Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly (1799) narrates two scenes of panther attacks. In the first scene, Huntly’s mind is paralyzed, while in the second, Huntly’s body kills a stalking panther by hurling a tomahawk across a dark cave, an effort stemming from our bodily “constitution.” This introduction argues that this artist not only troubled the mind-centered ontology of consciousness—the Cartesian idea of the mind’s dominance over the body—but also explored the ontological alternatives that centered the expressions of our material body’s “constitution.” It both uncovers the posthumanist accents of this work, and reveals the way it prods us to refurbish posthumanism by historicizing it. Starting with Brown, this introduction thus recovers a set of texts focused on “minding the body,” on not simply eroding the philosophical distinction between the mind and body in order to trouble a mind-centered ontology and imagine a body-centered alternative to it, as posthumanism does. It also reveals the way artists used the expressive agency of these historical bodies to imagine less repressive alternatives to nineteenth-century structures of power—including chattel slavery, market capitalism, and patriarchy—whose claims to dominance involved reducing the body to little more than mindless matter.

The conclusion explores Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno (1855), focusing on the way its characters and, we, as readers, make sense of embodied actions on board the San Dominick. Being able to read the emplotment of bodies becomes the key to solving the mystery on the ship, and to making sense of the story itself. By doing so, Melville complicates the mind-centered ontological paradigm’s structuring of our reading practices, our “mind-centered reading practices,” that reduce all bodies to just so many textual objects recording lived experience. By privileging the expressive agency of the material body, Melville also presents a competing reading practice, a “body-centered reading practice,” that understands the body as an active agent making meaning out of lived experience. The conclusion contrasts Amasa Delano’s faulty “mind-centered reading practice” with Babo’s rebellious “body-centered reading practice.” Melville thus “minds the body” to demonstrate the way the material expressions of the lived experiences of racial embodiment can short-circuit the objectification of Black bodies in the nineteenth-century chattel slave economy. And by doing so, Melville also models for us, as twenty-first-century readers, new ways to interpret critically the resistant meaning-making possibilities of embodied experience in all of its expressive dynamism.