Canadian Association for American Studies Robert K. Martin Book Prize
“A valuable resource. . . . Stone gives space to both fugitive and free black writers, canonical and obscure, essay and narrative, in an effort to revisit the terms of the canon and the boundaries of the black literary as it is understood for the Antebellum period.”—American Literature
“Does an excellent job at examining how black writers and orators—as well as white legal scholars and slaveholders—attempted to define black selfhood. . . . Everyone should read this book when trying to understand how today’s society has come to view black bodies and black well-being, especially in light of the Tuskegee experiment; Henrietta Lacks; and other immoral, illegal, and extralegal uses of black bodies for the benefit of white people.”—Journal of African American History
“Presents a wealth of literature—from pamphlets to ‘scientific’ findings to novels and short stories, all of which provides insight into antebellum sentiments regarding black selfhood.”—The Griot
“An innovative interpretation of antebellum black literature as well as a timely contribution to the growing body of scholarship on health and the black body in slavery and freedom.”—Erica L. Ball, author of To Live an Antislavery Life: Personal Politics and the Antebellum Black Middle Class
“Engages productively with discourses of identity and subjectivity, the human and post-human, nationalism and citizenship, and law and medicine in a ‘transcolonial’ framework that includes the United States, the Caribbean, and Canada.”—Gwen Bergner, author of Taboo Subjects: Race, Sex, and Psychoanalysis
Andrea Stone is associate professor of English language and literature at Smith College.
Publication of the paperback edition made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
The Florida Bookshelf 