This workshop forms part of the quarterly LACS series, "Dangerous Subjects,” which offers a friendly and encouraging environment in which to discuss works-in-progress written by LACS affiliated faculty and graduate students. Lunch will be provided. For the pre-circulated paper, please RSVP to lasuw@uw.edu by Feb. 21.

UW History Professor Adam Warren will present a paper, with comment by Art History Prof. Jennifer Baez, examining eighteenth-century Peruvian civil cases that involved enslaved Africans as sites for articulating and negotiating ideas about bodies, disability, and fitness. Afforded permission to sue their owners in the Spanish Empire's courts, enslaved litigants navigated legal channels to gain what historian Michele McKinley describes as "fractional freedoms," incremental improvements in their circumstances such as permission to seek new owners, prevention of separation from kin, or the provision of medical care. Enslaved litigants petitioned for these gains by accusing owners of cruelty, neglect, or overwork and by claiming existing or resulting bodily injury, disease, or mental unwellness. Central to their legal strategies was the act of drawing attention to their own bodies, describing them in detail and asking that they be examined for evidence of the debilitating effects of slavery and mistreatment. To substantiate these claims, enslaved litigants petitioned to have physicians and surgeons inspect them to confirm the presence or absence of disability. Focusing on the central role that these medics played as arbiters of disability and enslaved litigants' own testimony, I argue these civil cases gave rise to a concept of disability based not on liberal notions of universal rights, but rather on enslaved litigants' claims to early modern legal principles that recognized forms of corporate status based on vulnerability, exclusion, and suffering that under Spanish law could warrant and require protection. Informed by medics' testimony, this idea of disability differed from later North Atlantic concepts of disability linked to industrialization and workplace injury legislation.