Race, Labor, and Disability in Modern American History

This presentation will examine the intersections between histories of race, labor and disability. Foregrounding the experience of African Americans, I will begin with a brief historiographical overview of articles, anthologies, and monographs that explore how race, labor, and disability -­‐as both lived experiences and ideological constructs-­‐ have repeatedly coalesced within modern American capitalism to delineate when, where and who could do which kinds of work in both the public and private sectors. Positing the working black body as a category of historical analyses, complicates prevailing ideas of the abstract normative worker of modern liberal theory and helps us to rethink the ways in which those bodies deemed ʻdeficientʼ have served as sites of both repression and resistance within industrial capitalism from the factory floor to the battlefield. These racial corporealities evince that under certain circumstances some peoples could draw on their bodies as a resource, while others could not because they were positioned as their bodies. Throughout this presentation, I will outline how the respective methodologies of race, labor, and disability history can deepen our understandings of how shifting epistemologies of embodied difference were used to sustain the occupational, social, and residential segregation of modern American political economy. Finally, I hope to outline a number of challenges moving forward, ranging from archival access, to the danger of theorizing everyday experiences of race and disability out of existence and eviscerating the field of much of its analytical and political power.