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Cervantine Futures places the writings of Miguel de Cervantes into conversation with some of the most pressing issues in cultural studies, critical theory, and sociopolitical discourse of the last decade. Assembling a diverse range of prominent and emerging scholars in the field, this volume stakes a claim for Hispanism’s place in the growing scholarly movement to vindicate pre- and early modernity for its incisive and often singular perspective on race, gender, ability, the body, affect, materialism, and other axes of timely debate.

To date, the writings of Miguel de Cervantes have been oddly sidelined from larger, ongoing scholarly projects to link premodern literature with the most recent analytics of critical theory and cultural studies. Cervantine Futures addresses this conspicuous gap by highlighting creative, forward-looking, and rigorous approaches that situate Cervantes in recent theoretical developments in critical cultural studies. Conceived under the rubric of “futures”—collective and capacious, yet also subjunctive and transtemporal—this book tasks the fields of early modern Iberian and Cervantine studies with adopting a more global approach to the early modern period that surveys the current and historical landscapes while charting new horizons. Crucially, Cervantine Futures reflects upon how early modern texts, cultural modes of expression, and visual ideations from Cervantes’s life and legacy resonate with contemporary debates on gender, race, ability, and other issues. The volume thus includes scholarly provocations that deploy feminist, queer, critical race, disability studies, and new materialist approaches to Cervantes’s oeuvre—tendentiously positioned as “canonical”—with the purpose not only of scrutinizing its sociopolitical meanings, but also of creating new archives that productively reframe and rethink early modernity.

A masterful synthesis of literary readings and poetic reflections, making profound contributions to our understanding of chronic pain

At the intersection of queer theory and disability studies, acclaimed theorist Michael D. Snediker locates something unexpected: chronic pain. Starting from this paradigm-shifting insight, Snediker elaborates a bracing examination of the phenomenological peculiarity of disability, articulating a complex idiom of figuration as the lived substance of pain’s quotidian. This lexicon helps us differently inhabit both the theoretical and phenomenal dimensions of chronic pain and suffering by illuminating where these modes are least distinguishable. 

Suffused with fastidious close readings, and girded by a remarkably complex understanding of phenomenal experience, Contingent Figure resides in the overlap between literary theory and lyric experiment. Snediker grounds his exploration of disability and chronic pain in dazzling close readings of Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, and many others. Its juxtaposition of these readings with candid autobiographical accounts makes Contingent Figure an exemplary instance of literary theory as a practice of lyric attention.

Thoroughly rigorous and anything but predictable, this stirring inquiry leaves the reader with a rich critical vocabulary indebted to the likes of Maurice Blanchot, Gilles Deleuze, D. O. Winnicott, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. A master class in close reading’s inseparability from the urgency of lived experience, this book is essential for students and scholars of disability studies, queer theory, formalism, aesthetics, and the radical challenge of Emersonian poetics across the long American nineteenth century.

How to remake the world with neurodivergence at its heart

What if we embraced neurodivergent ways of being not as deviations to be corrected but as vital ways of inhabiting the world? What new realities might emerge? Bringing a much-needed humanistic perspective to the study of autism and other forms of neurodivergence, Counter-cartographies offers a bold reimagining of neurological difference, moving beyond rigid diagnostic frameworks to uncover more expansive, generative modes of existence.

Engaging the work of Fernand Deligny to trace how modern taxonomies of neurodivergence have hardened over time, Leon J. Hilton questions how these categories might instead serve as tools for remapping the world with neurodivergence at its center. At the heart of Counter-cartographies is an exploration of performance and performativity that reveals how the norm of neurotypical reality is continually reinforced through acts of doing, redoing, and undoing.

Charting the historical shift away from “mind” and toward “brain” and moving fluidly across disciplines—from digital art and documentary cinema to cybernetics and radical mental health movements—Hilton illuminates the deep interconnections between performance, perception, and the historical construction of the “neurotypical.” Through close readings of works by William Pope.L, Mel Baggs, Wu Tsang, and others, Hilton also examines how neurodivergence has been represented, embodied, and materialized in contemporary art and media. Restless, engrossing, and persistently attuned to moments of rupture when the neurotypical order falters, Counter-cartographies charts a path toward a more capacious, imaginative world.

