#Milo revisions full

In 2006, a few years after Quayson’s observation, the United Nations adopted its first human rights treaty of the twenty-first century: the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). The examples made me realize that, far from being incidental, disabled characters are integral to the energy and vitality of literature in English from the Global South. These are great stories, and part of their greatness is how writers repeatedly deploy disability in creative, original ways. Through figures of disability, authors make any number of pressing topics more vivid, including such issues as the effects of colonialism and apartheid, global capitalism, racism and sexism, war, and environmental disaster.įurthermore, even at their most fantastic, such representations relate to the more than half a billion disabled people who live in the Global South, often in precarious circumstances. Disabled character can be both realistic and metaphorical.

The story in Petina Gappah’s The Book of Memory(2015) is related by an albino woman in Zimbabwe who encounters both intense stigma rooted in traditional metaphysical beliefs and unexpected kindness.

The narrator of Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People(2007) is an exuberant boy in India who has a bent spine and goes around on all fours as a result of a chemical plant disaster.

In Chris Abani’s short novel Song for Night (2007), the narrator is a boy soldier in a war in Nigeria who has had his vocal cords severed and communicates with others through an improvised sign language.Anita Desai’s Fasting, Feasting (1999) recounts how an ungainly disabled daughter in small-town India is largely kept out of sight by her upper-middle-class family.Edwidge Danticat’s story “Caroline’s Wedding,” from her collection Krik? Krak! (1996) tells of a beloved Haitian-American sister in New York City who has a missing forearm.Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K(1983) focuses on a cognitively disabled man of color who traverses through a war-torn South Africa and is beset by hunger A partially deaf, cracking, impaired character narrates Salman Rushdie’s Booker-Prize-winning Midnight’s Children(1981) incredibly, he connects telepathically with other children born in the first hour of India’s independence.In Chinua Achebe’s classic novel about Nigeria, Things Fall Apart (1958), the Igbo clan’s formidable war medicine is associated with a one-legged woman.

#Milo revisions full

This week in North Philly Notes, Christopher Krentz, author of Elusive Kinship: Disability and Human Rights in Postcolonial Literature, writes about the significance and utility of disabled characters in novels from the Global South.Ībout two decades ago, the scholar Ato Quayson noted that postcolonial literature is full of disabled characters, an intriguing insight that sent me searching for examples. Among those I quickly found:

An error has occurred the feed is probably down.

activism african american african american studies american studies animals Anthropology art Asian American asian american studies baseball basketball Book books brazil business civil rights community COVID crime cultural studies Democracy disability economics economy Education elections environment ethics football gender gender studies government health history immigration inequality labor Labor Studies law LGBT literature media migration music open access philadelphia philosophy photography political science politics poverty publishing race race and ethnicity racism refugee religion science sex sexuality slavery social justice sociology sports technology Temple University Press transgender transnational politics Trump University Press University Press Week urban studies violence war women.

Celebrating 14 notable Black Philadelphians of the Twentieth Century.

Listen Up! Temple University Press Podcast, Episode 6: Billy Brown on Exploring Philly Nature.

Announcing Kalfou: A Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies, Volume 9, Issue 1, Spring 2022.

A Q&A with Faith Ryan, Temple University Press’ new Production Assistant.