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

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

Stephen Knadler
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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.
 
  • Cover
  • Title Page
  • Copyright Page
  • Contents
  • Acknowledgments
  • Introduction: “Ill-Defined Emancipations”
  • 1. Chronic Debility and Black Futures
  • 2. Narrating Slow Violence
  • 3. Vibrant Naturalism
  • 4. Unsanitized Domestic Allegories
  • 5. “Dis-integrating Sanity”
  • Epilogue
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
  • Index
Citable Link
Published: 2019
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN(s)
  • 978-0-472-05418-3 (paper)
  • 978-0-472-12560-9 (ebook)
  • 978-0-472-07418-1 (hardcover)
  • 978-0-472-00414-0 (audio download)
Series
  • Corporealities: Discourses of Disability
Subject
  • Race and Ethnicity
  • Literary Studies:American Literature
  • American Studies
  • Disability Studies

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  • Introduction3
  • Chapter 32
  • Chapter 42

  • sanitary mother5
  • National Negro Health Week Bulletin3
  • politics of health3
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  • Chicago Department of Health2
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Black-and-white photographs of “healthy” light-skinned babies such as this one on the cover of the 1927 National Negro Health Week Bulletin were a popular image symbolizing racial progress in African American public health publications.

Cover of 1927 National Negro Health Week Bulletin

From Introduction

Fig. 2. Photograph on the cover of the 1927 National Negro Health Week Bulletin showing a light-skinned Black child in a washing tub.

This sentimental photograph by an unknown photographer of a domestic scene depicts a mother and her two daughters in a well-appointed middle-class home complete with a lush area rug, carved marble fireplace, polished writing desk, and armchair. Both the mother and two daughters have straightened hair and wear carefully starched formal attire to indicate their respectability.

Contented Home Life Promotes Health

From Introduction

Fig. 3. Black-and-white photograph of a mother and her two daughters reading beside the fireplace in a family parlor that appeared in the 1927 National Negro Health Week Bulletin.

This photograph depicting the “intelligent care” urged on Black mothers has a deliberate ambiguity. The woman staring down at her sleeping child after giving him his bath is softly lit against deep shadows. Her individual features are less important than the washing tub and clean towels in the foreground, and she appears to be wearing a nursing uniform as if to suggest that the good sanitary mother should also be a trained nurse.

Constant Intelligent Care

From Introduction

Fig. 4. Photograph that appeared in the 1927 National Negro Health Week Bulletin picturing a Black nurse or mother with a freshly bathed child in her lap above a caption that reads, “The baby is entitled to constant intelligent care.”

The Neighborhood Union women’s questionnaire reflects their awareness of sociology’s new scientific quantitative methodologies. This comprehensive survey asks questions not only about the material conditions both inside and outside the home (from household equipment and lighting to the appearance of the yard and street) but also the sanitary and moral habits of the families. The survey of the welfare of the neighborhood also included a concern with the family’s efforts to beautify their home.

Neighborhood Union Survey 1

From Chapter 3

Fig. 5. Questionnaire created by Lugenia Hope and the women of the Neighborhood Union to survey the material, moral, sanitary, and aesthetic conditions of the home and yards in the neighborhoods developing around Atlanta University, Morehouse, and Spelman College in the first decades of the twentieth century.

The Neighborhood Union women’s questionnaire reflects their awareness of sociology’s new scientific quantitative methodologies. This comprehensive survey asks questions not only about the material conditions both inside and outside the home (from household equipment and lighting to the appearance of the yard and street) but also the sanitary and moral habits of the families. The survey of the welfare of the neighborhood also included a concern with the family’s efforts to beautify their home.

Neighborhood Union Survey 2

From Chapter 3

Fig. 5. Questionnaire created by Lugenia Hope and the women of the Neighborhood Union to survey the material, moral, sanitary, and aesthetic conditions of the home and yards in the neighborhoods developing around Atlanta University, Morehouse, and Spelman College in the first decades of the twentieth century.

The black-and-white drawing in Waring’s 1916 Prophylactic Topics depicts a five-pointed star with the words “Five Points in Household Health” in the center. Each point of the star designates one of the five points: Prompt Disposal of Garbage, Adequate Heating and Ventilating, Sanitary Plumbing, Disposal of Dust and Dirt, and a Good Ice-Box. At the bottom of the drawing, in addition to the elaboration of the five points of household health, is a poem that calls household health also the “star of empire” and that thus ties health care on the homefront to the civilizing of backwards races abroad.

Star Performer on Stage of Household Health

From Chapter 4

Fig. 6. Image from Mary Fitzbutler Waring’s 1916 household medical guide Prophylactic Topics entitled “Upon the Stage of Household Health Be a Star Performer.”

This illustrated public health warning depicts a triangle of streets with food carts surrounded by motor cars, horses and buggies, and pedestrians. The text block in the center of the illustration warns readers, however, to avoid any foods from street vendors that might have been exposed to flies, animals, dust, or what the advertisement calls “promiscuous pubic handling

Death Lurks in Dirty Food

From Chapter 4

Fig. 7. Illustration from Mary Fitzbutler Waring’s 1916 Prophylactic Topics entitled “Death Lurks in Dirty Food.”

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