Editors' Introduction: Race, Ethnicity, Disability, and Literature: Intersections and

Interventions
Author(s): Jennifer C. James and Cynthia Wu
Source: MELUS, Vol. 31, No. 3, Race, Ethnicity, Disability, and Literature (Fall, 2006), pp.
3-13
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of Society for the Study of the Multi-
Ethnic Literature of the United States (MELUS)
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Editors' Introduction: Race, Ethnicity,
Disability, and Literature: Intersections
and Interventions

Jennifer C. James
George Washington University

Cynthia Wu
Agnes Scott College

Since the introduction of disability studies into the fields of the

humanities and cultural studies in the early 1990s, the field has, to
a large extent, concerned itself with the politics of representation,
focusing on creating knowledge about the histories, activism, and
cultures of a people who have been designated as "other." This
centering of disability as a social and political issue wrests control
of it from the realm of medical science, which has historically
maintained control over the delineation, definition, and treatment
of disabilities-often with the result that people with disabilities
are summarily portrayed as medical specimens or problems to be
fixed. Furthermore, the medicalization of disability defines
disability merely as a physiological impairment-a source of
individual misfortune or the unnatural product of a biological
"accident"-and thus avoids considering the implications of
"disability" as a discursively engineered social category.1 What
disability studies does, then, is call attention to how built and
social environments disenable those with physical, sensory, or
cognitive impairments and privilege those who are normatively
constituted. 2

MELUS, Volume 31, Number 3 (Fall 2006)

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4 JENNIFER C. JAMES AND CYNTHIA WU

Exposing the constructed aspects of disability partially entails

demonstrating that the goals of medical rehabilitation and other
curative measures often have been driven by ideological objectives
that have little to do with the needs of disabled individuals; indeed,
the disabled might not deem intervention necessary. In A History
ofDisability, Henri-Jacques Stiker contends that Western societies'
rush to "fix" bodies labeled "disabled" stems from a growing
unwillingness to acknowledge circumstances-for example,
poverty, war, or unsafe industries-that continue to create
environmentally instigated forms of disability (see 121-189). None
of this is meant to suggest that "disability" is merely a cultural
fiction or that any of the attendant challenges the disabled may
face are wholly preventable. However, unpacking the portrayal of
disability in medical science and its deployment in socio-political
spheres shifts our attention from disability as a medical problem
located in the individual to disability as a label that generates
institutionalized exclusion.
Ethnic studies has a long history of considering race in
conjunction with gender, class, sexuality, immigrant and colonial
subject status, and the scholarship on the intersectionality of these
social identities is vast. However, there is very little work that
addresses the ways in which the categories of race/ethnicity and
disability are used to constitute one another or the ways that those
social, political, and cultural practices have kept seemingly
different groups of people in strikingly similar marginalized
positions. Disability studies historian Douglas Baynton has
suggested that the dominant culture's consistent conflation of these
varied identities has served a political purpose: While "[d]isability
has functioned historically to justify inequality for disabled people
themselves, the concept of disability has been used to justify
discrimination against other groups by attributing disability to
them ... non-white races were routinely connected to people with
disabilities, both of whom were depicted as evolutionary laggards
or throwbacks" (36).
In the medical fields, these "laggards" and "throwbacks" have
been targeted for experimentation, isolation, and even
extermination. Most famously perhaps, the early twentieth-century
birth control advocate Margaret Sanger argued that sterilizing the
mentally and physically disabled would be an effective means of

