Between Fitness and Death: Disability and Slavery in the Caribbean (Disability Histories #12)
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- Synopsis
- 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.
- Copyright:
- 2020
Book Details
- Book Quality:
- Publisher Quality
- ISBN-13:
- 9780252052071
- Related ISBNs:
- 9780252043192, 9780252085062
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- Date of Addition:
- 04/20/20
- Copyrighted By:
- The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
- Adult content:
- No
- Language:
- English
- Has Image Descriptions:
- No
- Categories:
- History, Nonfiction, Disability-Related, Social Studies
- Submitted By:
- Bookshare Staff
- Usage Restrictions:
- This is a copyrighted book.
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- by Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy
- in History
- in Nonfiction
- in Disability-Related
- in Social Studies