University of Michigan Press

Signifying Bodies: Disability in Contemporary Life Writing

admin — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 17:01:00 +0000

We live in an age in which the memoir has become the preeminent genre. Writers of the contemporary memoir are not required to be a “somebody” or famous personality before publication. This is the age of the “nobody” memoir—the writings of individuals who tell stories of lives that in previous ages would have remained untold. In his thought-provoking book, Signifying Bodies: Disability in Contemporary Life Writing, author and professor of English at Hofstra University, G. Thomas Couser, argues that with these modern memoirs we have seen an astonishing proliferation of personal narratives about disability—from personal stories about illnesses like HIV/AIDS, or breast cancer, to accounts of mental illness, narratives by people living with physical disabilities such as blindness or mobility impairments, and accounts of addiction.

These “some body” writings, as Couser somewhat ironically terms them, have arisen in the wake of the civil rights movements of the last several decades. They not only provide a previously unknown level of visibility to people with non-normative bodies in our society, but they also provide a means for self-representation in which “disabled people counter their historical objectification (or even abjection) by occupying the subject position.” At the same time, Couser observes, these writings are largely mediated by publishers, the marketplace, and our collective preconceived notions of what constitutes acceptable narratives of disability. As such, they may play into stereotypes and reinforce our culture’s ableism. Thus, one extremely common pattern of the disability memoir is that of an individual who triumphs over adversity (think the amputee mountain climber, or the blind runner). In these stories, disability is a “problem” that must be “overcome” by a single, exceptional individual. These books contain no collective action, no political awareness of how our society is structured to marginalize people with disabilities, and no questioning of the status quo.

In a later chapter, Couser contrasts this kind of narrative to the work of memoirists like Anne Finger whose Elegy for a Disease goes beyond an individual account of her disability to include interviews with other survivors of polio and quotes from other memoirists. Says Finger, “I do not want to give you just my story…I also want to write about the social experience of disability.” Couser identifies Finger’s book as belonging to a set of new post-ADA disability memoirs in which authors consciously attempt to avoid the clichés of triumph over adversity, or providing a voyeuristic experience of “the other.” He also notes that these new memoirs come from a privileged group within the disability community itself—white professionals whose access to resources such as education has provided them with the means to understand and tell their stories within a larger social context.

In another chapter, Couser provides thought provoking discussions of documentary filmmaking about people with disabilities, discussing one film in particular—Face To Face: The Schappell Twins—as an example of an exceptional documentary that avoids freak show exploitation while pushing the audience to question notions of normality, individuality and privacy by taking them into the world of Reba and Lori Schappell, conjoined twins. He also examines Marjorie Wallace’s extraordinary biography of June and Jennifer Gibbons, The Silent Twins, who were elective mutes convicted of arson and confined indefinitely to Britain’s Broadmoor Hospital in the 1980s. Another chapter makes an argument that people with disabilities warrant the attention of ethnography, and engages in a thoughtful examination of the memoir, Riding the Bus with My Sister by Rachel Simon in which the author wrote about her sister Beth who has mild retardation.

Published by a university press, Couser’s book assumes a certain familiarity with the language of the academy. Yet it remains accessible and engaging, providing an intelligent examination of contemporary life writing within a framework that pushes readers to question basic assumptions about disability embedded in popular culture. Signifying Bodies offers a much needed contribution to discussion of the modern memoir by highlighting the contribution and representation of people with disabilities to the genre.

Written by: Elaine Beale, February 2nd 2010

An Angle of Vision: Women Writers on Their Poor and Working-Class Roots

admin — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 09:00:00 +0000

Edited by Lorraine M. López

University of Michigan Press

In An Angle of Vision, we are presented with a series of extraordinarily well-written essays centered upon one of the most taboo topics in U.S. culture: class. More specifically, we are presented with first-person, female-centered examinations of two groups who are steadily disappearing from both the public discourse and the popular culture of the United States: the poor and working class. As the myths of meritocracy and the “middle class nation” take up ever more space in the public discussions that the United States has about itself, the space assigned to these two groups shrinks. When the poor and working class do garner some attention, their stories are generally told from and distorted by a perspective completely alien from their own. They are spoken of or for, but do not truly get to speak for themselves.

This anthology is then both welcome and needed, especially since it grants us the perspective of a group far more diverse that can usually be expected. We hear the voices of Dorothy Allison, Bich Minh Nguyen, Angela Threatt, Sandra Cisneros, Joy Harjo, Mary Childers, and others in the dialects born of distinct cultures and subcultures from around the United States and throughout the world. Having only their gender and class background in common, these women writers represent a variety of races, ethnicities, sexualities, generations, and geographies and do so in a way that makes the foreign familiar and approachable.

However, their stories, written in the intersections between multiple identities, share common themes that emerge explicitly and implicitly throughout the book. Perhaps the most compelling is the lingering doubts of “authenticity” that plague those who find themselves moving into a world where discussions of the class in which they were born is deemed taboo and one is expected to achieve (or at least fake) fluency in the dialect of the privileged. Despite the cult of social mobility immortalized in the American Dream, one is often supposed to pretend not to have moved at all since such an admission may embarrass those who were born into their social status.

