THE BOOKS
Literary Criticism
Black Well-Being: Health and Selfhood
in Antebellum Black Literature
"An innovative interpretation of antebellum black literature as well as a timely contribution to the growing body of scholarship on health and the black body in slavery and freedom." -- Erica L. Ball, author of To Live an Antislavery Life: Personal Politics and the Antebellum Black Middle Class
"Engages productively with discourses of identity and subjectivity, the human and post-human, nationalism and citizenship, and law and medicine in a 'transcolonial' framework that includes the United States, the Caribbean, and Canada."-- Gwen Bergner, author of Taboo Subjects: Race, Sex, and Psychoanalysis
Analyzing slave narratives, emigration polemics, a murder trial, and black-authored fiction, Andrea Stone highlights the central role physical and mental health and well-being played in antebellum black literary constructions of selfhood. At a time when political and medical theorists emphasized black well-being in their arguments for or against slavery, African American men and women developed their own theories about what it means to be healthy and well in contexts of injury, illness, sexual abuse, disease, and disability.
Texts examined in this volume include arguments for emigration that optimistically connect resettlement to good heatlh; women's slave memoirs from Canada, the United States, and the West Indies that articulate notions of black selfhood in moments of physical pain; narratives of slave rape that assert black personhood through acts of self-defense/revenge; and fictional stories of armed revolt that ascribe a healthy and robust black sexuality to the most heroic characters.
Such portrayals of the healthy black self in early black print culture created a nineteenth-century politics of well-being that spanned continents. Even in conditions of painful labor, severely limited resources, and physical and mental brutality, these writers counter stereotypes and circumstances by representing and claiming the totality of bodily experience.
Poetry
American Spelling, Story in Verse
"Amazing, splendid! Andrea Stone's anonymous protagonist--a mom who drops her to (accidentally or murderously) from a bridge--displays the desperate sentiments of Plath, but also the frustration and alienation of Eliot's Prufrock. So, Stone's story must out as poetry, 'the work of verse and belief,' as a disturbed stream-of-consciousness. The work exudes generic originality, organic genius: A 'dropped' baby signals a mom who's dropped out of maternity, opted out of 'family negotiations...a lot like federal politics,' and becomes the 'u' dropped out of Americanese (words like 'color' and 'neighbor'). Although American Spelling muses on the unspeakable crime of infanticide, its unceasing lyricism and urbane imagery render it a beautiful, newborn twin to William Carlos Williams's verse-novel, Paterson. Like that work, American Spelling is a quirky, engrossing melange of 'syllables [that] involve the whole mouth' and language whose simplicity is drop-dead scenic."
-- George Elliott Clarke, Parliamentary Poet Laureate of Canada
"Andrea Stone's story in verse is a strange and stylish amalgam of narrative and lyric that invites us to question how we observe and record the world around us. American Spelling is a delicate and engrossing long poem that stays with you long after you have finished reading it."
-- Paul Vermeersch, author of Don't Let It End Like This Tell Them I Said
Something
"In American Spelling, Andrea Stone has fashioned a brilliant mosaic narrative. Each lyric is a finely faceted gem of character, observation, wordplay, or insight. Taken together, in Stone's complex and clever pattern, they compose a story of loss, abandonment, and the slow and fitful movements of forgiveness, never losing sight of language itself as the means both of division and reunion.
--Michael Thurston, author of Reading Postwar British and Irish Poetry