The volume aims at looking at the central issue of the various aspects of disability representation, the impact of these representations on the materially embodied experience of disablement, the political imperatives shaping the narratives of corporeal difference, and the influences of highly particularised local cultural context on the constitution of epistemic and discursive notions of corporeality. The volume follows three routes of inquiry: How do we find 'disability' in texts or, what are 'disability texts'? How do we read concepts historically using literary and cultural texts and what would a similar study of the Indian context reveal? How do we study culturally distinct ways of narrating bodyminds? These questions will be answered through a discussion of representation histories of the abnormal informed by histories of disease conditions and its representations, with the aim of developing ways of thinking and talking about concepts of corporeal difference that are socio-culturally and socio-historically located away from the western context and to explore the intersections between gender, caste, religion, sexuality, class and disability.
Mired inside its rather archaic comprehension as a medical phenomenon, disability, for a long time now, has been ignored as a marker of identity. The world has only been busy in rectifying the absences that have, ostensibly ?dis-abled?, rather than accepting such impaired existences as human beings themselves. The volume intends to reclaim the representations of disability and present narratives that do not just use the figure of the disabled as a means to an end. It includes translation of 17 disability centric short stories from multiple Indian languages into English. Further it uses these stories as illustration to test and develop new theoretical formulations concerning disability and the disabled. What grants the proposed work its uniqueness is, in other words, not only the translations of the erstwhile lost stories of disability but also the use of these stories towards the formation of theoretical paradigms to move forward the project of Disability Studies. The volume shows, interrogates and problematizes the affect that impairment and disability has on those who are ?abled?. It presents how the ?normal? human being approaches the disabled and interacts with them. All in all, owing to its academic engagement with disability as a phenomenon and within a narrative, this work intends to take the role of a resource book that will find ready use in the newly emergent multidisciplinary field of Disability Studies and will be of great significance to India and the world at large especially since Literature has a major role to play in this field. Not only, then, does it present different disability narratives to the world but, through their academic interrogation, also allows researchers and academics, especially in India, to form the theoretical enhancements in Disability Studies that both our country and the world desperately require.
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