Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies (COPAS - E-Journal)
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Challenging What We “Know” about Disability: Phamaly Theatre and the DisAbility Project
Get PDFPhamaly and the DisAbility Project are theater companies comprising disabled performers with different missions and purposes. Phamaly produces standard Broadway fare (or previously-existing material) with an all disabled cast. The DisAbility Project writes and produces new material based upon the experience of its actors, creating and touring original material in order to educate others about the culture of disability. Phamaly and the DisAbility Project take different approaches to performance and inclusion. Phamaly conforms to a Brechtian model of performance, while the DisAbility Project enacts Augusto Boal\u27s theories of the theater of the oppressed. Both companies enact audience alienation to compel reconsideration of the capabilities of the disabled body
Guilt, Shame, and the Generative Queer in Taiye Selasi\u27s _Ghana Must Go._
Get PDFThis paper focuses on Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go (2013) and shows how Selasi, by challenging conventional modes of storytelling, creates narrative spaces for characters that queer traditional formations of subjectivity, most prominently by emancipating them from the repressive forms of affect of guilt and shame.
Sharing Autism Through Metaphors. (Dis)ability, Difference and Diversity in Temple Grandin’s Portrayals of Autism.
Get PDFAutistic people, professionals claim, lack the socio-emotional awareness to employ metaphors. Yet public, medical and neuroscientific discourse about autism is full of metaphors, including those used by autistic people themselves. Analyzing the autobiographic writings of Temple Grandin – livestock scientist and autism spokeswoman – I treat her metaphors as shared sociocultural resource negotiating the identities of autistic people within a larger context of changing American disability narratives and identity politics
‘Double Whammy’?! Historical Glimpses of Black Deaf Americans
Get PDFDiscrimination on account of both one’s hearing status and skin color can be disabling—but it can also be enabling, as I will show in this historical overview on Black deaf Americans. I examine Black deaf Americans as a minority group within a minority past and present, their changing relationship with signed language, and their activism especially with regard to desegregating education. I argue that Black deaf persons have significantly contributed to American culture, although their contributions have gone largely unacknowledged
Reading Time Travel in Octavia E. Butler’s "Kindred" as Sankofa
Get PDFThis article shows how the Akan concept of Sankofa“ as healing through returning to the past is engaged in Octavia E. Butler’s novel Kindred“. Based on selected close readings, I will discuss whether the science fiction element of time travel in the novel can be read as a literal representation of Sankofa“
\u27Extreme Forms of Aging:\u27 The Case of Sam Berns
Get PDFBy discussing the aging disorder progeria as depicted in the HBO documentary Life According to Sam, “this paper argues that extraordinary forms of aging allow us to gain new insights into the cultural construction of age. The paper explores the ways in which age is culturally constructed through physical and behavioral aspects. The condition of progeria, puts individuals in between these categories, providing an angle to look at the way subcategories of age influence a person’s perception about age and aging in a given social context. Moreover, the essay connects methods from age studies as well as disability studies and suggests a dialogue between the two fields. Progeria, causing the body to age at a tremendously accelerated rate, serves as a suitable point of inquiry. On the one hand, it is an aging disorder at the junction between disability and age while, on the other, it challenges normative assumptions of age and aging by juxtaposing different subcategories of age within a single individual
Seeds of a Future World: Science and Technology in the Digital Art of Elizabeth LaPensée
Get PDFThis article examines how the decolonial practice of digital artist Elizabeth LaPensée deals with colonial representations of science and technology. In colonial images, the ideological prejudice that Indigenous people belong in the past and are incapable of a future of higher sciences manifests itself in a pervasive visual language. The colonial imagery that pitches developed versus primitive technology is frequently reproduced in contemporary representations. Creating art that takes into account her Anishinaabe and Métis worldviews, LaPensée challenges these racist notions and dismantles the colonial structures at their roots. This article reads LaPensée’s digital works alongside the artist’s own comments as depictions of Indigenous scientific literacies that do not rely on colonial symbolism. By telling stories about sustainable futures with a recurrent imagery, LaPensée offers viewers a representational, anti-colonial language with which these futures can be imagined
Epilogue: Women in the Medical Profession. No Choice or Choiceosie?
Get PDFEpilogue: Women in the Medical Profession. No Choice or Choiceosie
Disenfranchised Mothers and Maternity Insurance – Tracing Progressive Arguments in Ernest Hemingway’s Short Stories
Get PDFErnest Hemingway’s corpus has often been analyzed towards its perceived focus on a masculine perspective and experience and has therefore taken its female characters as mere dependents and modifiers of this experience. While a number of critics have, in recent years, turned towards gender as a fruitful approach to Hemingway after all, the mother character especially has received very little scholarly attention still. In this essay I explore parallels between Hemingway’s short stories “A Canary For One” and “Hills Like White Elephants” and contemporaneous Progressive, reformist arguments by Olive Schreiner and Elsie Clews Parsons. I will investigate the relationship between mother characters and tropes of maternity in Hemingway’s short stories and the argumentative structures of contemporaneous Progressive texts, aiming to illustrate that the parallels I will point out allow a more differentiated analysis of the motherhood trope within this selection of Hemingway’s short fiction. This essay contends that the mother character in “A Canary for One” and maternity as a concept in “Hills Like White Elephants” together illustrate two instances of non-Progressive womanhood and thereby appear as a fictionalization of the circumstances out of which Schreiner and Parsons develop their progressive arguments towards female selfhood and individuality.