AML 2600 – Spring 2027 – Eneh

To some readers, the Black body in fiction registers primarily as a symbol of oppression or resilience. This course aims to complicate that reading. It offers students a sustained encounter with the particular and often unglamorous embodied conditions that African American writers have represented across two centuries, and it asks what changes when we read those conditions not as metaphor but as the text's primary subject. We will trace this literary history across five key movements: 1) the slave narrative, in which writers like Harriet Jacobs documented the enslaved body itself as evidentiary archive; 2) the conjure tradition, exemplified by Charles Chesnutt, theorizing healing outside biomedical authority; 3) the modernist and postwar novel, in which writers like Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin represent the psychiatric institution and addiction as instruments of racial surveillance and control; 4) the feminist and post-civil rights novel, where Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, and Toni Cade Bambara reckon with the reproductive body under duress; and 5) the speculative tradition, in which writers like Octavia Butler imagine non-biomedical, non-ableist definitions of wellness altogether. This approach connects our literary analysis directly to health humanities, Black disability studies, and Black feminist health science, positioning literature not as commentary on health but as a mode of health knowledge production in its own right. Our goal, ultimately, is to gain a complex appreciation of how this literary tradition has thought, and continues to think, about the body, well beyond the register of trauma alone.

This course fulfills the State-Mandated Writing (W) credit and Exploring the Human Experience credit.