Healthy: Medicine, Law, Literature and a Nineteenth-Century Black Rhetorics of Physicality (2009)
Stone, Andrea (Author)
University of Toronto
Physical Details: 235 pp.
Language: English
In nineteenth-century North America and the Caribbean, literary representations of slavery and enslaved people were profoundly interconnected with notions of the African physique derived from law and medicine, simultaneously responding to and shaping those influential discourses. Contributing to recent work on the body under slavery, the dissertation argues for a specific consideration of medical and legal theories and practices that attempted to 'construct' people of African descent in the United States, colonial Canada, and the Caribbean. My study illuminates early black writers' (some professionals themselves) contributions to race, legal, and literary theories through their rhetorics of physicality that emphasizes health. I argue that American, colonial Canadian, and Caribbean geopolitical affiliations to each other and to the imperialist Old World produced complex systems of analysis in which nineteenth-century African-American writers/orators created both fictional and non-fictional forums for theorizing race and professional practice. Foregrounding physicality and health against a backdrop of medical and legal discourses in our readings of early African-American writing produces a frame for understanding race, one that accounts for embodied difference and social construction. An emphasis on medico-legal discourse illustrates how nineteenth-century black writers attempted to counter proslavery ideology even as they underscored physicalized alterity to theorize race and critique white social ideologies.
...MoreDescription Cited in ProQuest Diss. & Thes. . ProQuest Doc. ID 305106737.
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