This chapter explores how Black writers link the subjects of racial inequality and what it means to be human. This linking prompts a perennial question for critics and students alike: when it comes to examining African American literature’s long memory, do we examine the history of racial inequality to find out more about what it means to be human, or do we look to rich humanistic social relations in fiction to reimagine and/or resolve any remaining concepts of racial inequality? For this chapter, I examine the terms of the debates over how to represent Black humanity, and I claim that the debate has produced only ongoing and unanswered questions. Hence, I posit that it is in fact the irresolvable human conflict that asks and re-asks questions about Black humanity, and I claim that it is this ongoing instability or tension that defines race’s seminal role in African American literature.

This chapter examines the relationship between Black literature and anti-Black medical violence. It argues that, since at least the eighteenth century, Black writers have tapped into the narrative and documentary power of Black writing to chronicle and archive the racialized operations of medical violence and its historical attempts to exploit Black bodies. Using literature to spotlight medicine’s role in the global economies of Black embodied terror, these writers have helped to construct an important site of memory that I call the Black medical archive. In doing so, they demonstrate the importance of medicine to the politics and aesthetics of the Black literary tradition, from its origins to the present. Further, they unfurl how Black literature has long been a crucial site for the transformational practices of storytelling that the field of narrative medicine has proffered as a radical intervention into the histories of violence, exploitation, and discrepant care that have informed the practices and epistemologies of modern medicine.