Resources
This resource list consists of selected literary and theatrical texts, artistic works, films, essays, memoirs, significant works of criticism and historical and social scientific studies about Black health and wellbeing. The list has been designed to foreground Black British experiences of health, although a range of materials about Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas are also included. We welcome suggestions for additions to the list – please get in touch via our contact page.
The list can be searched using any word or term. The keywords are intended to help users identify specific health experiences, illnesses or themes. The arrows at the top of the table can be used to sort the search results into alphabetical or date order.
| Title | Author | Genre | Keywords | Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Physicians, Colonial Racism and Diaspora in West Africa | Adell Patton | history | disease; medicine | 1996 |
| Contagion: Colour on the Front Line | Aida Silvestri | art | COVID-19; NHS | 2021 |
| 50 Proof | Alison Saar | art | women's health; enslavement | 2012 |
| Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination | Alondra Nelson | history | health activism | 2013 |
| Black Lives Matter: Poems for a New World | Ambrose Musiyiwa (ed.) | poetry | COVID-19; housing; police violence | 2020 |
| Black Women, the Economic crisis and the British state in Black British Feminism: A Reader, ed. Heidi Mirza | Amina Mama | non-fiction | NHS; nursing | 1997 |
| Every Light in the House Burnin' | Andrea Levy | fiction | NHS; Ageing | 1994 |
| Bodies in a Broken World: Women Novelists of Color and the Politics of Medicine | Ann Folwell Stanford | literary criticism | doctors; medicine | 2003 |
| A Burst of Light and Other Essays | Audre Lorde | essays/memoir | cancer; activism; lesbian sexuality | 1988 |
| The Cancer Journals | Audre Lorde | memoir | cancer | 1980 |
| Sickening Anti-Black Racism and Health Disparities in the United States | Anne Pollock | non-fiction | disease; women's health; environment | 2021 |
| Flesh to a Tiger | Barry Reckord | play | hospital; doctors | 1958 |
| First, Do No Harm | Bernardine Evaristo | play | NHS | 2020 |
| Sister’s of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery | bell hooks | non-fiction | mental health; healing; women's health | 1993 |
| Black Old Age...the Diaspora of the Senses? in Healthy and Wise: The Essential Health Handbook for Black Women, ed. Melba Wilson | Beryl Gilroy | essay | ageing | 1994 |
| Frangipani House | Beryl Gilroy | fiction | ageing; care; hospital | 1986 |
| Patient: poems | Bettina Judd | poetry | gynaecology | 2014 |
| The Heart of the Race: Black Women's Lives in Britain | Beverley Bryan, Stella Dadzie, and Suzanne Scafe | non-fiction | sexual and reproductive health; NHS; hospital | 1985 |
| Here/ Not Here | Bim Ajadi | play | disability | 2020 |
| Second Class Citizen | Buchi Emecheta | fiction | sexual and reproductive health | 1974 |
| I Think of My Mother: Notes on the Life and Times of Claudia Jones | Buzz Johnson | autobiography | heart disease; tuberculosis; activism | 1984 |
| Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity | C. Riley Snorton | history | medicine; transgender | 2017 |
| I am Not Your Baby Mother | Candice Braithwaite | non-fiction | sexual and reproductive health; mental health; maternity | 2020 |
| Hush | Candice Onyeama | film | depression | 2016 |
| The Black Nurse: An Endangered Species- A Case for Equal Opportunities | Carol Baxter | non-fiction | nursing; NHS | 1988 |
| Madness in Black Women's Diasporic Fictions: Aesethics of Resistance | Caroline A. Brown, Johanna X. K. Garvey (eds.) | literary criticism | madness; mental health; women's health | 2017 |
| Uncertain Suffering: Racial Health Care Disparities and Sickle Cell Disease | Carolyn Rouse | social science | sickle cell | 2009 |
| Foreigners: Three English Lives | Caryl Phillips | fiction | police violence | 2007 |
| Racism: Science and Tools for the Public Health Professional | Chandra L. Ford | social science | public health; racism | 2019 |
| Too Heavy a Yoke: Black Women and the Burden of Strength | Chanequa Walker-Barnes | non-fiction | women's health; obesity; diabetes; hyptertension; anxiety | 2014 |
| Zikora | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | fiction | sexual and reproductive health; maternity | 2020 |
| Support | Christiana Ebohon-Green | film | hospital; grief | 2017 |
