care at the crossroads

Normatively, the analytic of care has been theorized within a positive orientation situating care practices as a liberatory salve against anti-black violence. Care as such fails to account for how violence is ordained and materializes vis-a-vis care for the black. "Too black for care" writes Frank Wilderson is the structural position of the blackened. This proposal examines the religious and scientific violence that undergirds the ways in which the enslaved person is cared for and enacts their own care work in the slave hospital on the Butler plantation estates of Butler and St. Simon Islands in Georgia from 1774-1859. How do we think of care and what it means for the enslaved person to be cared for in this site? I contend that the exemplary violence and libidinal economy of slavery is continued and congealed within the religio-scientific analytic of care which continues to determine the blackened existence today.