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PATHOLOGIZING BLACK BODIES: THE LEGACY OF PLANTATION

SLAVERY

Edited by Constante González Groba, Ewa Barbara Luczak and Urszula

Niewiadomska-Flis

Routledge, 2023

DOI: https://doi.10.26754/ojs_misc/mj.202510154

VANESA LADO-PAZOS

Universidade de Santiago de Compostela

vanesa.lado.pazos@usc.es

<https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4092-2398>

In 2007 Saidiya Hartman famously defined the afterlife of slavery as an existence

determined by “skewed life chances, limited access to health and education,

premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment” (2007: 6). Since then, the

discipline of Black studies has actively embraced the productive intersection

between the past and the present to point up the tragic perpetuation of racial

oppression and the relentless struggle of the African American community in the

United States. This continuity between the past and the present was evidenced in

April 2020 when the entire world, immersed in the devastating Covid-19

pandemic, watched video footage of the murder of yet another African American

man at the hands of the police. What was perhaps less apparent was the

disproportionate toll that the pandemic itself had on the Black population of the

country, a paradigmatic example of the invisible impact of structural racism.

Pathologizing Black Bodies: The Legacy of Plantation Slavery (2023), co-authored

by Constante González Groba, Ewa Barbara Luczak and Urszula Niewiadomska-

Flis, explores the multiplicity of mechanisms through which these means of

oppression are actualized in the present and represented in literature. The first in

the series Routledge Studies in African American Literature, the monograph stems

from the conception of the Black body as a site of inscription of historical violence,

oppression and trauma, and scrutinizes this bodily “criminalization, sexualization

and medicalization” (1). The book is divided in three sections centered around

eugenics, trauma and food studies, which examine the corporeal imprint of slavery

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as shown through the medical experimentation, capitalist commodification and

exploitation as well as the fungibility of the racialized body. Alongside this, the

detailed analysis provided in each of the parts assesses the different acts of resistance

undertaken at an individual and communal level.

The first part, “Pathologizing ‘Blood’”, comprises two chapters in which Luczak

tackles the application of scientific racism to the medical sciences and analyzes the

tension between the structural implementation of these discourses and individual

attitudes through two cases of study. The first chapter is concerned with the

emergence of racial seroanthropology in the 1920s as a discipline that mobilized

the symbolic power of blood for segregationist purposes. Through the

contextualization and analysis of Wallace Thurman’s short story “Grist in the Mill”

(1926), the author discusses the main cultural meanings of blood —namely, an

essentialist substance, a symbol of danger, an emblem of community and a mark of

purity (39)— and how these meanings are exposed and subverted in the narrative.

This ideology was used to defend white superiority on biological grounds, and

interracial contact was purported to endanger the well-being of the individual and

the body politic. Labeled a “mock gothic fiction” (39) due to its treatment of

conventional gothic tropes with an ironic and sarcastic tone, the short story taps

into the long tradition of the genre in Southern literature. The narrative instantiates

the process of appropriation and subversion of traditional associations between

Blackness and monstrosity singled out by Maisha Wester in her seminal study of

African American gothic forms (2012: 28). The second chapter continues to

develop the ramifications of eugenics as a pseudo-scientific discourse, this time

with the examination of involuntary sterilizations in Toni Morrison’s Home

(2012). Through the fictionalization of characters and events, the novel invokes

figures such as Dr. Marion J. Sims, heralded as the father of gynecology, and his

infamous experiments on enslaved women; Eunice Rivers, the nurse who

coordinated the Tuskegee syphilis experiments (1932–1972); and the 2010

scandal regarding the 7,600 sterilization procedures performed by the state of

North Carolina between 1933 and 1973 that disproportionately targeted Black

women. The novelty of this study resides in Luczak’s accurate analytical approach

to Morrison’s novel through standpoint eugenics, a framework that employs the

“epistemological perspective of eugenic victims” and vests it with a “greater weight

in unearthing the medical profession’s abusive practices” (53). In addition to

focusing on victims, Luczak examines the role of the bystander, highlighting how

the intersection of race and gender becomes a fundamental axiom of what the

author calls “female solidarity witnessing” (70).

In the second part, “Pathologizing the Body”, González Groba further develops

the dimensions of corporeal pathologization by exploring the representation of the

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racialized body as a disruptive element in need of containment, as well as the

reversal of this tendency in antiracist discourses. The third chapter is concerned

with the examination of literal forms of subjugation in two critically acclaimed

contemporary novels, Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) by Jesmyn Ward and The

Nickel Boys (2019) by Colson Whitehead. The prison structures that govern

Parchman Farm and the Arthur G. Dozier reformatory are testaments to the

spatial legacies of plantation slavery, and the authors’ mobilization of the tropes of

the ghost and the double rely on the potential of gothic literature to articulate a

profound social critique. Ward’s specters signify on the intergenerational

transmission of trauma and its iteration in the present. In turn, Whitehead’s

engagement with the doppelgänger reveals a division of the self predicated on the

two main trends of the racial discourse: the possibility of transcendence is pitted

against the pessimistic belief in the insuperability of antiblackness. Intimately

related to the exercise of spatialized rememory vested with supernatural overtones

that Rebecca Evans calls “gothic geomemory” (2021: 446), these spaces and

beings underscore a transhistorical process of de-subjectification and erasure of the

Black body. As counterpart to Luczak’s analysis, in the fourth chapter González

Groba expands on the discussion of the body politic as a metaphorical organism.

