From enslaved to dissected: poetry, Afro-Cuban skulls and the transnational economies of exchange in Samuel Morton's Crania Americana (Philadelphia, 1839)

Racial theories and human remains circulated between Cuban intellectuals and the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, where the physical anthropologist Samuel Morton assembled his collection of Indigenous and African skulls from the Americas. This article aims to reveal unknown aspects of scientific racism in colonial Cuba and Philadelphia while it focuses its intellectual energy on paying attention to multidirectional flows and exchange of ideas and the circulation of knowledge in different forms associated with the expansion of Morton's Crania Americana.