Jenifer L. Barclay, “Family Matters: The Social Relations of Disability in Enslaved Families and Communities.”
The meeting will be a discussion of a chapter entitled “Reimagined Communities: Disability and the Making of Slave Families, Communities, and Culture” from Barclay's first book, The Mark of Slavery: Disability, Race, and Gender in Antebellum America (University of Illinois Press, 2021). The chapter examines the overlooked and unacknowledged roles of enslaved people with disabilities in contributing to the social cohesion of their vulnerable families and communities. Historians of slavery have noted that factors like age and gender shaped the daily lives of enslaved people, but ignored the social relations of disability in these spaces. Because they were devalued by slaveholders, enslaved people with disabilities were less likely to be sold and more likely to contribute important family and community-based labor. Yet ableism also existed within slave communities that sometimes left them marginalized and excluded.
Barclay is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University at Buffalo. Her work has been supported by fellowships at the University of Virginia’s Carter G. Woodson Institute and Case Western Reserve University. Barclay is an associate editor for Review of Disability Studies and her first book, The Mark of Slavery: Disability, Race, and Gender in Antebellum America, appears in the University of Illinois Press’s “Disability Histories” series. With Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy she is editing a collection, 'Cripping the Archive: Disability, History, and Power', and is working on her second project, 'Between Two Worlds: Disability and Segregation in Southern Education from Emancipation to Integration'.
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