The Black Body and the Medical Archive

This chapter examines the relationship between Black literature and anti-Black medical violence. It argues that, since at least the eighteenth century, Black writers have tapped into the narrative and documentary power of Black writing to chronicle and archive the racialized operations of medical violence and its historical attempts to exploit Black bodies. Using literature to spotlight medicine’s role in the global economies of Black embodied terror, these writers have helped to construct an important site of memory that I call the Black medical archive. In doing so, they demonstrate the importance of medicine to the politics and aesthetics of the Black literary tradition, from its origins to the present. Further, they unfurl how Black literature has long been a crucial site for the transformational practices of storytelling that the field of narrative medicine has proffered as a radical intervention into the histories of violence, exploitation, and discrepant care that have informed the practices and epistemologies of modern medicine.