This chapter offers a theoretical examination of the relationship between the Black body and religion in African American religious studies, paying particular attention to enslavement and the construction of the slave body and “the flesh” as a complex fulcrum for religious embodiment and self-fashioning in modernity and also for intracommunal bodily violation in Black religious contexts. This chapter wrestles with the philosophical inheritances that scholars in this field must navigate as both an intellectual exercise on the matter of Black existence, and as an ethical problem with regard to how to account for both the experience of domination and the manifold examples of Black religious innovation which sit at the crux of the study of Black religions. Thus, it effectively argues that scholars cannot sidestep attention to the Black body and its interdependence on the fraught category of religion.

This chapter examines the relationship between Black literature and anti-Black medical violence. It argues that, since at least the eighteenth century, Black writers have tapped into the narrative and documentary power of Black writing to chronicle and archive the racialized operations of medical violence and its historical attempts to exploit Black bodies. Using literature to spotlight medicine’s role in the global economies of Black embodied terror, these writers have helped to construct an important site of memory that I call the Black medical archive. In doing so, they demonstrate the importance of medicine to the politics and aesthetics of the Black literary tradition, from its origins to the present. Further, they unfurl how Black literature has long been a crucial site for the transformational practices of storytelling that the field of narrative medicine has proffered as a radical intervention into the histories of violence, exploitation, and discrepant care that have informed the practices and epistemologies of modern medicine.

The black body plays a central role in stellar atmospheres in describing the radiation field within the photosphere.The equation describing the photon distribution is Planck's law.Because the characteristics of black-body radiation are completely determined by the temperature of the black body, it forms a fundamental radiation standard, used to calibrate absolute radiant energy received from stars.

This essay examines the conditions of African American modernism in the twenty-first century. How does a new black modernism differ from an earlier black modernist period commonly associated with the New Negro Movement of the 1920s? Moving briefly from Richard Bruce Nugent’s 1926 short story, “Smoke, Lilies, and Jade” to two significant portrayals of a new black modernism by the visual artist Glenn Ligon and the poet Claudia Rankine, the essay considers how Ligon’s text-based paintings and Rankine’s poetry in Citizen play with the dynamic of image and text that has been so productive for black modernism. In particular, Rankine’s use of Ligon’s text-based paintings in Citizen helps the poet depict the subtle, subjective shift that occurs when difference, however defined, “enters the American landscape.”