Studies in Colonial & Postcolonial Lit (465-0-20)

Topic

The Politics of Disability

Instructors

Kalyan Nadiminti

Meeting Info

University Hall 018 English: Tues 2:00PM - 4:50PM

Overview of class

How have vocabularies of disability evolved in twentieth-century narrative? Tracking how the concept develops alongside questions of citizenship, this course considers how disability is fundamentally a political claim that exceeds its status as either a medicalized or an identity category. We will examine how narrative represents disability as an embodied and embedded structural condition of power by reading twentieth- and twenty-first century novels and memoirs from India, South Africa, and the United States. Exploring key formulations in the field such as narrative prosthesis, stigma, the metaphors of illness, bodyminds, maiming, and more, this course simultaneously introduces graduate students to the interdisciplinary field of disability studies. Texts include Ved Mehta's Face to Face, J.M. Coetzee's Life and Times of Michael K, Indra Sinha's Animal's People, Jaipreet Virdi's Hearing Happiness, and Andrew Leland's The Country of the Blind alongside recent monographs from the field.