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RACE, ETHNICITY, DISABILITY, AND LITERATURE 5

ridding the world of "defectives." As she notoriously proclaimed in

The Pivot of Civilization (1922): "Every single case of inherited
defect, every malformed child, every congenitally tainted human
being brought into this world is of infinite importance to that poor
individual; but it is of scarcely less important to the rest of us ...
who must pay [. ..] for these biological and racial mistakes" (8).
For African Americans, Sanger's views on sterilization came
dangerously close to advocating the eradication of races and
ethnicities too frequently thought of as "biological and racial
mistakes" (8). Because black women had often been tricked into
"consenting" to sterilization and abortion, Sanger's position proved
even more disconcerting (see Davis 202-21), especially in light of
her instrumental role in the Negro Project, a birth-control initiative
aimed at black women in the south. 3
While political exclusion and eugenicist theorizing suggest a
desire to "disappear" those bodies deviating from the "norm,"
those very same "extraordinary bodies," to use Rosemarie
Garland-Thomson's term, have also been rendered highly visible
in some realms of culture and even made into spectacles for
popular consumption. Baynton notes that the 1904 World's Fair's
"displays of 'defectives' alongside displays of 'primitives'
signaled similar and interconnected classification schemes," a
spatio-corporeal arrangement also used at American freak shows
(Baynton 36-37).
More recently, scholars in literary disability studies have
claimed that damaging representations of disability-even if they
follow a predictable mode of representation-do not always
relegate disabled characters to stereotypes about disability (such as
that which is to be feared, pitied, or wondrously admired). As
Garland-Thomson attests, reading against the grain of such images
can reveal that such "representations sometimes deploy disabled
characters in complex, triangulated relationships or surprising
alliances, and [that] these representations can be both oppressive
and liberating" (9). Disability becomes a "multivalent trope,
though it remains the mark of otherness" (9).
Interestingly enough, the article widely believed to be the first
piece of published scholarship in literary disability studies
references race substantively, but it does so in ways that more
current writing cautions against. Leonard Kriegel's "Uncle Tom

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6 JENNIFER C. JAMES AND CYNTHIA WU

and Tiny Tim: Some Reflections of the Cripple as Negro" (1969)

emerges out of a specific historical moment marked by the African
American civil rights movement. By referencing the con-
temporaneous liberatory movements by black and other racial
minorities, the essay attempts to connect the author's social
location as a disabled (white) man with those of "the Negro, the
Puerto Rican, the Mexican, [and] the Indian" (412). In making the
argument that the disabled have historically been deprived of the
right to self-representation and self-determination, Kriegel links
the situation of people with disabilities-who so often do not see
recognizable depictions of their day-to-day lives reflected in
readily available media sources-with those of racial minorities
who are similarly deprived of a range of representations that more
accurately illustrate their lived experiences.4
Although Kriegel takes an important first step in rethinking the
ramifications of hegemonically-conceived representations of
disability for disabled people, he does so in a way that presumes
whiteness in his formulation of disability, reduces blackness to a
trope that alienates black people, and reproduces racist discourses
in his uncritical embrace of the racially subaltern. By simply
stating that being disabled is like being black, he fails to account
for the intersectionality of ability status and race, thus, assuming
able-bodiedness for people of color and erasing those who are
disabled and nonwhite. Furthermore, he relegates blackness to a set
of predictable metaphors about disenfranchisement, rage, and
militancy.5 Kriegel merely draws from the exposure and cultural
capital of contemporaneous civil rights movements instead of
meaningfully engaging with race.

Kriegel does focus necessary concern on the politics of

representation. In 1987, almost two full decades after the
publication of Kriegel's essay, Alan Gartner and Tom Joe rightly
attest to the capacity that a wide variety of textual materials
(literature, film, print, and visual media) have for influencing the
actions of the state towards the disabled: "There is a pernicious
reciprocal relationship between image and policy. The way out of
the conundrum of the 'disabling image' cycle is to use the power
of the government to force society-wide changes in behavior
affecting the disabled. As we have learned in race relations, it is
changes in behavior that ultimately effect changes in attitudes and

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RACE, ETHNICITY, DISABILITY, AND LITERATURE 7

beliefs" (4). However-and not unexpectedly-an allusion to the

gains of the civil rights movements rears its head once again in this
rhetorical gesture linking the rights-based concerns of the disabled
to those of people of color. Race becomes a means through which
Gartner and Joe make a well-crafted argument about how images
and material conditions are mutually productive.

