Introduction: "Ill-defined emancipations" -- Chronic debility and black futures : rehabilitative politics in Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois -- Narrating slow violence : post-Rconstruction's necropolitics and speculating beyond liberal antirace fiction -- Vibrant naturalism : African American women, respectability ecology, and reimagined accommodations -- Unsanitized domestic allegories : biomedical politics, racial uplift, and the African American woman's risk narrative -- "Dis-integrating sanity" : the Harlem Renaissance's "transforming psychology" and black mental distress -- Epilogue: The futures of back debility.
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 today's headlines, including the Black Lives Matter movement"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.