| Citizen: an American Lyric | Claudia Rankine | poetry | police violence; mental health | 2014 |
| Don't Let Me Be Lonely | Claudia Rankine | poetry | mental health; cancer; depression; drugs; grief; HIV/AIDS | 2004 |
| The Health of Us | Claudia Rankine | poetry | health policy; drugs; doctor; ObamaCare | 2016 |
| Black Man in a White Coat: A Doctor's Reflections on Race and Medicine | Damon Tweedy | memoir | doctor; hospital; medical school | 2015 |
| Don't Call Us Dead | Danez Smith | poetry | HIV/AIDS; police violence | 2017 |
| Maybe I Don’t Belong: A Memoir Of Race, Identity, Breakdown And Recovery | David Harewood | memoir | mental health | 2021 |
| Capturing Chronic Illness: an Online Exhibition | Dareth Guthrie, Belinda Otas, Marc Thompson, Fay Summerfield | photography | HIV/Aids; reproduction/ gynecology; chronic fatigue; organ transplant | 2020 |
| Just Medicine: A Cure for Racial Inequality in American Health Care | Dayna Bowen Matthew | social science | health policy; institutional racism; implicit bias | 2015 |
| nut | debbie tucker green | play | mental health | 2013 |
| Stoning Mary | debbie tucker green | play | HIV/AIDS | 2005 |
| Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology | Deidre Cooper Owens | history | gynecology | 2017 |
| That Reminds Me | Derek Owusu | fiction | addiction; self-harm; mental health; care | 2019 |
| Some Kind of Black | Diran Adebayo | fiction | sickle cell | 1997 |
| Donald Rodney Display | Donald Rodney | art | sickle cell | 2004 |
| Fatal Invention | Dorothy Roberts | social science | medicine; genetics | 2011 |
| Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction and the Meaning of Liberty | Dorothy Roberts | social science | reproduction; women's health | 1997 |
| The Enculturated Gene: Sickle Cell Health Politics and Biological Difference in West Africa | Duana Fullwiley | social science | sickle cell | 2011 |
| Love in the Hospital in Tibisiri: Caribbean Writers & Critics, ed. Maggie Butcher | E.A. Markham | poetry | hospital; nursing | 1989 |
| The Grassling: A Geological Memoir | Elizabeth-Jane Burnett | non-fiction | ageing; grief; environment | 2019 |
| Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home | Erna Brodber | fiction/autobiography | mental health | 1980 |
| Medicine and Ethics in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction | Esther L. Jones | literary criticism | mental health; madness; sexual violence; disability | 2015 |
| The Black Women's Health Book: Speaking for Ourselves | Evelyn C. White (ed.) | essays | disease; mental health; HIV/AIDS; sexual and reproductive health; addiction; grief; doctors; cancer; domestic violence | 1990 |
| Black People and Healthcare in Contemporary Britain | Femi Nzegwu | social science | hospital; NHS; GP | 1993 |
| Medicine and Colonialism in Studies in a Dying Colonialism | Frantz Fanon | critical theory | doctors; hospitals; colonial medicine | 1965 |
| A Bad Day for a Good Man in a Hard Job in Closure: Contemporary Black British Short Stories | Fred D'Aguiar | fiction | mental health; nursing | 2015 |
| Black Queer Freedom | GerShun Avilez | cultural criticism | hospital; queer | 2020 |
| Mad Room | Gloria Swain | art exhibition | mental health; healing; chronic pain | 2016 |
| The Fat Black Woman's Poems | Grace Nichols | poetry | maternity | 1984 |
| Deadly Monopolies: The Shocking Corporate Takeover of Life Itself, and the Consequences for Your Health and Our Medical Future | Harriet A. Washington | social science | pharma | 2011 |
| Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present | Harriet A. Washington | history | medical experimentation; enslavement | 2006 |
| White Woman Listen! Black Feminism and the Boundaries of Sisterhood in Cultures in Babylon: Black Britain and African America | Hazel V. Carby | essay | sexual and reproductive health | 1982 |
| A Picture of Health: Women Photographers from the Hyman Collection | Heather Agyepong | art exhibition | mental health | 2020 |
| Biomedical Ambiguity: Race, Asthma, and the Contested Meaning of Genetic Research in the Caribbean | Ian Whitmarsh | non-fiction | asthma | 2008 |
| Community Care: the Black Experience | Institute of Race Relations | non-fiction | care | 1993 |
| Deadly Silence: Black Deaths in Custody | Institute of Race Relations | non-fiction | police violence | 1991 |
| Trumpet | Jackie Kay | fiction | grief; transgender; disease | 1998 |
