Disease, Labor, and Subject Formation in the Black Atlantic

Alexandre White, Johns Hopkins University

How were colonial subjects conceived of and constituted in early imperial encounters? This paper seeks to investigate the role of medicine in the production and justification for African enslavement and the Trans-Atlantic Slave trade. Employing phenomenological approaches drawn from the works of Edward Said and Frantz Fanon, I analyze early colonial writings and medical treatises written between 1500 and 1830 to understand how early conceptions of tropical medicine affected the production of the slave as social and economic subject in contrast to the European colonizer in the Americas. Treatises on tropical disease designed for the protection of European populations envisioned a foreign space that needed to be rendered safe for habitation but was at its core threatening to a European population. Conversely treatises on slave health management and writings upon the health of the colonized explored the natural proclivities of those of the tropics to endure and survive colonial labor and enslavement. Disease, susceptibility to it and the nature of its effects became a way of understanding the differences between European and colonial populations from Columbus’ arrival until the latter nineteenth century. In colonial space the European’s saw in themselves a weakness for diseases emerging from their climes and thus required a mode of rule, located not only in economic and military conquest but also in sanitary order. This dictated relations not only to colonial space but also to the enslaved and colonized that maintained the colonial project, defining roles and systems of governance. While recent scholarship has profoundly analyzed the role of tropical medicine in articulating theories of racial difference (Seth 2018), this article incorporates larger questions of political economy to explain how the intersection of medical knowledge, imperial commerce and slavery structured subject formations for both the enslaved and European alike.

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 Presented in Session 157. Power and Normativity, Part 3: Capitalism, Governance, Subjection