Investigating the intersections and interventions of race and (dis)ability within African-American literary corpus

Abstract

Disability studies scholars concede that disability akin to gender, race, class and caste is a category with a contested history and material ramifications, such as; it merits attention within other analyses of inter-sectionality. Disability scholars and activists have comprehended the operations of Ableism and its conjunction with other structures of oppression. Moreover, it is necessary to discern that disability is completely entangled in the histories, experiences and denotations of age, class, caste, gender, race as well as sexuality, citizenship, nationality, religion and other categories of “difference” and “otherness”. The hegemonic culture’s consistent conflation of these diverse identities has provided a political intention; disability has historically functioned to rationalize inequality for disabled people themselves, the intrinsic conceptualisation of disability has been used to justify discrimination against other groups by ascribing disability to them.

Therein this paper deeply delves in analyzing as how non-white races are habitually coupled to people with disabilities, both of whom were portrayed as evolutionary ‘laggards’ or ‘throwbacks’. Concomitantly, this paper aims to understand the “constitutive relationship” between race, violence and disability and intends to engage with a reading of race and disability pertaining to the larger African-American fiction through the analysis of Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” and “Sula”. Conclusively, this paper strives to conciliate the unnoticed, yet essential, binary between these two categories of “difference” and “otherness”.