| The Fat Lady Sings | Jacqueline Roy | fiction | mental health; hospital; psychiatry; voice hearing | 2000 |
| My Brother | Jamaica Kincaid | memoir | HIV/AIDS | 1997 |
| Learning in Womanist Ways | Jan Etienne | non-fiction | ageing | 2016 |
| Bras | Jay Bernard | poetry | transgender | 2018 |
| Riddym Ravings (The Mad Woman's Poem) | Jean 'Binta' Breeze | poetry | voice hearing | 1988 |
| Black Women's Activism and Organisation in Public Health- Struggles and Strategies for Better Health and Wellbeing | Jenny Douglas | social science | health activism; sickle cell; nursing; NHS; mental health | 2019 |
| The Politics of Black Women’s Health in the UK: Intersections of “Race,” Class, and Gender in Policy, Practice, and Research in Black Women in Politics: Demanding Citizenship, Challenging Power, and Seeking Justice, eds. by Julia Jordan-Zachery, Nikol Alexander-Floyd | Jenny Douglas | social science | women's health | |
| Men We Reaped | Jesmyn Ward | memoir | death; drugs; suicide | 2014 |
| The Unbelonging | Joan Riley | fiction | domestic violence; mental health | 1985 |
| Waiting in the Twilight | Joan Riley | fiction | stroke; disability | 1987 |
| Sister Josephine | Joanna Traynor | fiction | nursing; care; hospital | 1997 |
| Black and Blue: The Origins and Consequences of Medical Racism | John Hoberman | history | medicine; cardiology; gynecology; psychiartry | 2012 |
| Wilson | John Ogunmuyiwa | film | anxiety; depression | 2018 |
| Race in a Bottle: the Story of BiDil and Racialized Medicine in a Post-Genomic Age | Jonathan Kahn | social science | heart failure; drugs | 2012 |
| The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease | Jonathon Metzl | history | schizophrenia | 2009 |
| Self Portrait | Jordan Casteel | art | lupus | 2021 |
| Invisible Life Force of Plants | Joy Gregory | art | medicine; healing | 2020 |
| Terraformed: Young Black Lives in the Inner City | Joy White | social science | police violence; housing | 2020 |
| Health and Medicine in the circum-Caribbean, 1800-1968 | Juanita De Barros, Steven Paul Palmer, David Wright (eds.) | history | enslavement and medicine; women's health | 2009 |
| Dying in the City of the Blues Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race and Health | Keith Wailoo | history | sickle cell | 2001 |
| How Cancer Crossed the Color Line | Keith Wailoo | history | cancer | 2011 |
| Justice for Joy | Ken Faro | film | police violence | 1995 |
| Khadija Saye: in this space we breathe | Khadija Saye | art | healing | 2020 |
| Jean Charles De Menezes Borne Aloft by Joy Gardner and Stephen Lawrence | Kimathi Donkor | art | police violence | 2010 |
| Madonna Metropolitan: the Death of Cynthia Jarrett | Kimathi Donkor | art | police violence | 2005 |
| The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century | Kyla Schuller | history | gynecology; women's health | 2017 |
| The Louder I Will Sing | Lee Lawrence | memoir | disablility; police violence | 2020 |
| My Name is Why | Lemn Sissay | memoir | mental health; care | 2019 |
| History in IC3: the Penguin Book of New Black Writing in Britain, eds. Courttia Newland, Kadija George | Linda Bellos | fiction | ageing | 2000 |
| Speechless | Linda Brogan | play | mutism | 2010 |
| Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World | Londa L. Schiebinger | history | healing; enslavement; colonial medicine; experimentation | 2017 |
| Some Nights I Don't Sleep in Tibisiri: Caribbean Writers & Critics ed. Maggie Butcher | Lorna Goodison | poetry | insomnia | 1989 |
| Breathing Race into the Machine: the Surprising Career of the Spirometer from Plantation to Genetics | Lundy Braun | history | lung capacity; medical practice | 2014 |
| The Little Miracles | Malika Booker | poetry | stroke | 2020 |
| Gender Scripts in Medicine and Narrative | Marcelline Block, Angela Laflen (eds.) | essays | reproduction; women's health | 2010 |
| Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands | Mary Seacole | autobiography | nursing | 1857 |
| Little Miss Burden | Matilda Ibini | play | disability | 2019 |
| Hysteria | Maud Sulter | photography | women's health; mental health | 1991 |
| Healthy and Wise: The Essential Health Handbook for Black Women | Melba Wilson | non-fiction | cancer; sickle cell; HIV/AIDS; women's health; domestic violence | 1994 |
| Nine Night | Natasha Gordon | play | grief; death | 2018 |
| The Body Beautiful | Ngozi Onwurah | film | cancer | 1990 |
| Medicine | Omikemi | play | racial medicine | 2020 |
