Cripistemologies of Memory

Abstract

While crip time serves as a useful heuristic for understanding how disabled people challenge normative expectations regarding pace, what the article terms demented time conveys the meaningful inversions of past and present modeled by people with dementia and misunderstood by those without it. The article interweaves the documentary film Dick Johnson is Dead and personal stories of dementia to study the ways they present “forgotten” memory in new and surprising forms. If Johnson’s film insists that disabled people are not yet dead, the grandmother of the article’s author—in forgetting who is dead—keeps them among the living. While mourning typically frames the dead as lost, the person with dementia recapitulates this loss as presence. A cripistemology of memory, then, asks that we embrace demented time , that we unknow categorical distinctions between life and death, and that we privilege the ways memories of the dead interrupt the presumed certainty of the living.