If a meaningful engagement with race is missing from Kreigel's

early theorizing on disability, his choice of Uncle Tom as a subject
points to the nearly reflexive ascription of disability to enslaved
bodies in antebellum abolitionist literature. Certainly, the violent
practices slaveholders used to reduce blacks to object status and
the forms of labor they were made to endure ensured that many
blacks became disabled within that institution. As just one case in
point, in one of the first novels published by an African American
woman, Harriet E. Wilson's Our Nig; or Sketches in the Life of a
Free Black, In a Two-Story House, North. Showing that Slavery's
Shadows Fall Even There (1859), the author immediately
announces in her preface that she is "disabled by failing health"
(n.p.). Wilson then presents a brief third-person narrative detailing
the circumstances that transform Alfrado, a free biracial child born
to a white mother and black father, into the abject black subject
"Nig." Abandoned by her mother, who leaves her at the home of a
family controlled by a sadistic "she-devil" after her father dies, she
is taken in as an illegal indentured servant and overworked, beaten,
and tortured relentlessly. The matriarch makes her goals clear-to
bring forth "the nigger in the child" (26). "Nig" is finally left
"lame" after her weakened body causes her to fall down a flight of
stairs (117).
Arguably the first example of black autopathography, Our Nig
suggests that the production of black subjectivity and the
production of the disabled body are coterminous. Wilson also has
"Nig" note that the white family's "invalid" daughter Jane is
deemed desirable enough to marry, while lamenting that "Nig,"
also disabled, will never be viewed as a "treasure" worthy of
romantic love (55). In this sly critique of the popular nineteenth-
century sentimental novel's presentation of disabled bodies as
objects inspiring care and pity in those surrounding them, Wilson
implies that those narratives-already romanticized-are nullified
if that disabled body is black. She in fact ends her work with

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8 JENNIFER C. JAMES AND CYNTHIA WU

descriptions of "the invalid mulatto's" trials as she endeavors to

make a living; dismissed as an "impostor" feigning her illness,
"Nig" is forced to become a ward of the state before finally gaining
her autonomy (123, 124). Although many critics have examined
Wilson's depiction of the torture "Nig" suffered at the hands of her
tormentors, none have explored Wilson's analysis of the black
disabled body produced by this violent subjugation.
As Wilson shows, these multiple identities can often be
interrelated, yet we want to point out that when such analogies are
made between one form of oppression and another, the comparison
often ends up privileging one over the other. In place of claims that
"disability is like race," we stress the importance of understanding
how disability has always been racialized, gendered, and classed
and how racial, gender, and class difference have been conceived
of as "disability." We call for a more nuanced understanding of a
multiplicity of identities-both minority and majoritarian-so that
critics can examine the interplay of exclusion and privilege that
situate individuals in complex and often contradictory ways.
The articles we have assembled for this special issue all work
within a disability studies framework to examine the interplay of
race, ability status, and other social identities in American
literature. Some of the texts-such as The Woman Warrior or
Borderlands-will be easily recognizable for those familiar with
the US multiethnic canon. Other texts may be less commonly read
and new for some readers. A number of authors, in their
engagement with disabled women of color, have taken a position
similar to that of Rosemarie Garland-Thomson who claims that
disabled black women in the work of Ann Petry, Toni Morrison,
and Audre Lorde signify a liberatory form of difference rather than
increased subjugation because the difference embodied
anatomically by both fictional and nonfictional black women
inaugurates an oppositional identity politics that resists
assimilation (Garland-Thomson, ch. 5). Other authors have
fashioned interpretive strategies by showing how a disabled
whiteness operates in the narratives of people of color and
indigenous peoples. For instance, Ellen Samuels's analysis of
William and Ellen Craft's fugitive slave narrative, Running a
Thousand Miles for Freedom (1860), examines Ellen Craft's
disguise as a white "invalid" gentleman, which enables the

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RACE, ETHNICITY, DISABILITY, AND LITERATURE 9

couples' escape from slavery in Georgia. Noting the diminishment

of important signifiers of disability in the most reproduced
contemporary drawing of Ellen's masquerade, Samuels traces
representations and retellings of the Crafts' story into the twentieth
century to explore the complex status of disability in African
American literature, which, she claims, has long been concerned
with presenting an independent and healthy black subject. While
much critical attention has been given to Ellen's subversive
performance of race and gender, Samuels argues for the
importance of interpreting disability as a constructed social
category whose shifting meanings are equally complex and, often,

intimately intertwined with them. She similarly suggests that

disability scholars must offer multi-valenced analyses which
foreground race, using the invalid as a literary figure that has been
defined as much by race as by gender.
Jeeyeun Lim's article examines the well-known tongue cutting
conversation between the protagonist and her mother in Maxine
Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior alongside nonfictional
reports of frenotomy. She claims that this scene from the text must
be read as not purely figurative or purely literal but that, when
placed alongside accounts of tongue cutting as treatments for
speech difficulties ranging from stuttering to English-language
deficiency, Kingston's narration of the event literalizes a tendency
to locate ethnic-cultural-linguistic identities on the body. Lim
observes that the protagonist's anxieties about language and speech
link to her trauma-laced experiences in school environments, and
although the protagonist does not draw a direct link between the
politics of special education and those of bilingual schooling, she
establishes the need for further discussion about the connections
between public education for disabled students and for non-native
speakers of English.
Anna Mollow reads Willow Weep for Me: A Black Woman's
Journey Through Depression, by Meri Nana-Ama Danquah, in
order to consider the political implications of representing
suffering in relation to disability. Noting disability studies'
interrogation of "stories of overcoming" as apolitical narratives of
personal triumph, Mollow argues that the multiple oppressions that
women of color face necessarily complicate their relationship to
psychic and physical impairment. In part, Mollow claims that

