Too Black for Care
Clinical Apperception, Anti-Blackness, and Narrative Aporia
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 14636340 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Roy Cherian (0000-0002-4257-8842, Cal Humanities, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Volume | 50 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Publication date | 2026-06-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Culture Medicine and Psychiatry (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0165-005X • E-ISSN: 1573-076X |
| Publisher | Springer Science and Business Media LLC (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1007/s11013-026-09984-1 |
| PMID | 41963719 |
| OpenAlex | W7153323807 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 29 |
In this essay, I read Seth Holmes and Maya Ponte’s work on “en-casement” alongside Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason to argue that faculties of biomedical apperception cultivated through clinical training are symptomatic of an orientation to sensational experience developed within Enlightenment philosophy. Characterized by the negation of subjectivity, en-casement is an expression of the anti-Black tendency to dehumanize and dominate the other in ways that render the biomedical paradigm of healing impotent with regard to the redress of Black suffering. I problematize narrative medicine as an intervention to resist en-casement by drawing on Afropessimism to elaborate limits and failures derivative from its assumptive logic of a free, agentive, autonomous, and sovereign subject capable of dramatizing suffering. Insofar as paradigmatic social death renders Blackness as a site of absolute dereliction on the level of the Symbolic, Black suffering is aporetic to narrative in ways that make even the humanist intervention no less impotent as a mode of redress. Given that the totalizing violence of anti-Blackness forecloses the redress of Black suffering within humanist paradigms of healing writ large, from the biomedical to the narrative, I consider the unmet demand for ante-anti-Black forms of care from the framework of abolition medicine
Dehumanization · Enlightenment · Humanism · Narrative · Redress · Subject (documents · Empathy and Medical Education · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism · Theological Perspectives and Practices
Medical Bondage
Critique of Pure Reason
The Medicalization of Society
Phenomenology of Perception
Breathing Race into the Machine
Ante-Anti-Blackness
Unbearable Blackness
Secular Translations
Ontological Terror
Ethnography and the Making of Modern Health Professionals
En-case-ing the Patient
Social Death and Narrative Aporia in 12 Years a Slave
Toward Black abolition theory within radical abolition studies
Structural competency
Afro-Pessimism
Thinking About the Secular Body, Pain, and Liberal Politics
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |