The Diseased Body Politic of Early America in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy

This essay reads Toni Morrison’s A Mercy (2008) to reexamine the biopolitical role of proto-epidemiological discourse in the seventeenth-century Atlantic world. By focusing on the intersecting stories of malaise in the novel—The Great Plague of 1665 in London, smallpox outbreaks in colonial America, and disease and mass deaths on slave ships—I unpack the ways in which disease and its management played a role not only in preserving racial formations but also in producing them. Morrison’s repudiation of the notion of disease as a social equalizer forms the core of the essay’s inquiry, as I argue that materialist and historicist readings of early Atlantic world pandemics can help theorize the differential impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on raced subjects. The essay also probes the interpretive possibilities of rereading medical histories by centering the narratives of Black and Indigenous women and examining the ways in which such an oppositional reading may mitigate the archival and conceptual gaps in our understanding of both disease and body normativity. Woven into these argumentative strands is a critical consideration of historical method. The essay demonstrates that Morrison’s rendering of medical history is more expansive than that of the conventional historical novel, as her attempt is not to recreate accounts of early American pandemics but rather to disrupt a linear progress narrative of Western medicine.