Vitality Politics: Health, Debility, and the Limits of Black Emancipation

Erscheinungsjahr 2019
ISBN: 978-0-472-05418-3
Verlag: UNIV OF MICHIGAN PR

Buch, Englisch, 320 Seiten, Paperback, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm

Reihe: Corporealities: Discourses Of Disability

Vitality Politics focuses on a slow racial violence against African Americans through everyday, accumulative, contagious, and toxic attritions on health. The book engages with recent critical disability studies scholarship to recognize that debility, or the targeted maiming and distressing of Black populations, is a largely unacknowledged strategy of the U.S. liberal multicultural capitalist state. This politicization of biological health serves as an instrument for insisting on a racial state of exception in which African Americans' own unhealthy habits and disease susceptibility justifies their legitimate suspension from full rights to social justice, economic opportunity, and political freedom and equality. The book brings together disability studies, Black Studies, and African American literary history as it highlights the urgent need and gives weight to a biopolitics of debilitation and medicalization to better understand how Black lives are made not to matter in our supposedly race-neutral multicultural democracy.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Knadler, Stephen

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Amerikanische Geschichte
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziale Gruppen/Soziale Themen Invalidität, Krankheit und Abhängigkeit: Soziale Aspekte
• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Volkskunde
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft

Über Autor(innen)

Stephen Knadler is Professor of English, Spelman College.