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10 JENNIFER C. JAMES AND CYNTHIA WU

celebrated representations of African American women's fortitude

and resilience, combined with their limited access to mental health
care, result in an underestimation of the presence (and effects) of
depression within that community. While Mollow does not dismiss
skepticism of medical intervention as a means of norming and
regulation, she argues that Danquah's autopathography
demonstrates that African American women's recognition of
depression as a potentially disabling condition can be a politically
resistant act.

In a similar vein, Eva Tettenborn asks how Freudian theories of

mourning and melancholia might be reinterpreted within an
African American cultural context. Tettenbom claims that the
portrayal of "the different mind" in contemporary African
American literature is not to be read as an index of black
pathology, but as a gesture of reclamation that seeks to undo the
dominant culture's erasure of mourning and melancholia from
black historical experience. Drawing energy from Saidiya
Hartman, Tettenbom traces this strategic omission to the "forced
performances" slaveowners and body traffickers demanded that
slaves exhibit, from "joyous" exhibitions of singing and dancing to
enforced silences. Because these forced performances sought to
quell the disruptive potential of expressions of black pain and loss,
Tettenborn suggests that representing the "different mind" can be a
source of empowerment precisely because it acknowledges black
feeling at the same time that it indicts a system that has continued
to inflict psychic injuries upon the black subject.
Heather Hewett explores Edwidge Danticat's The Farming of
Bones, a fictionalized interpretation of the 1937 massacre of
thousands of Haitians ordered by the dictator of the Dominican
Republic. Hewett notes that while the experience of disability is
not always traumatic and that disability is not always caused by
trauma, understanding the physical and emotional injuries
sustained during the massacre underscores a need to integrate
theories of trauma and disability. Furthermore, the novel's
sustained inquiry into the process of accepting a permanently
altered body-a process that highlights the transient and
transitional nature of the body-situates itself within a greater
cultural frame of African diasporic cosmologies, particularly
AfroCaribbean understandings of loss and disability. Hewett

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RACE, ETHNICITY, DISABILITY, AND LITERATURE 11

contends that Danticat's inclusion of several disabled crossroads

figures, reminiscent of the important Haitian trickster figure Papa
Legba-whom Hewett provocatively reads as "disabled"-asks us
to expand simplified notions of disability to encompass more
complex theories of the body and identity that might lie beyond
Western interpretative frameworks.
Michelle Jarman analyzes Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of
the Dead as a dystopic critique of eugenic legacies, showing that
concerns with biological or genetic purity interface with those of
sexuality. Observing that Silko's novel takes place in the
southwestern borderlands, Jarman links the histories of slavery in
the Americas, the US annexation of Mexico, and genocidal
violence against indigenous populations as she shows how the
privileging of physical or cognitive impairment stymies eugenic
practices and philosophies. In effect, Jarman argues that it is
through this form of alterity based on different ability statuses that
coalitions may be formed across racial and ethnic lines. These
racial crossings-based on physical and cognitive dissidence-
ultimately allow characters to shift from being participants in
eugenic practices and discourses to becoming protesters against a
delimiting and abusive regime.
Todd Ramlow takes up the implicit challenge of disability
studies to think subjectivity and embodiment differently by
comparing two queer activist-writers who theorize the border,
Gloria Anzalduia and David Wojnarowicz. Examining Anzaldua's
Borderlands/La Frontera and Wojnarowicz's AIDS memoir, Close
to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration, Ramlow suggests that
the "borderlands" are reconfigured in multiple ways, but perhaps
most urgently in the direction of physical difference and disability.
Disability is one of the material incarnations of the borderlands; it
is outside or elsewhere from the normative national fantasy of
bodily "integrity." That physical border is further impacted and
complicated by vectors of race, class, ethnicity, gender, and
sexuality. In the attempt to break down the binaristic thinking that
organizes Western society-one that might ask us to read these
writers as wholly distinct from one another-"Bodies in the
Borderlands" offers the figure of "prosthetic subjectivity," which
describes an interdependent and intersubjective constitution of the
"self." Ramlow argues that subjectivity is never singular, whole or

