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1 results

  • 1 - Theorizing Black Bodies

  • from Part I - Extraction and Abstraction
  • Edited by Cherene Sherrard-Johnson, Pomona College, California
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to the Black Body in American Literature
    Published online:
    09 May 2024
    Print publication:
    16 May 2024, pp 17-31

  • Summary

    In the settler-enslaving context of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, where multiple discourse communities (politics, science, Christianity, and abolitionism) worked in tandem to signify Blackness as a distinct biological entity, Black writers crafted an alternative symbolic order that understood racialized Blackness as a socially constructed embodied experience. This chapter argues that, for thinkers like Phillis Wheatley Peters, Adam Carman, Maria Stewart, Rev. J. W. Loguen, and Harriet Jacobs, the Black body is a site of overdetermined experiences that – when studied – reveal the machinations of anti-Black sociopolitical processes. By focalizing three areas of critical interrogation – moral inversion, natural rights, and sentimentality – I show how these thinkers interrogated the West’s foundational mythologies of nation and selfhood.