Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Need an Intensive Writing Class for Fall? Consider HIST-J 300 RACE, HEALTH, AND DISEASE


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.