Raquel Kennon

Humane Conditions: Labor, Healing, and the Poetics of Black Maternal Health

My new book project, Humane Conditions: Labor, Healing, and the Poetics of Black Maternal Health, explores how African American literature and culture can help us understand current maternal health disparities, particularly the high Black maternal mortality rates in the United States. While recent studies primarily focus on this pressing issue from a medical science and public health perspective, this book aims to show how an approach rooted in the humanities, specifically literary studies, offers valuable insights on how Black authors and artists represent Black maternal figures, labor, and the possibilities of healing through community care.

Raquel Kennon is Associate Professor of English at UW–Madison. She is a scholar of 19th to 21st century African American and African diasporic literature. Her research interests include global Black literatures, Black feminism, and medical humanities. She is the author of Afrodiasporic Forms, on the literary and cultural legacies of slavery in the Americas. Her work has appeared in MELUS, African American Review, Studies in Latin American Popular Culture, Modern Drama, Callaloo, Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, and Oxford Bibliographies Online, as well as in edited collections including Madness in Black Women’s Diasporic Fictions: Aesthetics of Resistance.