The Patent Form: Norbert Rillieux, Solomon Northup, and the Production of Means in the Atlantic World

Abstract This article troubles the racial foundations of our mediated age by tracking the relocation of the patent form from US intellectual property law to nineteenth-century African American literature. According to an Enlightenment racial schema, people of African descent were considered fit only to be the means for the propagation of European life. This racist ideologeme was enforced by the legal exclusion of free and enslaved African Americans from patenting their inventions. In this article, I examine the Creole inventor Norbert Rillieux’s patented sugar-refining apparatus for how it encapsulates key characteristics of the concept of mediation. I then turn to Solomon Northup’s reworking of the patent form into literary form. In the description of his invention, Northup problematizes notions of intellectual foresight implied in the patent form, ultimately revealing how the power of mediation is tied up with a racial capitalist system that claims to secure property rights while simultaneously undermining them.