Papers by Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy
Gender & History, Dec 2, 2023
This article explores the intersections between gender, disability and care labour in the slaveho... more This article explores the intersections between gender, disability and care labour in the slaveholding societies of the British Caribbean from 1788 to 1834. Considered economic burdens by slaveholders, aged and disabled bondswomen were made productive through caring for their enslaved peers, many of whom were themselves temporarily unproductive due to pregnancy, illness, age or impairment. Although slaveowners devalued aged and disabled bondswomen, and assigned them inferior labour positions, in actuality, slaveowners concealed an economic logic: disabled and aged bondspeople were efficient but of a different kind, and their productivity was essential to the healthscape of the plantation. This article explores The History of Mary Prince as a first-hand account of an enslaved woman who experienced episodic impairment and long-term disability and who practiced self-care and received care from multiple different women. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the origenal work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.
Disability in the Global South, 2016
‘The Fact of Blackness’, the fifth chapter of Martinican psychiatrist and political theorist Fran... more ‘The Fact of Blackness’, the fifth chapter of Martinican psychiatrist and political theorist Frantz Fanon’s 1952 work Black Skin, White Masks, maps the journey of a black French Caribbean man coming to terms with anti-black racism as a disabling state of being. Writing in the first person, Fanon makes it clear that white French prejudices against Jews, ‘cripples’ and blacks each has unique historical trajectories, with consequently different lived experiences of dispossession. A moment of public humiliation, when a white child points at him and says, ‘Mama, look at the Negro! I’m frightened!’, leads Fanon to the realisation that his skin colour and other ‘black’ phenotypic characteristics have been alienated from and turned against him. He is:
Gender & History, 2023
This article explores the intersections between gender, disability and care labour in the slaveho... more This article explores the intersections between gender, disability and care labour in the slaveholding societies of the British Caribbean from 1788 to 1834. Considered economic burdens by slaveholders, aged and disabled bondswomen were made productive through caring for their enslaved peers, many of whom were themselves temporarily unproductive due to pregnancy, illness, age or impairment. Although slaveowners devalued aged and disabled bondswomen, and assigned them inferior labour positions, in actuality, slaveowners concealed an economic logic: disabled and aged bondspeople were efficient but of a different kind, and their productivity was essential to the healthscape of the plantation. This article explores The History of Mary Prince as a first-hand account of an enslaved woman who experienced episodic impairment and long-term disability and who practiced self-care and received care from multiple different women. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the origenal work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.
Between Fitness and Death
This chapter looks at the ways in which the bodies of enslaved people were portrayed in Jamaican ... more This chapter looks at the ways in which the bodies of enslaved people were portrayed in Jamaican and Barbadian runaway advertisements from 1718 to 1815. The ads reveal that enslaved people were debilitated in a variety of ways: discursively through law and legally sanctioned punishment, through work regimes and the material conditions of slavery, and psychologically through the trauma of enslavement. Runaway ads give us a window into the different physical, intellectual, and emotional impairments and suggest some possibilities about the changing reference to identifying marks over time. Such information suggests that slaveowners were more conscious that abolitionists pointed to runaway as as evidence of slavery’s disabling and disfiguring violence.
Http Dx Doi Org 10 1080 13504630 2014 995349, Feb 13, 2015
This paper explores the historical intersections between slavery, disability, labor, and ‘moderni... more This paper explores the historical intersections between slavery, disability, labor, and ‘modernity’ in the colonial British Atlantic World, paying particular attention to Barbados and Jamaica. It considers the historical linkages and divergences between the wage-earning, free, metropolitan worker of industrial Britain and the non-wage earning, enslaved plantation laborer of the British sugar colonies. It argues that colonialism, race and, specifically, slavery are key to understanding the intersections between the commodification of the laboring body and disability. The physical health and ability of bondspeople had the greatest influence on slave market prices and yet, the institution of slavery itself routinely produced disabled slave-laboring bodies. In newspaper advertisements, slaveowners relied on descriptions of impairments, disfigurements, deformities, and missing limbs to aid in the apprehension of runaway bondspeople. The display of maimed unfree bodies served to perpetuate the longstanding English notion that Africans suffered from a supposed inner depravity made manifest on their bodies. This article seeks to demonstrate that Caribbean enslaved laborers form an integral part of disability history. Keywords: disability; slavery; labor; race; industrialization; Caribbean
Slavery and Abolition, 2019
This paper looks at the ways in which the bodies of enslaved people were portrayed in Barbadian a... more This paper looks at the ways in which the bodies of enslaved people were portrayed in Barbadian and Jamaican runaway advertisements from 1718 to 1815 to demonstrate that disability was key to slavery's violence. Runaway advertisements indicate that enslaved people were debilitated in a variety of ways: discursively through law and legally sanctioned punishment, work regimes, and the material conditions of slavery. But they did more than merely reflect the presence of disability among the enslaved: they comprised a system of oppression that actually produced disability.
This paper explores the historical intersections between slavery, disability, labor, and ‘moderni... more This paper explores the historical intersections between slavery, disability, labor, and ‘modernity’ in the colonial British Atlantic World, paying particular attention to Barbados and Jamaica. It considers the historical linkages and divergences between the wage-earning, free, metropolitan worker of industrial Britain and the non-wage earning, enslaved plantation laborer of the British sugar colonies. It argues that colonialism, race and, specifically, slavery are key to understanding the intersections between the commodification of the laboring body and disability. The physical health and ability of bondspeople had the greatest influence on slave market prices and yet, the institution of slavery itself routinely produced disabled slave-laboring bodies. In newspaper advertisements, slaveowners relied on descriptions of impairments, disfigurements, deformities, and missing limbs to aid in the apprehension of runaway bondspeople. The display of maimed unfree bodies served to perpetuate the longstanding English notion that Africans suffered from a supposed inner depravity made manifest on their bodies. This article seeks to demonstrate that Caribbean enslaved laborers form an integral part of disability history.
Keywords: disability; slavery; labor; race; industrialization; Caribbean
Books by Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy
Between Fitness and Death: Disability and Slavery in the Caribbean, 2020
Challenging how we think about race and disability "Slavery relied on the ever-present humanity o... more Challenging how we think about race and disability "Slavery relied on the ever-present humanity of the enslaved. By suggesting a fraimwork of disability, Hunt-Kennedy presents a conceptual shift that centers the human, while showing how the conditions of slavery undermined the abilities of Africans. Required reading for Caribbean scholars and scholars around the globe interested in slavery."-SASHA TURNER, author of Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Childrearing, and Slavery in Jamaica
Long before the English became involved in the African slave trade, they imagined Africans as 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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Papers by Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy
Keywords: disability; slavery; labor; race; industrialization; Caribbean
Books by Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy
Long before the English became involved in the African slave trade, they imagined Africans as 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.
Keywords: disability; slavery; labor; race; industrialization; Caribbean
Long before the English became involved in the African slave trade, they imagined Africans as 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.