Having grown up in desperate poverty in the Deep South and finding myself suddenly part of the shrinking middle class, I found these essays in general riveting and deeply authentic. It is, perhaps, difficult for me to overcome my class bias enough to truly understand how they would be taken by someone who does not share the writers’ experiences with class. However, I hope that the appeal of truly great writing, filled with pathos and humor, might overcome any discomfort readers may have with the topic.

Written by: Melinda Barton, January 21st 2010

The Songs of Blind Folk: African American Musicians and the Cultures of Blindness

admin — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 01:00:00 +0000

By Terry Rowden

University of Michigan Press

Terry Rowden’s book is that rarest of gems, a work of critical theory that should appeal to a broad audience and that contributes simultaneously, in an original and exciting way, to the fields of Disability Studies, Ethnomusicology, and African American Studies. While more casual music fans might be tempted to turn immediately to chapters on Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder, the initial chapters on the cultural politics of blindness and race in the nineteenth century represent a seldom viewed perspective on the nexus of racial and physical difference—and they are no less accessible nor original in their insights than the later chapters on more recognizable figures.

Rowden focuses first on the figure of “Blind Tom Bethune” as a product of nineteenth-century American preoccupation with “freakish attraction.” Bethune was marketed—enslaved, essentially, even after Emancipation, by his managers as a kind of idiot savant, but his popularity and reappropriation by African American folk musicians and poets in the late nineteenth century helped to transform him from a freakish sentimental figure to a more affirmative expression of African American creativity.

The book then traces a lineage of blind blues musicians: those for whom race, age, obscurity, and blindness become part of a musical aesthetic. A chapter on “The Souls of Blind Folk” shows a tradition in gospel and spiritual music that, unlike much of the composition by African American musicians, openly acknowledges the artists’ blindness, which becomes emblematic of the musician’s spiritual condition.

Rowden’s work on Charles and Wonder climax his study. He examines the “Rhetoric of Genius” surrounding Charles and some of his contemporaries, the prodigiously “gifted” artist who is legitimated for mainstream American audiences first by virtue of his physical attractiveness and second by his invention of the sunglasses as an iconic representation of the sightless performer. Wonder is presented as a musician who seemed to achieve “transcendence” over his blindness. He helped dispel the folkloric notion that blindness “was somehow a punishment for some kind of original sin.” His precocious rise to fame Rowden attributes first to excellent musical education and second to his being “cute”—both “little” and “a wonder”—and so unthreatening to the public. By sharp contrast to his forebears, Wonder grew up with what Rowden memorably calls “the cyborgean prosthestics of privilege”—an unprecedented access to technology and financial and personal support. Nonetheless, his career was eclipsed by the advent of MTV and BET and the “image-oriented” musical world of the 1980s and beyond.

The Songs of Blind Folk is both sensitive and provocative, a work of historical scholarship and applied critical theory, an accessible and original addition to ongoing discourses in a variety of disciplines.

Written by: Rick Taylor, December 13th 2009

Hazel Scott: The Pioneering Journey of a Jazz Pianist from Café Society to Hollywood to HUAC

admin — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 22:34:00 +0000

By Karen Chilton

University of Michigan Press

Sometimes when I read autobiographies and biographies of revered artists, pioneers, and notables, I often become absorbed in their beginnings as if they were happening in the present moment and their endings as if they had just passed. This is done easily when the writer blends eloquence with knowledge as is the case with Karen Chilton. Chilton presents the life of Hazel Scott with the exquisiteness with which Scott lived her life.

At a time in American history when musical innovation seemed a necessary creative prescription for the societal madness, Hazel Scott's timing could not have been more perfect. Born on June 11, 1920 in Trinidad, Hazel Scott was the fifth and only child to survive beyond infancy. Perhaps, there was a subconscious need to rectify the situation in a consolatory manner through musical prodigiousness. Hazel began formally studying classical piano with her mother, Alma, an accomplished pianist herself. Hazel and her family later relocated to Harlem, thus giving her the chance to expound upon her classical training with the informal teachings of Art Tatum and Fats Waller. Hazel's mother had not only musical talent but also, entrepreneurial cooking skills that would bring to their home some of Harlem’s most creatively elite such as William "Count" Basie and Billie Holiday, to name a few.

The latter half of Hazel's life was just as exciting as the half that led up to it. Scott had always been outspoken with a low tolerance for BS and a strong desire to do things her way. Her musical bravado of blending the classical with boogie-woogie could only be matched by her shrewd business skills. These skills were a lot to be spoken for considering the fact that there were few Black women of her time who were insistent on maintaining their artistic and personal integrity from the times of the Great Depression through the civil rights era. Her other notable match was her husband, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., with whom she would create a formidable pairing known the world over. Hazel Scott's life was not just intertwined with greats on one side of the color or gender spectrum. Her exceptional and innovative talent for blending went beyond any musical genre into the scope of politics, gender, and class.

Those who call themselves jazz or music aficionados may know the name Hazel Scott. However, those who simply like jazz and are familiar with the likes of Miles Davis, Ella Fitzgerald, and John Coltrane may not have had the fortune of familiarizing themselves with her genius. Karen Chilton eloquently and knowledgeably increases our musical wealth.

Written by: Olupero R. Aiyenimelo, April 9th 2009