Cranial Reconstruction

Abstract

Abstract This chapter interrogates the dominance of early psychometrics in the form of racial comparative craniology, in particular the measurement of brain volume. It opens with a reading of Turner’s Confessions to outline Black genius as a challenge to ubiquitous theories of racial cognitive difference, leading into an examination of Great Man theory in advocacy works like those of William Wells Brown in relation to the reformist impulse of the otherwise racially conflicted and complicit field of phrenology. These moments, the chapter argues, outline the emergence of a trend toward psychometric thinking that is exemplified by the medical testing the Union Army conducted on the brains of Black people. It is an act of cultural midwifery of sorts, creating a psychometric gaze that then infects the birth of the Realist novel, as exemplified by Miss Ravenel’s Conversion and Daniel Deronda.