Between Fitness and Death

Disability and Slavery in the Caribbean

Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780252085062, 9780252043192
• eBook ISBN: 9780252052071
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

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.

CHAPTER 1

Imagining Africa, Inheriting Monstrosity

Gender, Blackness, and Capitalism in the Early Atlantic World

English racism was born of greed.

—Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain

This is some monster of the isle, with four legs, who hath got, as I take it, an ague. Where the devil should he learn our language? I will give him some relief, if it be but for that. If I can recover him, and keep him tame, and get to Naples with him, he’s a present for any emperor that ever trod on neat’s leather.

—William Shakespeare, The Tempest

The place of monstrosity in the emergence of slavery and antiblack racism is key to understanding the historically entwined construction of racism and ableism in the Atlantic World. Even before the rise of the Atlantic slave trade, European writing often equated Africans and their descendants with animality and monstrosity. In the early modern period, the most popular theories on the origin of blackness all posited an original whiteness for all humans from which blackness was a collective aberration.1 While these ideas did not by themselves lead to African enslavement, the incipient idea of a particularly African form of monstrosity served in the seventeenth century to naturalize and defuse moral doubts about the enslavement and dispossession of Africans in the English Atlantic world. European racism was not enough, in and of itself, to justify African enslavement. The seventeenth-century transformation of these ideas from vague notions of difference into an ideology of systematized, racist, and violent subjugation required a new institutional, economic, and political set of relationships and interests: black monstrosity.2

This chapter traces the intellectual, legal, and anthropological processes by which the English transformed the concept of blackness into a collective, inheritable, and racial monstrosity, a category of being that made Africans, and in particular African women, supposedly fit for servitude. In the early modern European imagination, deformity and monstrosity raised concerns about what it meant to be human.3 The English notion that Africans were monstrous beings suspended Africans in the liminal space between the human and the animal, enabling colonists to exploit Africans’ humanity by enforcing forms of disablement onto the enslaved. Early modern conceptions of monstrosity, deformity, and the corporeal as physical signs of an inner goodness or sin greatly influenced colonial understandings of Africa and the New World. Africans thus entered the English imagination as deformed and monstrous beings in need of containment and control at a cultural moment coinciding with colonization and expansion of the slave trade.

No clear boundary between deformity and monstrosity was recognized in the early modern period: monstrosity was simply an element of deformity. Deformity referred to both perceived ugliness and those physical anomalies that were deemed “unnatural,” as well as functional impairments like a crooked spine, clubfoot, or amputation.4 Monstrosity did not apply to one particular physical abnormality; rather, English people used it to describe a variety of phenomena, all of which were strange or striking enough to evoke an offense against God.5 It was widely believed in early modern Europe that the birth of a deformed child might be interpreted as a sign that something calamitous was likely to happen. The monster’s ambiguous status in medieval and early modern Europe provoked widespread and long-lasting fear among Europeans because they transgressed against the natural order.6 Sixteenth-century English writer Thomas Raynalde claimed that “imperfection is when any particular creature doth lack any property, instrument, or quality which commonly by nature is in all other, or the more part of that kind, comparing it to other of the same kind and not of another kind.”7 “All that is imperfect is ugly” argued Martin Weinrich in 1596, “and monsters are full of imperfections.” Regardless of the various meanings ascribed to them, both deformity and monstrosity reflected the connection—widely assumed at the time—between bodily deformation and moral depravity.8

By the mid-sixteenth century, the determining factor in monster identification was no longer physical deformity alone, but rather deviant inner characteristics and behaviors.9 In post-Reformation England, the popular belief that monsters were judgments of God was still prevalent, however, new medical texts, written by Englishmen, began to blame monstrosity on women’s imaginations and wombs.10 Monstrosity now signified the inner deviance and sin of women and the uterus as a threatening and dangerous force.11 Monsters became not just a “confusion of categories,” but the very embodiment of moral ambiguity and paradox.12

