Disability Rhetoric and the Challenge of Revolutionary Emancipation in the British Atlantic World, 1770-1807.

This paper explores the relationship between disability, amelioration, and gender from the 1770s to the abolition of the slave trade in 1807. It argues that the idea of black citizenship was framed in gendered and ableist terms during the British abolitionist debates. Tacky’s War (1760) and the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) were two events that framed the timing of pro-slavery amelioration efforts to alleviate pain among the enslaved. Abolitionists promoted a process of amelioration that encouraged enslaved women, on the one hand to have children so that the enslaved population could reproduce itself naturally. On the other hand, the suppression of the slave trade would decrease planters’ reliance on the slave trade as a means of reproducing a commodified labour force. What haunted this effort to suppress slavery was a fear that the slave trade only brought future revolutionaries into English colonies. Although the political motivations diverged, both pro- and anti-slavery campaigns were arguably motivated by the fear of black Haitian revolutionaries. British Caribbean planters continued to propagate the long-standing pro-slavery argument that African women did not feel pain in childbirth, which gave testimony to their supposed animality. In abolitionist propaganda, in contrast, the figure of the pained female body, in need of protection from long-term damage so that it might give birth and raise children, became a key means of displacing the figure of the enslaved, armed, male rebel, exemplified by the Haitian Revolution.