassiz and his wife, accompanied by a small group of Harvard scientists and students, set sail from New York to Rio de Janeiro on The Colorado.

In a lecture en route to Brazil, Agassiz challenged Darwin’s revolutionary theory of evolution on the grounds that the theory relied too much on argument and too little on fact. Agassiz posited that evolution was not plausible according to the geologic record. The trip to Brazil was an attempt to disprove Darwin once and for all. Agassiz saw in the unique biodiversity of Brazil a perfect laboratory to test his counter-theories of phylogenetic embryology and glacial catastrophe in the tropics.

But for Agassiz, the trip to Brazil was about more than science. Not only was evolution—a process not immediately observable to the human eye—deeply antithetical to Agassiz’s staunch empiricism, evolution was profoundly at odds with his perceived world order. Though only moderately religious, Agassiz believed in the existence of a creator in all his work. Fortunately for Agassiz, this belief fit well with comparative zoology, which at the time focused heavily on hierarchal classification…

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Stalking the Biracial Hidden Self in Henry James’s The Sense of the Past and “The Jolly Corner”

The Henry James Review
Volume 25, Number 3, Fall 2004
pages 276-284
E-ISSN: 1080-6555,
Print ISSN: 0273-0340
DOI: 10.1353/hjr.2004.0027

Stephanie L. Hawkins, Assistant Professor of English
University of North Texas

This essay argues that, for James, the visible face and body conceal some genetic “reality” or heritage, which he figures in both The Sense of the Past and “The Jolly Corner” as the specter of unacknowledged racial difference. In both works, James fuses evolutionary biology and the ghostly, thematizing turn-of-the-century anxieties regarding miscegenation. By transforming a narrative of time travel into one of racial passing, James both literalizes the psychological phenomenon of a “hidden self” and exposes the central paradox of double-consciousness: the simultaneous recognition and rejection of one’s “hidden” racial differences and sense of estrangement from the national family.

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