Incorrigible Runaways
Incorrigible Runaways
Disability and the Bodies of Fugitive Slaves
This chapter looks at the ways in which the bodies of enslaved people were portrayed in Jamaican and Barbadian runaway advertisements from 1718 to 1815. The ads reveal that enslaved people were debilitated in a variety of ways: discursively through law and legally sanctioned punishment, through work regimes and the material conditions of slavery, and psychologically through the trauma of enslavement. Runaway ads give us a window into the different physical, intellectual, and emotional impairments and suggest some possibilities about the changing reference to identifying marks over time. Such information suggests that slaveowners were more conscious that abolitionists pointed to runaway as as evidence of slavery’s disabling and disfiguring violence.
Keywords: bodies, runaway slaves, newspaper advertisements, runaway advertisements, slavery, Barbados, Jamaica, slavery, trauma, violence
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