| The Terror and the Time: Banal Violence and Trauma in Caribbean Discourse | Paula Morgan | non-fiction | ageing; alzheimer's; drugs | 2014 |
| What If I Told You | Pauline Mayers | theatre | medical experimentation | 2017 |
| Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780-1840 | Rana A. Hogarth | history | racial medicine; enslavement | 2017 |
| The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks | Rebecca Skloot | non-fiction | cancer; gynecology; | 2010 |
| Watchers & Seekers: Creative Writing by Black Women in Britain | Rhonda Cobham, Merle Collins (eds.) | poetry | maternity; women's health | 1987 |
| Grounding | RM Moses | film | anxiety | 2020 |
| Contagious Communities: Medicine, Migration and the NHS in post-war Britain | Roberta Bivins | history | NHS | 2015 |
| A Portable Paradise, poems 'Grace', 'On Nurses', 'Prayer', 'Shandilay Bush' | Roger Robinson | poetry | midwifery; nursing; medicine | 2019 |
| Health Issues in the Black Community | Ronald L. Braithwaite, Sandra E. Taylor, Henrie M. Treadwell (eds.) | essays | disease; mental health; inequality; | 2009 |
| The Healing Next Time | Roy McFarlane | poetry | police violence | 2018 |
| Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia | Sabrina Strings | history | obesity | 2019 |
| The Colour of Madness: Exploring Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic Mental Health in the UK | Samara Linton, Rianna Walcott (eds.) | anthology | mental health | 2018 |
| Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction | Sami Schalk | literary criticism | disability | 2018 |
| Infectious Fear: Politics, Disease, and the Health Effects of Segregation | Samuel Kelton Roberts Jr. | history | tuberculosis | 2009 |
| Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness | Sander L. Gilman | history | psychology; mental illness | 1985 |
| Race in Contemporary Medicine | Sander L. Gilman | social science | medicine; genetics | 2014 |
| Free People’s Medical Clinic | Simone Leigh | art exhibition | women's health; nursing | 2014 |
| The Waiting Room | Simone Leigh | art exhibition | police violence; therapy; healing | 2016 |
| Untitled (M*A*S*H) | Simone Leigh | film | nursing; war | 2018 |
| A Kick in the Belly: Women, Slavery and Resistance | Stella Dadzie | history | enslavement and medicine; women's health | 2020 |
| Not All Black Girls Know How to Eat: A Story of Bulimia | Stephanie Covington Armstrong | memoir | bulimia | 2009 |
| Black Women's Mental Health: Balancing Strength and Vulnerability | Stephanie Y. Evans, Kanika Bell, Nsenga K. Burton (eds.) | essays | women's health; mental health | 2017 |
| Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired: Black Women's Health Activism in America,1890-1550 | Susan L. Smith | history | midwifery; nursing; activism; public health | 2010 |
| Tales from the Front Line | Talawa Theatre Company | film | COVID-19 | 2021 |
| Behind the Mask of the Strong Black Woman: Voice and the Embodiment of a Costly Performance | Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant | social science | mental health; women's health | 2009 |
| Black Pain: It Just Looks Like We're Not Hurting: Real Talk For When There's Nowhere To Go But Up | Terrie Williams | non-fiction | depression | 2009 |
| Black Madness: Mad Blackness | Theri A. Pickens | literary criticism | disability; mental health; madness | 2019 |
| This Mournable Body | Tsitsi Dangarembga | fiction | depression; anxiety | 2018 |
| Abstract Peaces | Tsoku Maela | art | depression | 2015 |
| Pocomania | Una Marson | play | mental health | 1938 |
| Borrowed Body | Valerie Mason-John | fiction/memoir | addiction; care | 2005 |
| Between Stolen Breaths | Vanessa Damilola Macaulay | essay | asthma; COVID-19 | 2020 |
| Making a Place for Ourselves: The Black Hospital Movement, 1920-1945 | Vanessa Northington Gamble | history | hospital | 1995 |
| Homestretch | Velma Pollard | fiction | ageing | 1994 |
| The Health of Negroes in the Philadelphia Negro | W.E.B DuBois | social science | racism; disease; social environment | 1899 |
| Cancer of the Uterus (and various other works) | Wangechi Mutu | art | women's health; cancer | 2005 |
| Leave Taking | Winsome Pinnock | play | healing | 1987 |
| for all the women who thought they were Mad | Zawe Ashton | play | mental health; women's health | 2019 |
| Perceiving Pain in African Literature | Zoe Norridge | literary criticism | chronic pain | 2013 |
