How do new studies of the Black body navigate the racially-charged, politically-divided atmosphere of the 21st century United States in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, following the eruption of protests against policing and continued abolition movements? Or for that matter, the previous four centuries stretching back to 1619? Our bodies are always already in flux transforming, dissolving, and reconfiguring in response to rapidly deteriorating environs. What will we do? How will we adapt? What tools does literature provide us with for how to engage, confront, resist, and sustain? These panelists, all contributors to a forthcoming, interdisciplinary volume, on the Black body in American Literature, explore humans who happened to be Black at pleasure and at play, and not just as fungible objects from which to extract value, or an abject figure to pity. Featured panelists will provide a balanced treatment that is rigorously trans-historicized and collated around certain temporal flashpoints in which the Black body appears to have heightened corporeal or conceptual impact. Sami Schalk’s formulation of “Bodyminds,” a feminist conglomerate of the mental and physical, is an important reminder that even as we focus on the materiality of the body, we should remain wary of disaggregating the flesh from the consciousness. The contributors showcased in this panel reflect a diverse spectrum of Black embodiment, whether through spirit possession and religious performance, the iconographic legacy of a transnational diasporic revolutionary or medicinal racism’s material impact. Each paper interrogates literary representations of the porosity of the flesh as well as how “bodyminds” resist and queer understandings of Black ontology and visibility. The working conditions of Black embodiment remain fraught; these panelists make sustenance their primary concern.
The Black Body and Religion, Ahmad T. Greene-Hayes
From early African conversion narratives and accounts about spirit possession in the Atlantic world, to Black Pentecostal tongue-talking in the afterlife of slavery, texts featuring Black embodiment of religious fervor, piety, or ecstasy abound. This paper tracks how the embodiment of Black religious practice manifests in American literature. From spirit guides to soothsayers and prophets, Black bodies are exalted as hosts for the spirit and are often occupied by deities from on high. Taking into account multiple religious practices such as from Christianity, Voudou, and Islam, this chapter accounts for how the Black body functions in religious texts that seek to transcend the materiality of the flesh and/or to re-imagine the flesh as a canvas for religious innovation and insight in the anti-black world.
The Black Body and Medicine, Julius Fleming Jr.
As experimental test subjects in the Tuskegee Experiment to the founding of American gynecology, Black bodies have played an essential and often objectionable role in medical research and practice. Whether it involves disparity of care, insensitivity to levels of pain, immunity or vulnerability to pandemics, American literature features examples of characters whose bodies, through experimentation or exhibition, force us to confront medical ethics, namely in relation to race. Recent works addressing experimentation and mental and physical trauma resulting from malpractice include Toni Morrison’s Home (2012), Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad (2016), Kwoya Fagin Maples poetry collection Mend (2018), and Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2010).
“Celebrity Bodies: Toussaint Louverture and the Queer Spectacle of Black Masculinity in Literature of the Americas”. Samantha Pinto
Toussaint Louverture, hero of the Haitian Revolution, occupies a key space in the imagination of Black masculinity across his own time up through the present day. In this paper, I trace the way Toussaint Louverture’s body, in particular, is reimagined and represented both as a symbol for what Michelle Stephens terms “Black Empire,” and, taken together as an oeuvre, as a something altogether queerer. In texts as varied as CLR James’ The Black Jacobins and Toussaint L'Ouverture, Édouard Glissant’s Monsieur Toussaint, Derek Walcott’s The Haitian Trilogy, Eugene O’Neil’s The Emperor Jones, Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls, as well as visual art, cinema, public monuments, performances, children’s books, and his own memoir, Louverture’s body can be read across various times, spaces, and forms as a site of desire, vulnerability, and contested lineage for Black masculine “freedom dreams.” I argue that his continued embodied celebrity is more complex than an individual text’s objectification, and instead acts as a recurring scenario of Black political negotiation in key historical moments that unsettle racial identification.