Blackened Biology: Physiology of the Self and Society in African American Literature and Sculpture
Date of Award
Fall 2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
African American Studies
First Advisor
Golsdby, Jacqueline
Abstract
While dominant Black Studies and American literary studies treat “interiority” as synonymous with psychology and emotion, this dissertation recognizes the biological interior as a fundamental contributor to (political) consciousness. I argue that artists mobilize somatic depictions of Black life to critique anti-Black racism and expose its evolving techniques of domination. By analyzing the activated sympathetic nervous system in William Attaway’s novel Blood on the Forge (1941), brain injury in Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man (1952), and nasty secretions and movements in Jayne Cortez’s poetry collection Firespitter (1982), I show how physiological states teach characters about their social positionalities and communicate strategies for surviving and resisting total subjugation. For example, my first chapter on Blood on the Forge argues that Black sharecroppers’ autonomic bodily processes (e.g. fight-or-flight reflexes, vomiting, shivering, etc.) in a Pennsylvania steel mill reflect these characters’ sensation, perception, and nonverbal communication about their racialized exploitation. I contend that these reactions initiate characters’ political consciousness and outline a political collective within the novel based on shared precarity. This dissertation also includes interludes that analyze bioscientific imagery in Doreen Lynette Garner’s assemblage sculptures to show the Black interior’s political mobilizations and figurative diversity. For example, my first interlude considers Garner’s engagement with microscopy in her Sampled Skin Cells with Melanin III and Micro sculptures. I argue that Garner uses biological imagery to show how scientific ways of seeing elide race’s social construction. This project examines the Black biological body and its processes in the context of a Black feminist tradition that is skeptical about biology and biocentrism, even as it proves the hermeneutic of the flesh that grounds my study. I extend Black feminist theorizations of the flesh by focusing on the bodily insides, by centering physiology, and arguing for bioscientific imagery’s manipulability. There is not always a clear split between scientific and literary/linguistic explanations of Black humanness. On the contrary, I assert that Black creatives self-consciously invoke biology to (re)write racialized embodiment and refute race’s biological justifications. My focus on the bodily insides offers a new Black feminist perspective from which to read critiques of and responses to racial power dynamics in Black art.
Recommended Citation
Smith, Cera, "Blackened Biology: Physiology of the Self and Society in African American Literature and Sculpture" (2023). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1221.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1221
