Black Well-Being analyzes conflicting, oftentimes messy, articulations of black selfhood. From the classical healthy mind-in-body ideal to the disabled physique, the portrayals of black physicality in the literature analyzed here offer a striking range of strategic approaches to creating a nineteenth-century politics of well-being opposed to as well as independent of medically and legally informed systems of subjugation. These authors’ wide-ranging analyses of black well-being expose the instability of national and colonial, social and geopolitical constructs and the mythologies that support t ... More

Black Well-Being analyzes conflicting, oftentimes messy, articulations of black selfhood. From the classical healthy mind-in-body ideal to the disabled physique, the portrayals of black physicality in the literature analyzed here offer a striking range of strategic approaches to creating a nineteenth-century politics of well-being opposed to as well as independent of medically and legally informed systems of subjugation. These authors’ wide-ranging analyses of black well-being expose the instability of national and colonial, social and geopolitical constructs and the mythologies that support them, such as, for example, American exceptionalism, the civilizing enterprise of imperial Britain, and colonial Canada’s role as a safe haven from American slavery and racism. Their considerations of well-being, a fundamental, desirable aspect of selfhood, demonstrate the broad and complex scope of their early-to-mid-nineteenth-century black political philosophy. Their varied articulations bolster the need for an urgent reassessment of our twenty-first-century approaches to biopolitics, health, law, literature, personhood, and humanness toward the development of theories and models of ethical practice that truly account for the contextually discursive composition of the self.