ADDED CLASS FOR FALL 2013 – HIST-J 300 # 33599
RACE, HEALTH, AND DISEASE
5:30-6:45 pm, TR BH 236
Meets College Intensive Writing Requirement and College (CASE) S & H Breadth of Inquiry Credit
Instructor: Nicole Ivy, Visiting Postdoc, IU Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society
This course examines how national ideas about race, health and
disease have concurrently informed and been shaped by practices of enslavement
and incarceration in the U.S. and the Caribbean. It thinks through the ways
that “blackness” has been historically medicalized—as diseased, as a disease
itself—and also seriously considers the legacies of racialized health discourse
and health care administration in former slave societies.
Using an interdisciplinary approach, the seminar seeks to tease
out the relationships between the figures of the captive, the slave, and the
citizen. It explores how all of these are understood in relation to the
“national body.” Of the many questions this exploration necessarily raises,
this course is explicitly interested in the following: How was race marked out
on the body? How did it affect the ways in which black people experienced
health care? How have black people positioned themselves vis-à-vis
institutionalized forms of medicine? How have African-American and
African-Diasporic subjects sought to emphasize their own practices of
embodiment over and against official medical discourses? We will pay particular
attention to how black people have responded to the anatomization of their
racialized bodies.
