Reimagined Communities

Abstract

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.