Between Fitness and Death: Disability and Slavery in the Caribbean

In Between Fitness and Death, Hunt-Kennedy explores representations of disability, racism, and slavery in an ambitious study that spans 200 years, starting in the sixteenth century and concluding with the end of the British slave trade in the early nineteenth century. Working with a range of printed and archival sources from the Caribbean (mostly Barbados and Jamaica) and England, Hunt-Kennedy argues that disability served as a “trope” to “denigrate Africans and their descendants to the level of subhuman beings” (4). The association of blackness and disability, however, was more than discourse. As Hunt-Kennedy maintains, slavery had a disabling impact on the enslaved. Most lived out their lives under bondage in the “space between fitness and death,” experiencing the “methodical disfiguring and disabling” of their bodies (71). Such was the reality of life under slavery that served the economic interests of slaveowners. This undermining of the health and longevity of...