Human Insufficiency

Human Insufficiency argues that early modern writers depict the human political subject as physically vulnerable in order to naturalize slavery. Representations of Man as a weak creaturepoor and bare in King Lears wordsstrategically portrayed English bodies as needing care from people who were imagined to be less fragile. Drawing on Aristotles depictions of the natural master and the natural slave in the Politics, English writers distinguished the fully human political subject from the sub-human Slave who would care for his feeble body. This justification of a nascent slaving economy reinvents the violence of enslaving Afro-diasporic peoples as a natural system of care. Human Insufficiencys most important contribution to early modern critical race studies is expanding the scope of the human as a racialized category by demonstrating how depictions of Man as a vulnerable species were part of a discourse racializing slavery.