Sixteenth-century English accounts of African monstrosity facilitated the transition toward the more concrete violence of the supposedly known African of later seventeenth-century accounts. Beginning in the seventeenth century, English travelers who went to Africa seeking economic gain placed a new emphasis on ethnographic detail, claiming to portray bodies, land, flora, and fauna in the Caribbean and Africa in geographically and anthropologically accurate ways. As England’s role in African trade grew, so too did its presence in the Americas. While at the outset early colonies like Virginia (1607), Saint Christopher (1625; now Saint Kitts), and Barbados (1627) received very little material support from James I or Charles I, the application of English colonial power in the West Indies—including the 1655 colonization of Jamaica—increased dramatically over the course of the seventeenth century. The writings of elite metropolitan political figures of English colonization bolstered the institution of slavery and made blackness a hereditary and legally codified form of disablement.13

By the end of the seventeenth century, English thinkers understood the link between blackness and monstrosity in explicitly gendered terms. They explained the origin of black skin using the medieval and early modern concept of maternal imagination. This held that a pregnant woman’s thoughts and imaginations could imprint on her fetus and determine the infant’s physical appearance.14 English conceptualizations of black skin color as a monstrosity inherited from mothers was inextricably intertwined with the legal notion of maternal inheritance. In the English Caribbean colonies as well as regions such as Virginia, the freedom or servitude of a child of mixed ancestry was conditional on the mother’s status.15 The maternal inheritance principle was never documented in any of the Anglo-Caribbean’s slave codes yet it was universally adopted in the English Atlantic world. The ideological claims of maternal imagination and maternal inheritance overlap, suggesting an intergenerational link between monstrosity and enslaveability. The English notion that blackness was a heritable and racial form of monstrosity remained a feature of seventeenth-century English conceptualizations of Africans and their descendants, as a timely and advantageous justification for Africans’ subjection in the transatlantic economy.

Marveling at Monsters

By the time English voyagers landed on African shores, in the 1550s, their imaginations were already full of monstrous African beings belonging more to the realm of the fantastic than the human. Sixteenth-century Spanish and Portuguese travel writings and English translations of ancient texts circulated among the English elite and influenced English perceptions of Africans and their descendants. These texts told fanciful tales of races whose body parts were organized differently than those of “normal” human beings: some lacked necessary organs, whereas others were half-man, half-animal. Sixteenth-century English writers, including Thomas Hackett, Richard Eden, and Sir Walter Raleigh told such tales and drew on concepts of monstrosity to determine what made them different from and supposedly better than Africans.

In the early modern period, the line between human and animal, though fluid, was also heavily policed. It was for precisely this reason that monstrous births, viewed above all as evidence of the transgression of the animal-human boundary, were so threatening.16 Monstrous births caused such fear and horror among the English because they threatened the divide between human and animal.17 Early modern English folk believed, for instance, that bestiality resulted in “a monster, partly having the members of the body according to the man, and partly according to the beast.”18 English geographer and staunch supporter of Elizabethan overseas expansion Richard Hakluyt published in 1589 a collection of voyages written by numerous travelers to Africa and the Americas titled The Principal Navigations, Voyages and Discoveries of the English Nation. Principal Navigations reproduced the marvelous depictions of Africans found in ancient texts but on a much larger scale. Drawing on Pliny, he described the Blemines as being “without heads … having their eyes and mouth in their breast,” whereas, other parts of the continent were said to have “Satyrs … which have nothing of men but onely shape.”19 A visible physical deformity, or “mark” of a different species, was therefore a determining factor in the identification of monstrosity. Humans “possessing features or appendages which were either of unknown origin, were rightfully the marks of another species, or were simply too large” also fit this criterion.20 The belief that mixed conceptions resulted in monstrous offspring gave proof to the notion that humankind was not so distinct a species that it could not procreate with animal-kind. The uncertain distinction between man and beast meant that the boundary between the two needed to be carefully protected.21

