Introduction to "Dis/enabling Narratives"

Abstract

Introduction to "Dis/enabling Narratives" Essaka Joshua (bio) "When one speaks of disability, one always associates it with a story, places it in a narrative. A person becomes deaf, became blind, was born blind, became quadriplegic. The disability immediately becomes part of a chronotope, a time-sequenced narrative, embedded in a story"—Lennard. J. Davis, Enforcing Normalcy, 3–4. "Disability pervades literary narrative, first, as a stock feature of characterization and, second, as an opportunistic metaphorical device. We term this perpetual discursive dependency upon disability narrative prosthesis"—David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis, 47. "[Disability] is a culturally fabricated narrative about the body"—Rosemarie Garland Thomson, "The Politics of Staring," 74. "Disability is not a static condition; it is a fluid and labile fact of embodiment, and as such it has complex relations to the conditions of narrative, because it compels us to understand embodiment in relation to temporality"—Michael Bérubé, "Disability and Narrative," 570. "Deviations from bodily norms often provoke a demand for explanatory narrative in everyday life. Whereas the unmarked case—the 'normal' body—can pass without narration, the marked case—the scar, the limp, the missing limb, or the obvious prosthesis—calls for a story"—G. Thomas Couser, "Disability, Life Narrative, and Representation," 457. "Disability perspectives can transform understandings of structure, genre and narrative form"—Alice Hall, Literature and Disability, 1. Disenabling narratives often include stories in which disability is overcome, hidden, erased, medicalized, gothicized, compensated for, appropriated [End Page 305] , devalued, exaggerated, and stigmatized. In these narratives, people or characters with disabilities are, amongst other things, isolated, oppressed, othered, feared, objectified, talked past, dehumanized, exterminated, excluded, ignored, sentimentalized, shamed, and pitied. These narratives also, however, intermix preferences for able-bodiedness, able-mindedness, the fictions of independence, normative communication, and traditional aesthetic hierarchies with counternarratives of alternative embodiment, cognitive and sensory difference, interdependence, protest, survival, inclusion, pride, accessibility, and accommodation. This issue of JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory proposes a 'contrapuntal reading' of narrative that is inclusive of disability. For Edward Said, 'contrapuntal reading' means reading a text with an understanding of "the complementarity and interdependence instead of isolated, venerated, or formalized experience that excludes and forbids the hybridizing intrusions of human history" ("Jane Austen" 367). As Susan Burch and Michael Rembis observe, "lived experiences of disability defy universalized or essentialized interpretations. They do not conform to common historical narratives of unilinear progress," for there is no "singular 'disabled experience'" (1). In practical terms, a contrapuntal reading of narrative maintains a "simultaneous awareness both of the dominant history and of those other histories against which (and together with which) the dominating discourse acts" (Said, Culture and Imperialism 51). Exploration of dis/enablement involves giving attention to the overlapping, mutually intermixed stories of disablement and enablement that occur in narratives. The essays in this volume all come from the interdisciplinary field now known as disability studies. This field reorientates the history, culture, and perception of people with physical and/or psychological or psychiatric differences in a wide range of disciplines in the arts, humanities, and sciences. Disability-studies scholars engage in uncovering the ideologies that have led to the exclusion, oppression, and disparagement of people with disabilities, exploring new ways of understanding literature, history, identity, and culture. As Michael Bérubé points out, disability invites us to re-think "the role of temporality, causality, and self-reflexivity in narrative" (576), and to recognize "that many of the narrative devices and rhetorical tropes we take for granted are grounded in the underrecognized and undertheorized facts of bodily [and mental] difference" (570). The earliest surveys of disability in literary narratives focus on exposing [End Page 306] cultural biases against disability by identifying negative stereotypes in literary texts. These studies address the literary complicity in what David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder call "the historical devaluation of people with disabilities" ("Representation and its Discontents" 197). Bérubé problematizes this early phase of the investigation of disability and narrative, which scrutinizes stereotypes by comparing them with lived experiences, requiring us to practice a kind of literalism not usually expected of literary analysis. Bérubé concludes that, although "literary representations of people with disabilities often serve to mobilize...