Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies
Special Issue: Blindness and Literature
Special Issue: Disabling Postcolonialism
Special Issue: Blindness and Literature
Special Guest Editor: Georgina Kleege
Blindness seems to hold a particular fascination for writers from all cultures, functioning in a variety of ways in different texts. Blindness can indicate divine retribution for some sort of transgression, or can serve as a personal tragedy to be overcome. Blind figures can highlight the virtue and compassion of sighted characters, or act as seers and teachers commenting upon and guiding sighted protagonists. This special issue of JLCDS will explore literary representations of blindness and vision impairment. Topics may include: blind seers and prophets, Homer's blindness, Milton's blindness, Joyce's blindness, Borges’s blindness, blindness and visuality, blindness and aurality, blindness and gender, memoirs of lost sight, memoirs of restored sight, and so on.
Proposals should be e-mailed to the guest editor Georgina Kleege gkleege@berkeley.edu and the editor David Bolt before October 1 2008. Invited authors will then have at least 3 months to submit the final typescripts.
Book reviews that relate to the issue should be e-mailed to the Book Reviews Editor Clare Barker before January 15 2009.
Special Issue: Disabling Postcolonialism
Special Guest Editors: Clare Barker and Stuart Murray
From the hysteria of Conrad’s Congo to the ‘creative schizophrenia’ of Michael Gilkes’ Caribbean, and from the severance of India’s national ‘body’ at Partition to the fatal brokenness of ‘dying’ indigenous communities, cultural and literary representations insistently figure postcolonial spaces and moments in terms of disablement, lack and a difference produced by a conception of absence. At the same time, and as Ato Quayson effectively delineates in the Preface to Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation, disabled perspectives and critical disability analysis represent an obvious and significant omission within postcolonial theory, criticism and pedagogy. This Special Issue intends not simply to address these exclusions by ‘outing’ disability in postcolonial texts and narratives, but aims further to interrogate the critical interface between disability and postcolonial studies. We contend that disability potentially stresses the material and located nature of postcolonial cultures and emphasises the embodied nature of agency and community. With this in mind, we seek to explore the diverse and compelling nature of the ‘disabled postcolony’ trope and to examine its interrelationship with people with disabilities in postcolonial cultural locations. We ask: what might attention to the locatedness of disabled difference add to literary disability analysis? And if disability highlights the modes of misrepresentation that figure cultures and individuals as broken or damaged, or forever engaged in narratives of loss or healing, how can disability transform dominant modes of postcolonial theorising?
What might it mean to disable postcolonialism?
We invite papers that consider representations of disability in postcolonial texts and cultural narratives. Suggested topics might include, but are not limited to:
- Constructions of disability in postcolonial contexts (ideas of presence, exceptionality, normalcy, stigma, community), especially in terms that challenge Western orthodoxies of bodies, minds and behaviours
- Narratives of creative representation in which disability figures alternative modes of being to those suggested by Western or colonial frames
- Literary, visual or cultural narratives of national or communal ‘pathologies’
- Postcolonial environments of disablement (war, poverty, natural disaster, civil disorder, terrorism)
- Popular and news media representations of disability in non-Western societies
- Political and/or ‘official’ constructions of disability and disabled communities in the postcolony
- Medical and/or cultural constructions of health and disease; linguistic/cultural influences on diagnosis
- Disability and postcolonial identity politics (gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, caste, class)
Proposals should be e-mailed to the guest editors Clare Barker c.f.barker@leeds.ac.uk and Stuart Murray S.F.Murray@leeds.ac.uk before December 1 2008. Invited authors will then have at least 4 months to submit the final typescripts.
Book reviews that relate to the issue should be e-mailed to the Book Reviews Editor.
Editor, Dr. David Bolt |
Book Reviews Editor, Dr. Clare Barker
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