"A study in intersectionality inspired by the 'new' disability history, "Cripples All!" takes disability, race, and gender as its analytical framework and responds to the conspicuous absence of enslaved people with disabilities in historical narratives. Despite scholars' avowed commitment to giving voice to those enslaved, persons with disabilities remain objectified or ignored and the complexities of their lives passed over. Employing a social model of disability, this study intervenes into this lacuna and considers the many facets of their lives that extended far beyond slaveholder assessments of their "soundness." From this perspective, the rich diversity of their distinct experiences in slave families, communities, and culture emerge. Precisely because slaveholders deemed them "worthless," bondpeople who lived with disabilities occupied a marginalized but ironically enabling social space within which they provided invaluable labor and some small modicum of stability to their vulnerable communities. They often shared close ties with their nondisabled counterparts and sometimes banded together with others who were likewise disabled. Isolation and exclusion, however, sometimes resulted from stigmatization or in consequence of developments in slaveholders' lives"--From abstract.
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