Slavery & Disability

A new and very interesting literature on the intersection of slavery and disability has emerged in recent years. Some of this work has been out for a little while, but with more of it coming out I am only now taking a look at it. I am appreciating the conversation which I think is making a variety of important contributions to the scholarship on slavery more generally. It provides a critical new context for the history of slavery. Scholars have long noted that temporality is an essential element of all slave societies, and so contending with how changing ideas of disability factored into discussions of inheritable human bondage is clearly a critical context. Moreover, I’m coming away convinced how ideas of disability were mobilized and applied to enslaved and formerly enslaved people, making it one of the factors that contributed to social hierarchy of slave societies with important ramifications for postemancipation societies.

I am still processing this new (to me) vein of scholarship but it is clear it’s contributions are many, and that this is a discussion I will need to follow going forward. The titles I’ve looked at so far include:

Dennis Tyler, Disabilities of the Color Line: Redressing Antiblackness from Slavery to the Present (NYU Press, 2023)

Jenifer Barclay, The Mark of Slavery: Disability, Race, and Gender in Antebellum America (University of Illinois Press, 2021).

Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy, Between Fitness and Death: Disability and Slavery in the Caribbean (University of Illinois Press, 2020)

Dea H. Boster, African American Slavery and Disability: Bodies, Property and Power in the Antebellum South, 1800-1860 (Routledge, 2013)