The comparative analysis of Lillian Smith’s Killers of the Dream (1949) and Ibram

X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist (2019) draws a parallel between both authors’

employment of cancer as a metaphor for racism that effectively redresses the

construction of Blackness as pathological. Each of them addresses their most

immediate socio-historical context: while Smith sought to account for the malady

of segregation in her native South, Kendi focuses on systemic racism at a national

level, its origins and the mechanisms that enable its perpetuation today. Both

authors converge in their categorical indictment of the politics of disposability

(2023: 115) that devaluate African American lives. Drawing on their personal battle

with this disease and survival, Smith and Kendi advocate for the urgent enactment of

radical measures that will avoid a metastatic expansion of racism and thus irrevocably

imperil the “moral”, “political” and “cultural health” of the nation (122).

The third part, “De-Pathologizing Access to Food and Land”, discusses the

afterlife of slavery within the sphere of food production and consumption and

focuses on African American emancipatory strategies. The fifth chapter is concerned

with food representation in hip-hop through artists such as Goodie Mob, Dead

Prez, Notorious B.I.G. or OutKast, where it features both as a distinctive marker

of Black identity as well as a testament to endemic racism. Niewiadomska-Flis

examines current patterns of food distribution as bearing the imprint of plantation

slavery dynamics in practices such as supermarket redlining that deprives minority

areas of access to a broad variety of nutritional options. The author interrogates

the interconnections among race, poverty, food accessibility and health through

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the concept of food apartheid coined by Ashante Reese and “born at the

intersection of residential segregation, economic capital (capitalist accumulation)

and dispossession” (146). Niewiadomska-Flis delineates a health-conscious turn in

hip-hop culture that seeks to raise awareness of dietary-derived health issues and to

advocate for a healthier and greener revision of African American foodways.

Faithful to its combative style, this process of “decolonizing their communities’

diets” becomes a powerful “act of rebellion against racial injustice and

discrimination” (153). In the sixth chapter, the author explores the relationship

between African Americans and land, one that has been historically marked by

dispossession. Dispossession originated during slavery and was perpetuated

through subsequent systems such as sharecropping, peonage or convict leasing.

This opposition to Black land ownership as a chief mechanism of racial subjugation

continued into the twentieth century with the blatant discriminatory practices

enacted by the US Department of Agriculture. In this context, Niewiadomska-Flis

proposes Natalie Baszile’s 2014 novel Queen Sugar as a counter-narrative of land

reclamation and identity affirmation in a cultural space dominated by whiteness.

Her analysis of the narrative’s sugarcane plantation through the lenses of Michel

Foucault’s concept of heterotopia and Sarah Ahmed’s notion of affective economy

underlines the problematization of the Southern rhetoric of the pastoral idyll

through the African American protagonist who must confront the realities of

agrarian structural racism. In turn, successfully accessing land will allow for a

redefinition of a traditionally white co-opted space into a “site of [black] sovereignty

and sustainability” (165) mediated by the community’s solidarity and a shift

toward cooperative economics that also entails a redefinition of the self.

Pathologizing Black Bodies: The Legacy of Plantation Slavery offers an exhaustive

account of the manifold manners in which African American existence has been

pathologized and of the imprint that slavery has left on many spheres of Black life.

These inquiries are informed by a multiplicity of theoretical concepts that emanate

from different analytical frameworks, thus providing a comprehensive and detailed

assessment of the multi-dimensional phenomenon of systemic racism in the United

States. Luczak, González Groba and Niewiadomska-Flis examine a vast array of

texts and genres ranging from the short story to hip-hop lyrics, extending from the

early twentieth century to the present and with plotlines dating back to even earlier

periods. These two facets of the monograph demonstrate the continuation of racial

oppression and the pervasiveness of this issue within the contemporary social

debate, thus speaking to its main quality: its timeliness. The book directly engages

the inescapable hold of history and the presentness of the past, one that has been

theorized by myriad Black intellectuals from a historical, social, cultural and

philosophical perspective in recent years. From Michelle Alexander’s assessment of

our era as “the New Jim Crow” (2010) to Christina Sharpe’s description of Black

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life as perpetually embedded “in the wake” of slavery (2016), the discussion

carried out in these pages dismantles the grounds for a falsely-proclaimed postracial

age. Thus, with its acute critical analysis and exhaustive historico-theoretical

survey, the monograph stands as an active call for racial justice and as a relevant

asset in the expansion of Black studies.

Acknowledgements

The research for this project was funded by an FPU fellowship (19/01806) from

the Spanish Ministry of Universities and the research group Discourse and Identity

(GRC ED431C2023/15, Xunta de Galicia).

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Afterlives in Contemporary African American Novels”. American Literature 93(3): 445-472.

<https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-9361265>.

HARTMAN, Saidiya. (2007) 2021. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route.

Serpent’s Tail.

SHARPE, Christina. 2016. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Duke U.P. <https://doi.

org/10.1515/9780822373452>.

wESTER, Maisha. 2012. African American Gothic. Screams from Shadowed Places. Palgrave

Macmillan. <https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137315281>.

Received: 22/01/2024

Accepted: 06/11/2024

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.