And yet Europeans distinguished between the births of monstrous individuals, which were often seen as accidental, and the existence of monstrous races. Monstrous races were often understood as the descendants of the divinely cursed, most notably Canaan, whose mark of punishment was interpreted as a deformity inherited by his descendants.22 Medieval and early modern European writers understood racial deformity or monstrous races as evidence of the animality of those peoples who inhabited the outermost edges of the known world.23 Englishman John Pory’s 1600 translation of Joannes Leo Africanus’s famous work on Africa linked the supposed animality of Africans to intellectual deficiency: “The Negroes likewise lead a beastly kind of life, being utterly destitute of the use of reason, of dexterity of wit, and of all arts. Yea they so behave themselves, as if they had continually lived in a forest among wild beasts.”24 To early modern English people, clothing was a distinctly human attribute and, therefore, cultures that wore little to no clothing were considered bestial.25 Men with long hair were also considered bestial, for “beasts are more hairy than man, and savage men more than civil.”26

For Europeans, nakedness symbolized savagery; travelers often commented on the nakedness of various African societies and linked their lack of dress to the most egregious forms of heathenism and immorality.27 Africans, wrote one English writer, “are Man-eaters … the children make no scruple of devouring their parents, or the parents their children. They all go naked from the waste up, and every man has as many wives as he pleases, never taking care for the children, which sometimes the mothers are inhuman enough to devour.”28 Europeans’ belief in African monstrosity relegated Africans to the outer limits of humanity and testified to their supposed moral deficiency. Early European knowledge production about Africa created boundaries that made English expansion a moral and profitable undertaking.29

Although Europeans did include positive descriptions of indigenous and African people in their writings, the majority were negative.30 Columbus’s early accounts of the indigenous people of the Caribbean juxtaposed the supposed monstrosity and savagery of the Caribs with the beauty and innocence of the Tainos.31 And Bartolomé de las Casas famously condemned the Spanish treatment of the indigenous people of the Greater Antilles, who he claimed were not an enslaveable people.32 On occasion, Renaissance painters depicted enslaved Africans in Europe wearing gold and expensive jewelry, but such images reflected the status of the slaveowner, not the individual African. As Kate Lowe points out, Europeans, especially Italians, sometimes gave Africans of high-ranking or noble status “greatly superior treatment to non-royals, even if not always treatment equal to European royalty, and not always the same treatment as earlier princely ambassadors.”33 But these early depictions of indigenous and black bodies were rare and were not to last in European discourses.

For the most part, European portrayals of Africans in the sixteenth century were full of contradiction.34 Richard Eden’s 1553 English translation of Sebastian Münster’s A Treatise of the Newe India described indigenous women as both attractive and repulsive: “ Theyr bodies are very smothe and clene by reason of theyr often washinge,” he wrote, but “they are in other things filthy and without shame.” Eden looked to the supposed sexual deviance of indigenous women to separate them from Europeans: “Thei use no lawful coniunccion of marriage, and byt every one hath as many women as him liketh, and leaveth them again at his pleasure.” And yet, according to Eden, indigenous women’s monstrous and savage sexual practices are put to good use for “the women are very fruiteful … they travayle in maner without payne, so that the nexte day they are cheerfull and able to walke. Neyther have they theyr bellies wrimpleled or loose, and hanging pappes, by reason of bearinge many chyldren.”35 Eden’s portrayal of indigenous women is, on the one hand, an admittance of indigenous beauty and strength and, on the other hand, an insinuation of how such unnatural bodies can be put to new purposes. African and indigenous men were not spared from European contradictions. Pieter de Marees, whose writings about Ghana were translated into English in 1625, described African men as being of “very good proportion, with fair members, strong legs, and well-shaped bodies” but that they “...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Imagining Africa, Inheriting Monstrosity: Gender, Blackness, and Capitalism in the Early Atlantic World
• 2 Between Human and Animal: The Disabling Power of Slave Law
• 3 Unfree Labor and Industrial Capital: Fitness, Disability, and Worth
• 4 Incorrigible Runaways: Disability and the Bodies of Fugitive Slaves
• 5 Bondsman or Rebel: Disability Rhetoric and the Challenge of Revolutionary Emancipation
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover