Between Fitness and Death

​"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
​"Slavery relied on the ever-present humanity of the enslaved. By suggesting a framework of disability, Hunt-Kennedy presents a conceptual shift that centers the human, while showing how the conditions of slavery undermined the abilities of Africans. Required reading for Caribbean scholars and scholars around the globe interested in slavery.”—Sasha Turner, author of Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Childrearing, and Slavery in Jamaica
​"Hunt-Kennedy’s innovative take on the connections between disability and bondage underscores how embodiment, ability, and difference combined to shape ideologies of slavery and understandings about who could be enslaved. Essential reading for anyone interested in the intertwined histories of enslavement and race in the Atlantic World."--Jenny Shaw, author of Everyday Life in the Early English Caribbean: Irish, Africans, and the Construction of Difference
 
​"This provocative and powerful study . . . makes important contributions to understanding Caribbean slavery." --Choice