Book ID: CBB216430099

Between Fitness and Death: Disability and Slavery in the Caribbean (2020)

unapi

Hunt-Kennedy, Stefanie (Author)


University of Illinois Press


Publication Date: 2020
Physical Details: 244
Language: English

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.

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Reviewed By

Review Juanita De Barros (2021) Review of "Between Fitness and Death: Disability and Slavery in the Caribbean". Journal of Interdisciplinary History (pp. 666-668). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB216430099/

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Authors & Contributors
Mallipeddi, Ramesh
Baron, Beth
Natalie Lira
Orihuela, Andrés Avelino de
Mohanram, Radhika
Evans, Jazmin Antwynette
Concepts
Colonialism
Great Britain, colonies
Slavery and slaves
Medicine and race
Racism
Human body
Time Periods
19th century
20th century
21st century
20th century, early
18th century
17th century
Places
Great Britain
Atlantic world
North America
India
Africa
Cairo (Egypt)
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