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Young adults with intellectual disability tell the story of their own experience of higher education

 

How do students with intellectual disability experience higher education? Creating Our Own Lives addresses this question through the eyes of participants themselves. In relating their experiences and aspirations, these student perspectives mount a powerful challenge to assumptions that intellectual disability is best met with protection or segregation.

Taken together, the essays expose and contradict the inherently ableist claim that individuals with intellectual disability cannot be reliable storytellers. Instead, their deeply informative stories serve as a corrective narrative. The first of the four sections, “Laying the Foundation: Why Everyone Belongs in College,” focuses on belonging and inclusion; the second, “Opening Up Possibilities: Overcoming Doubt and Uncertainty,” conveys the optimism of this generation of advocates through stories of personal hardship, hopeful perseverance, and triumph over adversity; the third, “Inclusion as Action: Diversifying Student Experiences,” supports the understanding of diverse student experiences in inclusive higher education; and the fourth, “Supporting Growth: Peer Mentoring and Advice,” offers guidance to those reimagining and creating educational spaces.

Students with disabilities belong in higher education. Not only does this book serve as an important record of students enrolled in inclusive higher education programs, it is also an unprecedented resource, packed with information and inspiration both for parents seeking opportunities for their children and for individuals with intellectual disability who aspire to attend college.

Contributors: Makayla Adkins, Olivia Baist, Brandon Baldwin, George Barham, Marquavious Barnes, Katie Bartlett, Steven Brief, De'Onte Brown, Meghan Brozaitis, Mary Bryant, Gracie Carrol, Taylor Cathey, Maia Chamberlain, Antonio E. Contreras, Kim Dean, Elizabeth Droessler, Katie Ducett, Keiron Dyck, Rachel Gomez, Deriq Graves, Micah Gray, Maggie Guillaume, Cleo Hamilton, Nathan Heald, Joshua R. Hourigan, Hannah Lenae Humes, Courtney Jorgensen, Eilish Kelderman, Kailin Kelderman, Kenneth Kelty, Kaelan Knowles, Karlee Lambert, Kate Lisotta, Rachel Mast, Elise McDaniel, Emma Miller, Jake Miller, Lydia Newnum, Brenna Mantz Nielsen, Carly O’Connell, Nadia Osbey, Stirling Peebles, Breyan Pettaway, Amanda Pilkenton, True Rafferty, Taylor Ruppe, Lawrence Sapp, Tyler Shore, Brianna Silva, Alex Smith, Elliott Smith, Phillandra Smith, Payton Storms, Allen Thomas, Kylie Walter, Stephen Wanser, Sayid Webb, Breana Whittlesey, Luke Wilcox, Adam Wolfond.

Imagining anti-ableist liberation beyond the rubrics of access and inclusion

In the thirty years since the Americans with Disabilities Act was signed into law, the lives of disabled people have not improved nearly as much as activists and politicians had hoped. In Crip Negativity, J. Logan Smilges shows us what’s gone wrong and what we can do to fix it.

Leveling a strong critique of the category of disability and liberal disability politics, Smilges asks and imagines what horizons might exist for the liberation of those oppressed by ableism—beyond access and inclusion. Inspired by models of negativity in queer studies, Black studies, and crip theory, Smilges proposes that bad crip feelings might help all of us to care gently for one another, even as we demand more from the world than we currently believe to be possible.

Forerunners: Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.

When the Nazis assumed power in Germany in 1933, they wasted no time in implementing their radical policies, first by securing passage of the Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases. Among those designated by this law as “congenitally disabled” were deaf people. Horst Biesold’s newly translated book examines this neglected aspect of Nazi “racial hygiene” through interviews with more than 1,000 deaf survivors of this brutal law that authorized forced sterilizations, abortions, and eventually murder.

Crying Hands meticulously delineates the antecedents of Nazi eugenics, beginning with Social Darwinism (postulated in the mid-nineteenth century) and tracing the various sterilization laws later initiated throughout the world, including many passed and practiced in the United States. This exceptional scholarship is movingly paralleled by the human faces fixed to the numbing statistics, as in story after story those affected recount their irretrievable loss, pain, and misplaced shame imposed upon them by the Nazi regime. Through their stories, told to Biesold in German Sign Language, they have given voice to the countless others who died from the specious science practiced by the Third Reich. And now their own trials have finally been acknowledged.