Blackness and Disability

Critical Examinations and Cultural Interventions

Christopher M. Bell

• Publisher: Michigan State University Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9781611860108
• eBook ISBN:
  9781628954852
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Disability Studies diverge from the medical model of disability (which argues that disabled subjects can and should be "fixed") to view disability as socially constructed, much in the same way other identities are. The work of reading black and disabled bodies is not only recovery work, but work that requires a willingness to deconstruct the systems that would keep those bodies in separate spheres. This pivotal volume uncovers the misrepresentations of black disabled bodies and demonstrates how those bodies transform systems and culture. Drawing on key themes in Disability Studies and African American Studies, these collected essays complement one another in interesting and dynamic ways, to forge connections across genres and chronotopes, an invitation to keep blackness and disability in conversation. With an analysis of disability as a result of war, studies of cognitive impairment and slavery in fiction, representations of slavery and violence in photography, deconstructions of illness (cancer and AIDS) narratives, comparative analyses of black and Latina/o and black and African subjects, analysis of treatments of disability in hip-hop, and commentary on disability, blackness, and war, this volume shows that the historical lines of demarcation in this field are permeable and should be challenged.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword and Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Doing Representational Detective Work
• Coming Up from Underground: Uneasy Dialogues at the Intersections of Race, Mental Illness, and Disability Studies
• Visualizing Slavery: Photography and the Disabled Subject in the Art of Carrie Mae Weems
• Challenging Invisibility, Making Connections: Illness, Survival, and Black Struggles in Audre Lorde’s Work
• Pinning Down the Phantasmagorical: Discourse of Pain and the Rupture of Post-Humanism in Evelyne Accad’s The Wounded Breast and Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals
• Submissive and Non-Compliant: The Paradox of Gary Fisher
• Sexual, Ethnic, Disabled, and National Identities in the “Borderlands” of Latino/a America and African America
• “Could This Happen to You?”: Stigma in Representations of the Down Low
• “The Illest”: Disability as Metaphor in Hip Hop Music
• Both Sides of the Two-Sided Coin: Rehabilitation of Disabled African American Soldiers
• Notes on the Contributors