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Recovering critical, understudied writings from early archives, this book calls into question the idea that the Black prison intellectual movement began in the twentieth century, tracing the arc of Black prison writing from 1795 to 1901.

Analyzing slave narratives, emigration polemics, a murder trial, and black-authored fiction, Andrea Stone highlights the central role physical and mental health and well-being played in antebellum black literary constructions of selfhood. At a time when political and medical theorists emphasized black well-being in their arguments for or against slavery, African American men and women developed their own theories about what it means to be healthy and well in contexts of injury, illness, sexual abuse, disease, and disability.