English 222 - MEDICINE & LAW/AFR LIT/19TH C.

Fall
2016
01
4.00
Andrea Stone
TTh 03:00-04:20
Smith College
21358-F16
SEELYE 304
astone@smith.edu
During a time of rapid professionalization, medicine and law profoundly influenced New World ideas about what it means to be a human, a person, and a citizen, and how such definitions determined the rights of people of African descent. This course surveys 19th-century African diasporic authors' and orators' engagements with medical and legal theories on issues of slavery, emigration, crime and revolution. Supplementing our readings of slave literature, crime narratives, emigration writings, poetry and fiction, we study contemporary and current theories of race and racial science, the human, non-human, and post-human, environmentalism, colonization, pain, disability, gender, sexuality and legal personhood. Our literary travels take us from colonial West Indies, Jamaica, and the antebellum U.S. to colonial Canada, Cuba and the Bahamas. {L}
Not open to first-years
Permission is required for interchange registration during the add/drop period only.