Reimagined Communities
Reimagined Communities
Disability and the Making of Slave Families, Communities, and Culture
This chapter argues that the social relations of disability had a profound and long overlooked effect on slave families, communities, and culture. Dismissed and deemed worthless by slaveholders, enslaved people with disabilities occupied a marginalized but uniquely empowered social space. They often escaped sale and provided important labor to their families and communities, representing stability and social cohesion to vulnerable communities threatened by separation and disruption. Shared experiences of disability banded smaller groups of enslaved people together, sometimes across different types of impairment. Broader understandings of certain conditions such as blindness and dwarfism as markers of spiritual power meant that disability figured prominently in healing practices like conjuration and suggest how perceptions of the body played a role in African cultural retentions.
Keywords: African cultural retentions, Blindness, community-centered labor, conjuration, dwarfism, slave communities, slave culture, slave families, social relations, social cohesion
Illinois Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
