This talk draws from a tentative second book project on the histories and theories of chronic pain in the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Methodologically, this project wants to put into conversation disability theory and pain studies, both of which tend to be more presentist in their models of pain, to consider how historical models of pain may help us intervene in larger cultural crises surrounding pain like the current opioid crisis. Rather than imagine the history of pain and disability as only ever moving toward increasing forms of pathology and medicalization, what would it mean to excavate historical cripistemologies of pain that deviate from that teleological narrative? In this talk, I contend with the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade and the paradoxical understandings of pain attached to enslaved Black people, which continue to animate current healthcare disparities and inequalities. How does pain's racialization underpin dominant models of pain management and determine whose pain gets to matter? How did enslaved people contest the painful narratives attached to them or even revise white narratives of pain in terms of other traditions of health and healing?
Registration see: https://mahindrahumanities.fas.harvard.edu/event/pain-raceLOCATION:Online: registration see linked webpage STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20230223T230000Z DTEND:20230223T230000Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR