Scopes, Specula, the Speculative: Histories of Medical Experimentation and Looking in African American Art and Fiction

Abstract

This article traces a speculative and critical engagement with histories of health care disparity and medical exploitation shared across fictions by Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison, and the artwork of Ellen Gallagher. It argues that insistent returns to racialized experimentation and scientific modes of looking form a significant interrogation of a wider set of US promises and attritions. Specifically, it asks how postwar African American culture takes up scopic questions to address dominant accounts of progress and the modern, both via reference to visual orders and technologies, and via formal choices regarding iteration, perspective and scale.