Untangling Pathology from the Vantage of the Eighteenth-Century Black Atlantic

This essay places the book Pathologies of Motion: Historical Thinking in Medicine, Aesthetics, and Poetics in conversation with the intellectual history of the eighteenth-century Black Atlantic as well as theories of race and aesthetics within Black Studies. It suggests that the book offers a way to reassess histories of healing, mobility, and aesthetic production by centering the African diaspora and the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The essay thus reframes eighteenth-century pathologies of motion as racialized and sensorial responses to the ruptures of enslavement.