Jenifer L. Barclay
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- September 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780252043727
- eISBN:
- 9780252052613
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5622/illinois/9780252043727.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, African-American History
This book makes disability legible in the histories of both slavery and race, arguing that disability is a critical category of historical analysis. Bondage complicated and contributed to enslaved ...
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This book makes disability legible in the histories of both slavery and race, arguing that disability is a critical category of historical analysis. Bondage complicated and contributed to enslaved people’s experiences of complexly embodied conditions that ranged across the physical, sensory, cognitive, and psychological. Ableist histories of racial slavery have long overlooked how the social relations of disability shaped people’s everyday lives, particularly within enslaved families, communities, and culture. At the same time, antebellum Americans persistently constructed and framed racial ideology through ideas about disability, producing and naturalizing links between blackness and disability on the one hand and whiteness and ability on the other. Disability was central to the larger relations of power that structured antebellum society and figured prominently in racial projects that unfolded in the laws of slavery, medical discourses of race, pro- and antislavery political rhetoric, and popular culture like blackface minstrelsy and freak shows. The disabling images of blackness created in these various registers of American life resounded long after slavery’s end, gradually fading into less specific notions of black inferiority and damage imagery. The Mark of Slavery simultaneously examines relations of power and the materiality of the body and makes clear that just as blackness and disability were not mutually exclusive categories, enslaved people’s lived experiences of disability were not entirely separate from and unrelated to representations of disability that fueled racial ideology.Less
This book makes disability legible in the histories of both slavery and race, arguing that disability is a critical category of historical analysis. Bondage complicated and contributed to enslaved people’s experiences of complexly embodied conditions that ranged across the physical, sensory, cognitive, and psychological. Ableist histories of racial slavery have long overlooked how the social relations of disability shaped people’s everyday lives, particularly within enslaved families, communities, and culture. At the same time, antebellum Americans persistently constructed and framed racial ideology through ideas about disability, producing and naturalizing links between blackness and disability on the one hand and whiteness and ability on the other. Disability was central to the larger relations of power that structured antebellum society and figured prominently in racial projects that unfolded in the laws of slavery, medical discourses of race, pro- and antislavery political rhetoric, and popular culture like blackface minstrelsy and freak shows. The disabling images of blackness created in these various registers of American life resounded long after slavery’s end, gradually fading into less specific notions of black inferiority and damage imagery. The Mark of Slavery simultaneously examines relations of power and the materiality of the body and makes clear that just as blackness and disability were not mutually exclusive categories, enslaved people’s lived experiences of disability were not entirely separate from and unrelated to representations of disability that fueled racial ideology.
