Between Fitness and Death: Disability and Slavery in the CaribbeanLong 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. |
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Between Fitness and Death: Disability and Slavery in the Caribbean Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy No preview available - 2020 |
Between Fitness and Death: Disability and Slavery in the Caribbean Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy No preview available - 2020 |
Common terms and phrases
1661 Barbados Slave 1664 Jamaica Slave ableism abolition abolitionists African women animal antiblack racism argued Atlantic slavery Atlantic World Barbados and Jamaica Barbados Slave Code black bodies black skin bondspeople bondsperson branding Bridgetown British Caribbean captives Clarkson colonial debilitated deformity depictions descendants described disease disfigured Dovaston early modern eighteenth century England English Caribbean enslaved Africans enslaved bodies enslaved individuals enslaved laborers enslaved women European Fitness and Death Godwyn Haitian Revolution History human Ibid impairment indentured servants Indian Slavery individual’s instance intellectual island Jamaica Assembly Jamaica Slave Code lawmakers laws of Barbados Ligon London marks maternal inheritance Middle Passage monster monstrosity Newton notion one’s Oroonoko owners physical plantation planters principle of maternal proslavery punishment race racial racism Ramsay rebel rebellion Royal Gazette Jamaica runaway advertisements scars servants seventeenth century sexual skin color slave law slave trade slaveholders slaveowners slavery’s status Thistlewood Thomas Thomas Clarkson unfree laborers violence whip