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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

Haiti's Paper War: Post-Independence Writing, Civil War, and the Making of the Republic, 1804-1954

Chelsea Stieber

This book begins where so many others conclude: 1804. Recent scholarship has begun to explore the challenges that Atlantic world powers posed to Haitian sovereignty and legitimacy during the Age of ... More

This book begins where so many others conclude: 1804. Recent scholarship has begun to explore the challenges that Atlantic world powers posed to Haitian sovereignty and legitimacy during the Age of Revolution, but there existed an equally important internal challenge to Haiti’s post-independence sovereignty: a civil war between those who envisioned a military authoritarian empire and those who wished to establish a liberal republic. This book argues that the post-independence civil war context is central to understanding Haiti’s long postcolonial nineteenth century: the foundational political, intellectual, and regional tensions that constitute Haiti’s fundamental plurality. Considerable work has been dedicated to unearthing the uneven and unequal production of historical narratives about Haiti in the wake of Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s groundbreaking Silencing the Past, but many more narratives—namely, those produced from within Haitian historiography and literary history—remain to be questioned and deconstructed. This book unearths and continually probes the conceptually generative possibilities of Haiti’s post-revolutionary divisions, something the current historiographic framework on Haiti’s long postcolonial nineteenth century fails to fully apprehend. Through close readings of original print sources (pamphlets, newspapers, literary magazines, geographies, histories, poems, and novels), it sheds light on the internal realities, tensions, and pluralities that shaped the Haitian Revolution and its aftermath to reveal the process of contestation, mutual definition, and continual (re)inscription of Haiti’s meaning throughout its long nineteenth century.Less

Literary Bioethics: Animality, Disability, and the Human

Maren Tova Linett

Literary Bioethics reads four novels as thought experiments through which to grapple with questions of value regarding animal lives, old lives, disabled lives, and engineered lives. Drawing from ... More

Literary Bioethics reads four novels as thought experiments through which to grapple with questions of value regarding animal lives, old lives, disabled lives, and engineered lives. Drawing from literary and cultural theory, disability studies, age studies, animal studies, and bioethics, it considers the value of these different kinds of lives as presented in fiction. The study treats “bioethics” broadly; rather than treating practical issues of medical ethics, it takes “bioethical questions” to mean 1) questions about the value and conditions for flourishing of different kinds of human and nonhuman lives, and 2) questions about what those in power ought to be permitted to do with those lives as we gain unprecedented levels of technological prowess. Exploring how the literary texts engage ideologies such as human exceptionalism, ableism, ageism, and a curative imaginary—a proto-transhumanism that cannot tolerate imperfection—the study demonstrates the power of reading literature bioethically.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

Runaway Genres: The Global Afterlives of Slavery

Yogita Goyal

Runaway Genres: The Global Afterlives of Slavery tracks the emergence of slavery as the defining template through which current forms of human rights abuses are understood. To fathom forms of freedom ... More

Runaway Genres: The Global Afterlives of Slavery tracks the emergence of slavery as the defining template through which current forms of human rights abuses are understood. To fathom forms of freedom and bondage today—from unlawful detention to sex trafficking, the refugee crisis, genocide—this project reads a vast range of contemporary literature, showing how the literary forms used to tell these stories derive from the antebellum genre of the slave narrative. Exploring the ethics and aesthetics of globalism, the book forwards alternative conceptions of human rights, showing that the revival and proliferation of slave narratives offer a chance not just to rethink the legacy of slavery itself, but also to assess its ongoing relation to race and the human. Taking form seriously in discussions of minority literature, the book examines key genres associated with the slave narrative: sentimentalism, the gothic, satire, ventriloquism, and the bildungsroman. By offering a theory of form and how it travels, the book argues for the slave narrative as a new world literary genre, exploring the full complexity of an ethical globalism. Traversing multiple genres and disciplines, the book speaks to African diaspora and African American studies, transnational and world literatures, American studies, postcolonial and global studies, and human rights. Showing how slavery provides the occasion not just for revisiting the Atlantic past but for renarrating the global present, Runaway Genres creates a new map of contemporary black diaspora literature.Less