Revealing how contemporary Black creatives explore personal and collective wellness within anti-Black societies

Black Wellness tracks how Black artists, writers, poets, and other cultural producers explore Black health as feeling good while attending to underlying physical and mental exhaustion resulting from racism, homophobia, and sexism. Considering depictions of and discourse about pain, HIV/AIDS, Covid-19, cancer, and diabetes, GerShun Avilez moves beyond pathologies of Black illness and the outcome-motivated medical field to delineate the nature of Black wellness as the basis for artistic experiments, envisioning manifold expressions of health.

Responding to the history and impact of racial health disparities, Avilez locates a complex interplay between pain and care, stigma and pleasure, self-management and blame, and isolation and contact. In Black Wellness, he delves into innovative literary writing and digital projects: poetry by Danez Smith, Claudia Rankine, and Bettina Judd; personal reflections by Zadie Smith, Audre Lorde, and Yohanes Godanna Gatiso; novels by Toni Cade Bambara and Masande Ntshanga; and video, theatrical, and multimedia projects by Faithe Daye, Seth E. Davis, and Robbie McCauley.

Reading and thinking across borders to analyze African diasporic artists originating from the United States, Jamaica, South Africa, Ethiopia, and the United Kingdom, Avilez highlights how interconnected histories of racialization, minoritization, and colonization contextualize the lived experiences of Black wellness and illness. By deemphasizing—but not discounting—health outcomes, Black Wellness argues that cultural acts of envisioning and communicating Black health are always double pronged, simultaneously attending to states of debility and vitality in Black bodies.

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GerShun Avilez is Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, professor of English, and Russell M. and Elizabeth M. Bennett Chair in the Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota. He is author of Radical Aesthetics and Modern Black Nationalism and Black Queer Freedom and coeditor of The Norton Anthology of American Literature.

Contents

Preface

Introduction: The Dual Prongs of Black Health

1. Pain/Care

2. Stigma/Pleasure

3. Management/Redirection

4. Isolation/Contact

Conclusion: Acts of Countervailing

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index