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Podcast: New Books in Caribbean Studies
Episode: Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy, "Between Fitness and Death: Disability and Slavery in the Caribbean" (U Illinois Press, 2020)
Description: 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.Dr. Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy provides a three-pronged analysis of disability in the context of...