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.

Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy is an associate professor at the University of New Brunswick.

​"Between Fitness and Death is essential reading for scholars of health, racialization, and law in the world of Atlantic slavery, and it also gestures toward important future directions for scholars of slavery and race, more generally." --Black Perspectives

"Bringing together a wide array of sources with carefully crafted interpretive insight, Between Fitness and Death is a tremendous accomplishment. . . . Hunt-Kennedy provides a theoretically innovative framework for future scholarship on how enslaved people in the British Caribbean and beyond perceived of and operated in relation to the disabling power of slavery. Between Fitness and Death deserves wide-readership." --Middle Ground Journal

"Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy's Between Fitness and Death is an excellent introduction to disability studies for scholars rooted in histories of slavery and of the Caribbean." --H-Slavery

"Between Fitness and Death is an engaging theoretical assessment of the ideology of racial difference in American slavery. It is a helpful contribution to the growing battery of factors that historians must consider when assessing prejudice during the period. . . . Between Fitness and Death<.i> adds fresh insight into the origins of anti-Black racism, as well as a helpful guide to its enduring legacy." --Journal of African American History

"A compelling argument that colonial racialization and brutality are significant factors in the history of disability . . . Hunt-Kennedy's fascinating and important study will challenge future academics to look beyond fitness and death and rethink our assumptions about how anti-Black racism and abelism have developed in the Western World." --H-Disability

​"In revealing the pervasiveness of disability among enslaved people and the various associations between blackness and disability, Hunt-Kennedy provides a new way of looking at the archives of slavery. Between Fitness and Death furthers our understanding of Caribbean slavery." --Journal of Interdisciplinary History