Professor Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy discusses her book, “Between Fitness and Death: Disability and Slavery in the Caribbean,” which examines the relationship between disability, antiblack racism, and slavery in the sugar-producing colonies of the British Caribbean. Prof. Hunt-Kennedy explains how disability was a defining feature of slavery’s violence and it’s antiblack racism. She discusses how runaway slave advertisements document the debilitating violence inflicted on African Slaves and how abolitionist and proslavery rhetoric became influenced by the descriptions of these ads. Prof. Hunt-Kennedy illustrates that disability was a factor that shaped both the lives of the enslaved, legal and social fictions, and the meanings of enslavement, itself.
Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy, Associate Professor, Department of History at the University of New Brunswick. She also serves on the Council for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture and on the Editorial Board for the William & Mary Quarterly. Professor Hunt-Kennedy is also Director of Publications for the Disability History Association (DHA) and Executive Editor of All of Us, the DHA’s publication.
