Download or read book Jazz Epidemics and Deep Set Diseases written by Shane Hunter and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation argues that the Harlem Renaissance was, in part, a response to Victorian-era medical and scientific racism, and that the three writers on which it centers, Langston Hughes (1902-1967), Wallace Thurman (1902-1934), and Richard Bruce Nugent (1906-1987), participated in subverting these racist discourses. I focus on elements of their creative work that de-pathologize the black body. Specifically, I consider how these writers undermine Victorian-era medical racism that had, by the 1920s, come to inform American racial politics. Hughes's, Thurman's, and Nugent's work from the mid-1920s to the early 1930s is at least partly concerned with undermining medically racist ideology by either re-inscribing the black body as healthy, or by showing medical racism's pernicious effects. While each of these writers' voices is unique, and their lives and careers ultimately followed different trajectories, their work resists the pressures that a burgeoning medical establishment exerted on African Americans to conform to stereotyped norms. Each one highlighted elements from popular and material culture to show that these pressures contributed to pathologizing the black body.