Between fitness and death : disability and slavery in the Caribbean / Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Hunt-Kennedy, Stefanie, 1985- author.

Series:

Disability histories (Series)

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Enslaved persons--West Indies, British--Social conditions.

Enslaved persons.

West Indies, British--Race relations.

West Indies, British.

Great Britain--Colonies--America--Administration.

Great Britain.

West Indies, British--Social conditions.

Physical Description:

1 online resource

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Urbana ; Chicago ; Springfield : University of Illinois Press, [2020]

Summary:

"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"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Imagining Africa, inheriting monstrosity : gender, blackness, and capitalism in the early Atlantic world

Between human and animal : the disabling power of slave law

Unfree labor and industrial capital : fitness, disability, and worth

Incorrigible runaways : disability and the bodies of fugitive slaves

Bondsman or rebel : disability rhetoric and the challenge of revolutionary emancipation.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9780252052071

0252052072

OCLC:

1143837558