Vitality politics : health, debility, and the limits of black emancipation / Stephen Knadler.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Knadler, Stephen P., 1963- author.

Contributor:

Michigan Publishing (University of Michigan), publisher.

Series:

Corporealities

Corporealities : discourse of disability

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

African Americans--Civil rights--Health aspects.

African Americans.

American literature--African American authors--Health aspects.

American literature.

Biopolitics--United States.

Biopolitics.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (301 pages).

Place of Publication:

Ann Arbor, Michigan : University of Michigan Press, 2019.

Summary:

Stephen Knadler's manuscript examines the biopolitics of African American citizenship starting in the post-Reconstruction period, focusing on how African American civil, political, and economic rights became inseparably linked to African American health. "Vitality" was a value for the American populace that was promulgated in the Progressive Era, following the model of the robustly healthy Theodore Roosevelt. Knadler explores how the goal of racial uplift in the period became associated with notions of African American vitality and debility, and traces these notions through a range of African American cultural production, particularly literature. The manuscript theorizes how these works "troubled and also redeployed a biopolitical management around slow violence, health, and disability central to the emergence of modern racial capitalism and liberal citizenship."Although the study focuses on the early twentieth century and writers of that era (e.g., Charles Chesnutt, W.E.B. Du Bois, Marita Bonner, Ann Petry, Angelina Grimke, Nella Larsen, Alain Locke, Jessie Fauset, Dorothy West), its conclusions are acutely relevant to today⁰́₉s headlines, including the Black Lives Matter movement.

Contents:

Introduction: "Ill-Defined Emancipations"

Chapter 1. Chronic Debility and Black Futures: Rehabilitative Politics in Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois

Chapter 2. Narrating Slow Violence: Post-Reconstruction's Necropolitics and Speculating beyond Liberal Antirace Fiction

Chapter 3. Vibrant Naturalism: African American Women, Respectability Ecology, and Reimagined Accommodations

Chapter 4. Unsanitized Domestic Allegories: Biomedical Politics, Racial Uplift, and the African American Woman's Risk Narrative

Chapter 5. "Dis-integrating Sanity": The Harlem Renaissance's "Transforming Psychology" and Black Mental Distress

Epilogue: The Futures of Black Debility

Notes

Bibliography

Index.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 287-326) and index.

Description based on information from the publisher.

ISBN:

9780472125609

0472125605