Since Douglas C. Baynton’s often-cited 2001 essay on “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History,” the assumption that corporeal and mental disabilities have been wielded as disqualifiers for citizenship has been foundational to the field of critical disability studies. African American writers, as a result, it is frequently argued, distanced themselves from representations of disabilities that further pathologized Black people and justified the negation of their rights. The emergence of a robust Black disability studies over the last decade, however, complicates and reimagines these conceptual framings of disability and citizenship with their embedded white liberal biases about Black writers’ and activists’ strategic repudiation of disability. In field-changing books, Black Madness : : Mad Blackness and Disabilities of the Color Line, Therí Alyce Pickens and Dennis Tyler trace out how Black writers and activists have long been having their own anti-ableist and anti-racist conversations about disability in relation...
Black Madness::Mad Blackness
Disabilities of the Color Line: Redressing Antiblackness from Slavery to the Present
Stephen Knadler is a professor of English at Spelman College. He is the author of three books, including most recently Vitality Politics: Health, Debility, and the Limits of Black Emancipation (2019), which won the Tobin Siebers Prize for Disability Studies in the Humanities. His current project (tentatively titled “Crip Counterintelligences: Early African American Literature and Dis/abling Black Futures”) recovers a genealogy of mad and neurodiverse Black personhood in early African American literature. Three articles related to this manuscript were previously published in American Literature, M.E.L.U.S., and Cusp: Late Nineteenth/Early Twentieth-Century Cultures.
Stephen Knadler; Black Madness::Mad Blackness
Disabilities of the Color Line: Redressing Antiblackness from Slavery to the Present. American Literature 1 December 2024; 96 (4): 769–773. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-11611114
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