ABOUT THIS BOOK

Characters with disabilities are often overlooked in fiction, but many occupy central places in literature by celebrated authors like Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie, J. M. Coetzee, Anita Desai, Jhumpa Lahiri, Edwidge Danticat, and others. These authors deploy disability to do important cultural work, writes Christopher Krentz in his innovative study, Elusive Kinship. Such representations not only relate to the millions of disabled people in the global South, but also make more vivid such issues as the effects of colonialism, global capitalism, racism and sexism, war, and environmental disaster.

Krentz is the first to put the fields of postcolonial studies, studies of human rights and literature, and literary disability in conversation with each other in a book-length study. He enhances our appreciation of key texts of Anglophone postcolonial literature of the global South, including Things Fall Apart and Midnight’s Children. In addition, he uncovers the myriad ways fiction gains energy, vitality, and metaphoric force from characters with extraordinary bodies or minds.

Depicting injustices faced by characters with disabilities is vital to raising awareness and achieving human rights. Elusive Kinship nudges us toward a fuller understanding of disability worldwide.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Christopher Krentz is an Associate Professor at the University of Virginia with a joint appointment between the English Department and American Sign Language Program. He is the author of Writing Deafness: The Hearing Line in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and editor of A Mighty Change: An Anthology of Deaf American Writing, 1816–1864, as well as numerous articles about disability in literature and culture. He is currently director of the University of Virginia’s Disability Studies Initiative and helped found their American Sign Language Program.

REVIEWS

"Krentz effectively traces the evolution of disability in literature from 'a subtle, easy to miss presence' to something central to a work’s narrative, and... makes a strong case for literature as an agent of change.... [T]his book should have a spot on the shelves of literature students and scholars."—Publishers Weekly

“Krentz’s triangulation of disability, postcolonial studies, and human rights is original and significant work. In lively and engaging analysis, Elusive Kinship yields important insights about the intersection of disability with trauma and the different ways in which activism and community may be constituted, while providing critical discussions of the limitations of disability rights models. This book is a welcome addition to scholarship in literary postcolonial studies and disability in global contexts.”—Clare Barker, Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Leeds, and author of Postcolonial Fiction and Disability: Exceptional Children, Metaphor and Materiality

“Elusive Kinship is a vital contribution to the growing literature on the geopolitics of disability and debility. Krentz provides a lucid analysis of disabled lives in the Global South as represented in literature while also thoughtfully deconstructing the politics of knowledge production of disability studies in the Global North. Making a powerful case that postcolonial literature assists in challenging these divides, Krentz’s attention to overlooked aspects of disability offers a deep understanding, complicating and transforming what disability is and how it is lived."—Jasbir K Puar, Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University, and author of The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

Introduction

1. On Kinship with Literary Characters: The Power of Fiction

2. Between Indigenous Beliefs and Colonial Invasion: The Vital Role of Disability in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart

3. Extraordinary Bodies: Magic Realism, Disability, and Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children

4. How Metaphor Can Also Be Realism: Disability and Rights in Coetzee’s Fiction

5. A Sense of Care: Women Writing Disabled Women in the Global South

6. The Limits of Human Rights: Twenty-First-Century Depictions of War, Poverty, Global Capitalism, and Disability

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Notes

Works Cited

Index

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