Elusive Kinship

Disability and Human Rights in Postcolonial Literature

Christopher Krentz

• Publisher: Temple University Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781439922224, 9781439922217
• eBook ISBN: 9781439922231
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Characters with disabilities are often overlooked in fiction, but many occupy central places in literature by celebrated authors like Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie, J. M. Coetzee, Anita Desai, Jhumpa Lahiri, Edwidge Danticat, and others. These authors deploy disability to do important cultural work, writes Christopher Krentz in his innovative study, Elusive Kinship.  Such representations not only relate to the millions of disabled people in the global South, but also make more vivid such issues as the effects of colonialism, global capitalism, racism and sexism, war, and environmental disaster. 

Krentz is the first to put the fields of postcolonial studies, studies of human rights and literature, and literary disability in conversation with each other in a book-length study. He enhances our appreciation of key texts of Anglophone postcolonial literature of the global South, including Things Fall Apart and Midnight's Children. In addition, he uncovers the myriad ways fiction gains energy, vitality, and metaphoric force from characters with extraordinary bodies or minds. 

Depicting injustices faced by characters with disabilities is vital to raising awareness and achieving human rights.  Elusive Kinship nudges us toward a fuller understanding of disability worldwide.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. On Kinship with Literary Characters: The Power of Fiction
• 2. Between Indigenous Beliefs and Colonial Invasion: The Vital Role of Disability in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart
• 3. Extraordinary Bodies: Magic Realism, Disability, and Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children
• 4. How Metaphor Can Also Be Realism: Disability and Rights in Coetzee’s Fiction
• 5. A Sense of Care: Women Writing Disabled Women in the Global South
• 6. The Limits of Human Rights: Twenty-First-Century Depictions of War, Poverty, Global Capitalism, and Disability
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index