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

Vitality Politics: Health, Debility, and the Limits of Black Emancipation
ISBN-10
0472125605
ISBN-13
9780472125609
Category
Social Science
Pages
320
Language
English
Published
2019-08-07
Publisher
University of Michigan Press
Author
Stephen Knadler

Description

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.

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