Bondsman or Rebel
Bondsman or Rebel
Disability Rhetoric and the Challenge of Revolutionary Emancipation
This chapter explores the relationships between disability, amelioration, and abolition from the 1770s to the slave trade’s legal end in 1807. It reveals that both opponents and supporters of slavery utilized notions of disability and invoked concepts of monstrosity in their respective campaigns. Revolutionary emancipation, from Tacky’s War in Jamaica (1760) to the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804), gave rise to the gendered image of the armed, able-bodied, dangerous, and revolutionary black man, an image that circulated throughout the Atlantic world and haunted both pro- and anti-slavery discourse. Antislavery campaigners countered with the figure of the broken and beaten bondsperson as a way of envisioning a subject who in her or his freedom presented no physical threat to white society.
Keywords: disability, amelioration, abolition, monstrosity, Tacky’s War, Haitian Revolution, revolution, antislavery, proslavery, emancipation
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