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The Constitutive Relationship Between Race and Disability

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THE CONSTITUTIVE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN RACE AND DISABILITY IN AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE: A BLACK CRITICAL DISABILITIES STUDIES APPROACH by DELIA D. STEVERSON TRUDIER HARRIS, COMMITTEE CHAIR NIRMALA EREVELLES CASSANDER L. SMITH PHILIP BEIDLER YOLANDA MANORA A DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of The University of Alabama TUSCALOOSA, ALABAMA 2017 Copyright Delia D. Steverson 2017 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ABSTRACT In this project, I examine what disability scholars such as Ellen Samuels, Nirmala Erevelles, and Cynthia Wu label as the “constitutive relationship” between race and disability, meaning that race informs disability in the same way that disability informs race. The relationship between the two categories of difference is interconnected, yet seldom does black literary studies engage a disability studies praxis and rarely does disability studies engage with African American literature. I formulate a theory of reading race and disability as it pertains to the fiction, authors, and the larger African American and disability communities and strive to reconcile the overlooked, yet imperative, relationship between the two categories of difference. By using a Black Critical Disabilities Studies Approach, as I label it, my project breaks down the ways in which African American authors and scholars use disability as a metaphor for race, usually carrying a negative connotation. Not only do I engage the rhetorical strategies of disability in African American literature and scholarship, but I also employ a historical materialist lens to explore how, through the brutal system of slavery, the black body becomes the epitome of the disabled figure. Finally, I argue that using a Black Critical Disabilities Studies Approach allows for nuanced ways of reading African American literary texts, especially in terms of African American identity. ii DEDICATION This dissertation is dedicated to all of those who came before me, allowing me the opportunities afforded to me currently, as well as all of those who will come after me—may one or two words, phrases, or pages inspire you. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS It is with great pleasure that I thank the many friends, colleagues, and faculty members who have helped me through this research process. First, I must thank God, as I know through Him all things are possible. I am deeply indebted to my amazingly efficient, challenging, and knowledgeable dissertation chair, Trudier Harris. You are my motivation for greatness! I also want to thank my dissertation committee, including Cassander Smith, Philip Beidler, Nirmala Erevelles, and Yolanda Manora for your time and feedback. Thank you to all of my professors who have molded me into the scholar I am today, from undergraduate at Agnes Scott College to completion of this project here at the University of Alabama. I could not have successfully completed this journey without the encouragement, love, and laughs from my friends, including Chantal Revere, Raevan Harris, Charmaine Morrow, Briana Whiteside, and Johnny Tice, amongst others. I love all of y’all! Thank you to Kemeshia Randle for all your guidance and patience. You are a goldmine of great advice and help! Furthermore, this research project would not have been completed in such a timely manner without a fellowship from the Southern Regional Education Board during my writing year. Finally, I want to thank my incredible family, especially my brother, DJ, and my parents, Carolyn and Dennis. Dad, thank you for allowing me to overtake your office conference room for an entire year. Mom, thanks for keeping me physically and spiritually fed with our daily lunch outings. Thanks, Face, for encouraging me not to give up. iv CONTENTS ABSTRACT .............................................................................................................................. ii DEDICATION .......................................................................................................................... iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ......................................................................................................... iv INTRODUCTION ......................................................................................................................1 “I TRIED NO MORE TO DESTROY MYSELF”: DISABILITY AND BLACK SUBJECTIVITY IN THREE NINETEENTH-CENTURY SLAVE NARRATIVES............. 17 LOCATING THE SUSPENDED MARGINAL: FREAK SHOWS, COURT ROOMS, AND BLACK MASCULINITY IN RICHARD WRIGHT’S NATIVE SON (1940) AND ERNEST J. GAINES’S A LESSON BEFORE DYING (1993) ............................................... 47 ADRIENNE KENNEDY’S DISABILITY AESTHETIC IN THE ALEXANDER PLAYS (1992) ........................................................................................ 80 CONCLUSION: TOWARDS A BLACK CRITICAL DISABILITIES STUDIES APPROACH...................................................................................................... 114 REFERENCES ....................................................................................................................... 134 v INTRODUCTION In Incidents in the Life of A Slave Girl (1861), Linda Brent, a pseudonym for Harriet Jacobs, recounts becoming physically impaired after spending seven years in the crawl space of her grandmother’s attic to convince her cruel master, Dr. Flint, that she had run away. In Iola Leroy, or, Shadows Uplifted (1892), Iola Leroy’s uncle, Robert, explains to Harry, Iola’s brother, that disabilities surround colored people. In Invisible Man (1952), Brother Tarp, who works with the narrator, has a lame leg which is thought to be the result of Rheumatism. In Appalachee Red (1978), protagonist Little Bit Thompson goes insane after she refuses to believe her husband has been killed by the Ku Klux Klan. In Push (1996), the main character, Precious, is raped by her father and gives birth to a child with Down Syndrome. After years of what I thought were simply small, unrelated, instances of human difference, through taking courses, research, and teaching, I slowly began to realize that a disability presence is everywhere in African American literature. But how could I, along with other scholars of African American literature, miss something that seems so pervasive to me now? How has black literary studies, which is rather inclusive in thinking about identity politics, including issues of race, gender, nation, class, religion, and so on, been eliding disability? This project is an investigation into the undiscussed but lurking presence of disability in African American literature. By engaging both a disability studies praxis and a black literary studies analysis, I explore the ways in which race and disability inform each other in African American literature. The relationship between the two categories of difference is interconnected, yet in both black literary studies and disability studies there is a dearth of 1 research exploring this relationship. Seldom does black literary studies engage a disability studies praxis and somewhat less does disability studies engage with African American literature. Nonetheless, as I argue, the two disciplines have much to offer each other. Until more recently, there has been a disconnect between issues of race and ethnicity and disability studies. In his 2006 scathing critique of disability studies, Chris Bell argues in “Introducing White Disability Studies: A Modest Proposal,” that disability studies thus far has whitewashed “disability history, ontology and phenomenology” (Bell 275). He posits that White Disability Studies (as he names it) has largely excluded people of color and instead focuses on the work of white individuals and is produced mostly by white authors, scholars, and activists (275). He ascertains how a discipline that wishes to fight ableism marginalizes the voices of people of color within the movement. By critiquing such well-known disability studies scholars such as Simi Linton and Lennard Davis, Bell insists that because of White Disability Studies’ focus on whiteness, readers of their works, and in general works of many disability scholars, receive a distorted view of disability studies. In response to Bell’s call for inclusivity in terms of intersecting identities in disability studies, many scholars have begun to engage in a more intersectional approach to disability studies. Although I am not the first person to insist upon a merge between black literary studies and disability studies, few disability scholars and even fewer literature scholars have made explicit the relationship between race and disability in literature. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (1997) offers one of the first inclusive studies of engaging disability and fiction. She investigates how the cultural self and the cultural other operate in tandem to produce and sustain a social hierarchy 2 that simultaneously values certain bodies while devaluing others. She coins the term, normate, which names the veiled subject position of cultural self, the figure outlined by the array of deviant others whose marked bodies shore up the normate’s boundaries. The term normate usefully designates the social figure through which people can represent themselves as definitive human beings. Normate, then, is the constructed identity of those who, by way of the bodily configurations and cultural capital they assume, can step into a position of authority
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