Black Well-Being: Health and Selfhood in Antebellum Black Literature
Analyzing slave narratives, emigration polemics, a murder trial, and black-authored fiction, Andrea Stone highlights the central role physical and mental health and well-being played in antebellum black literary constructions of selfhood. At a time when political and medical theorists emphasized black well-being in their arguments for or against slavery, African American men and women developed their own theories about what it means to be healthy and well in contexts of injury, illness, sexual abuse, disease, and disability.
Such portrayals of the healthy black self in early black print culture created a nineteenth-century politics of well-being that spanned continents. Even in conditions of painful labor, severely limited resources, and physical and mental brutality, these writers counter stereotypes and circumstances by representing and claiming the totality of bodily existence.
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Stone gives space to both fugitive and free black writers, canonical and
obscure, essay and narrative, in an effort to revisit the terms of the canon
and the boundaries of the black literary as it is understood for the Antebellum
period"--American Literature "Does an excellent job at
examining how black writers and orators--as well as white legal scholars and
slaveholders--attempted to define black selfhood. . . . Everyone should read
this book when trying to understand how today's society has come to view black
bodies and black well-being, especially in light of the Tuskegee experiment;
Henrietta Lacks; and other immoral, illegal, and extralegal uses of black
bodies for the benefit of white people."--The Journal of African American History "Presents a wealth of
literature--from pamphlets to 'scientific' findings to novels and short stories,
all of which provides insight into antebellum sentiments regarding black
selfhood."--The Griot
