Between Fitness and Death: Disability and Slavery in the Caribbean

Between Fitness and Death: Disability and Slavery in the Caribbean

by Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy
Between Fitness and Death: Disability and Slavery in the Caribbean

Between Fitness and Death: Disability and Slavery in the Caribbean

by Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy

Paperback(1st Edition)

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Overview

Long before the English became involved in the African slave trade, they imagined Africans as monstrous and deformed beings. The English drew on pre-existing European ideas about monstrosity and deformity to argue that Africans were a monstrous race, suspended between human and animal, and as such only fit for servitude. Joining blackness to disability transformed English ideas about defective bodies and minds. It also influenced understandings of race and ability even as it shaped the embodied reality of people enslaved in the British Caribbean.

Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy provides a three-pronged analysis of disability in the context of Atlantic slavery. First, she examines the connections of enslavement and representations of disability and the parallel development of English anti-black racism. From there, she moves from realms of representation to reality in order to illuminate the physical, emotional, and psychological impairments inflicted by slavery and endured by the enslaved. Finally, she looks at slave law as a system of enforced disablement.

Audacious and powerful, Between Fitness and Death is a groundbreaking journey into the entwined histories of racism and ableism.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780252085062
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Publication date: 03/04/2020
Series: Disability Histories
Edition description: 1st Edition
Pages: 244
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy is an associate professor at the University of New Brunswick.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

1 Imagining Africa, Inheriting Monstrosity: Gender, Blackness, and Capitalism in the Early Atlantic World 13

2 Between Human and Animal: The Disabling Power of Slave Law 39

3 Unfree Labor and Industrial Capital: Fitness, Disability, and Worth 69

4 Incorrigible Runaways: Disability and the Bodies of Fugitive Slaves 95

5 Bondsman or Rebel: Disability Rhetoric and the Challenge of Revolutionary Emancipation 127

Conclusion 161

Notes 167

Bibliography 197

Index 223

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