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Chapter 9 - Disability, Mobility, and Agency in Mary Prince’s History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 April 2025

By
Andrea Stone
Edited by
Nicole N. Aljoe
Nicole N. Aljoe
Affiliation:
Northeastern University, Boston
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Summary

This chapter analyzes how Prince’s text underscores her disabilities and illnesses resulting from the physical, emotional, and psychological abuse she encountered and the labor she performed in both enslaved and free legal situations across geopolitical locations. Her memoir also moves between past and present tenses, active and passive voices. Through these literary techniques, she emphasizes disability and mobility as hardship as well as means of acquiring agency within the legal and everyday restrictions and demands people in power in the Caribbean and Britain placed on her in daily life. Prince’s intervention in the slave narrative genre as the first-known woman-authored autobiography in the genre widens interpretative terrain about Black enslavement and freedom, as she draws our attention to her physicality, disability, movement, and agency as a woman.

Keywords

disabilitymobilityagencygender
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Companion to Mary Prince , pp. 152 - 165
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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References

Works Cited

Baynton, Douglas C. “Disability in History.” Disability Studies Quarterly, vol. 28, no. 3, 2008.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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Franzino, Jean. “Lewis Clarke and the ‘Color’ of Disability Studies 1.” Disability Studies Quarterly, vol. 36, no. 4, 2016.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself. Edited by Fagan Yellin, Jean, Harvard University Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Lau, Travis Chi Wing. “The Pain of Race.” Harvard Mahindra Humanities Center Seminar on Eighteenth-Century Studies, Feb. 23, 2023.Google Scholar
Prince, Mary. The History of Mary Prince. Edited by Salih, Sara, Penguin, 2000.Google Scholar
Reynolds, Joel Michael. The Life Worth Living: Disability, Pain, and Morality. University of Minnesota Press, 2022.Google Scholar
Rowney, Matthew. “Preserver and Destroyer: Salt in The History of Mary Prince.” Common Things: Commerce, Culture, and Ecology in British Romantic Literature. University of Toronto Press, 2022, pp. 101–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stone, Andrea. Black Well-Being: Health and Selfhood in Antebellum Black Literature. University of Florida Press, 2016.Google Scholar
Wanzo, Rebecca. “In the Shadows of Anarcha.” This Suffering Will Not Be Televised, State University of New York Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Wood, Marcus. Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America. Routledge, 2000.Google Scholar
Wood, Marcus. The Horrible Gift of Freedom: Atlantic Slavery and the Representation of Emancipation. University of Georgia Press, 2010.Google Scholar

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