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12 JENNIFER C. JAMES AND CYNTHIA WU

unitary; it is always partial, supplemental, constructed in between

bodily contacts and scenes of embodiment. As Anzaldfia and
Wojnarowicz demonstrate, all subjectivity is implicitly prosthetic,
constituted between various border(land)s.
The essays here are a small sampling of the thought emerging
from the interrelationships between disability and race in literary
study. For instance, as Ramlow's essay indicates, critics are also
beginning to analyze the relationship between sexuality, race and
ethnicity within a disability studies framework. Robert McRuer's
Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability is one
recent example of the direction this scholarship is currently taking.
In a provocative work that questions the traditional paradigms used
to theorize marginalized people and cultures, McRuer asks us to
rethink the disciplinary knowledges that create abject subjects and
maintain artificial distinctions among non-normative bodies. Just
as importantly, the overwhelming number of women writers in this
special issue suggests that modes of analysis that take disability
into account alongside race may necessarily involve an
interrogation of gender. The challenge to those who engage
disability scholarship is therefore evident: When we consider the
multifaceted ways in which subjects are produced by identity
categories, we cannot stop at examining only one or two in
isolation. We must instead analyze the various ways intersecting
subject positions produce "identities" that might, in the end, defy
categorization altogether. We hope that this special issue of
MELUS will elicit further discussion about the complex issues
disability scholarship continues to generate.

Notes

1. Scholars working within the field of humanistic disability studies make a

distinction between "impairment," which refers to a lack of (or lessened)
physical, sensory, or cognitive function, and "disability" which refers to the
ways in which certain functional impairments interface with the environment to
create political disadvantage. This distinction places the onus for liberatory
change on the built and social environment rather than on medical intervention,
correction, and-thus-assimilation of the disabled person.

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RACE, ETHNICITY, DISABILITY, AND LITERATURE 13

2. For an explanation of how allopathic medical science during the early

twentieth century gained its cultural capital on the backs of the disabled, see
Bogdan 66-67.
3. Although The Negro Project, developed in 1939 with the help of the Birth
Control Federation of America, had black support (including W.E.B. DuBois),
the program was tainted by Sanger's eugenicism and became subject to
accusations of racial genocide. See "Birth Control or Race Control? Sanger and
the Negro Project," The Margaret Sanger Papers Newsletter 28 (2001): 1-5.
4. However, scholars within disability studies do not demand that authors
generate "positive" images of the disabled, for such positive images often
replicate yet another damaging master narrative-that of the disabled person
who "overcomes" his or her impairment and serves as a testament to the
universal human spirit. Narratives of idealized figures overcoming their
disability locate disability within the individual, rather than within an
institutional apparatus.
5. Additionally, blackness is presumed to be male; Kriegel references "the black
man" continually. This takes place even when he makes reference to a black
person who happens to be a woman.

Works Cited

Baynton, Douglas. "Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American

History." The New Disability History: American Perspectives. Ed. Paul K.
Longmore and Lauri Umansky. New York: New York UP, 2001. 33-57.
Bogdan, Robert. Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and
Profit. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988.
"Birth Control or Race Control? Sanger and the Negro Project." The Margaret
Sanger Papers Newsletter 28 (2001): 1-5.
Davis, Angela Y. Women, Race and Class. New York: Vintage Books, 1983.
Ferguson, Roderick A. Aberrations in Black. Toward a Queer of Color Critique.
Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2003.
Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical
Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia UP,
1997.
Gartner, Alan and Tom Joe, eds. Images of the Disabled, Disabling Images.
New York: Praeger, 1986.
Kriegel, Leonard. "Uncle Tom and Tiny Tim: Some Reflections on the Cripple
as Negro." The American Scholar 38 (1969): 412-30.
Margaret Sanger. The Pivot of Civilization. 1922. Amherst, NY: Humanity
Books, 2003.
McRuer, Robert. Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability. New
York: New York UP, 2006.
Stiker, Henri-Jacques. A History of Disability. Trans. William Sayers. Ann
Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1999.
Wilson, Harriet. Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of A Free Black. 1859. New
York: Vintage Books, 1983.

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