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Disability Media Studies

Bill Kirkpatrick

Elizabeth Ellcessor (ed.)

Disability Media Studies proposes the formation of a field of study, based in the rich traditions of media, cultural, and disability studies. Such a field is necessarily interdisciplinary and ... More

Disability Media Studies proposes the formation of a field of study, based in the rich traditions of media, cultural, and disability studies. Such a field is necessarily interdisciplinary and diverse, arising from cross-pollinating conversations and engagements. Thus, this collection offers fourteen chapters written by scholars located in a variety of disciplinary homes, all exploring media artifacts in light of disability. Additionally, two afterwords—by Rachel Adams, and Mara Mills and Jonathan Sterne—reflect upon the collection, the ongoing conversations, and the future of disability media studies. This book is intended to be accessible, teachable, and friendly to newcomers to the study of disability and media alike. Case studies include familiar contemporary examples—such as the blockbuster film Iron Man 3 (2013), Lady Gaga, and Oscar Pistorius—as well as historical media, independent disability media, reality television, and media technologies. Chapters consider disability representation, the role of media in forming cultural assumptions about ability, the construction of disability via media technologies, and how disabled audiences respond to particular media artifacts. Each chapter is preceded by a short abstract, orienting the reader by explaining the background and contribution of the essay.Less

Filipino Primitive: Accumulation and Resistance in the American Museum

Sarita Echavez See

This book takes Karl Marx’s concept of “primitive accumulation,” usually conceived of as an economic process for the acquisition of land and the extraction of labor, and argues that we also must ... More

This book takes Karl Marx’s concept of “primitive accumulation,” usually conceived of as an economic process for the acquisition of land and the extraction of labor, and argues that we also must understand it as a project of knowledge accumulation. The material collection and display of things associated with racially backward or so-called primitive peoples form the epistemological foundation of American knowledge production, which should more accurately be called knowledge acquisition or extraction. Nowhere can we appreciate so easily the intertwined nature of the triple forces of knowledge accumulation—capital, colonial, and racial—than in the imperial museum, where the objects of accumulation remain materially, visibly preserved. The Philippine exhibit in the American museum serves as an allegory and a “real” case of the primitive accumulation subtending imperial American knowledge just as the extraction of Filipino labor contributes to American capitalist colonialism. With this understanding of the Filipino foundations of the development of an American accumulative drive toward power/knowledge, this book then turns to Filipino American cultural producers like Carlos Bulosan, Ma-Yi Theater Company, and Stephanie Syjuco, who have created powerful parodies of an accumulative epistemology that has been naturalized in different sites and spaces (the museum, the art gallery, and the agribusiness farm) even as they also have proposed powerful alternative, anti-accumulative social ecologies.Less

Practices of Hope: Literary Criticism in Disenchanted Times

Christopher Castiglia

As the “hermeneutics of suspicion” as a critical disposition comes under fire, The Practice of Hope examines models of “critique” resistant to disenchantment. This book offers hope as an alternative ... More

As the “hermeneutics of suspicion” as a critical disposition comes under fire, The Practice of Hope examines models of “critique” resistant to disenchantment. This book offers hope as an alternative disposition, combining idealism and imagination to create and sustain the visionary values that, however closeted, animate genuine social critique. Hope’s “useable past,” the book contends, comprises mid-twentieth-century critics (Granville Hicks, Constance Rourke, F. O. Matthiessen, Richard Chase, Newton Arvin, R. W. B. Lewis, Lewis Mumford, C. L. R. James, Charles Feidelson, Marius Bewley, Richard Poirier), who wrote during a period worthy of disenchantment but who refused to replicate Cold War state epistemologies—hunting for nefarious and abstract agents hidden beneath seemingly innocent surfaces—melancholically retained by much criticism today. Instead, they transformed the socialist politics of the 1930s into critiques centered on dissent, collectivism, and wonder, making criticism more than a tale of disenchantment. . Organized around “empty signifiers” typically anathema to critics today—nationalism, liberalism, humanism, symbolism—The Practice of Hope shows how, following the creative uses of those terms by midcentury critics, we might reinvigorate critique, turning imaginative idealism into a new critical disposition. Criticism, the book argues, might again be a practice of hope.Less