Disabilities of the Color Line
Redressing Antiblackness from Slavery to the Present
Published on 15. February 2022
Book
Hardback
336 pages
978-1-4798-0584-6 (ISBN)
Description
Winner of the 2023 Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award
Honorable Mention for the 2022 Robert K. Martin Book Prize from the Canadian Association for American Studies (CAAS)
ASALH 2023 Book Prize Finalist
Reveals how disability and disablement have shaped Black social life in America
Through both law and custom, the color line has cast Black people as innately disabled and thus unfit for freedom, incapable of self-governance, and contagious within the national body politic. Disabilities of the Color Line maintains that the Black literary tradition historically has inverted this casting by exposing the disablement of racism without disclaiming disability.
In place of a triumphalist narrative of overcoming where both disability and disablement alike are shunned, Dennis Tyler argues that Black authors and activists have consistently avowed what he calls the disabilities of the color line: the historical and ongoing anti-Black systems of division that maim, immobilize, and stigmatize Black people. In doing so, Tyler reveals how Black writers and activists such as David Walker, Henry Box Brown, William and Ellen Craft, Charles Chesnutt, James Weldon Johnson, and Mamie Till-Mobley have engaged in a politics and aesthetics of redress: modes of resistance that, in the pursuit of racial and disability justice, acknowledged the disabling violence perpetrated by anti-Black regimes in order to conceive or engender dynamic new worlds that account for people of all abilities. While some writers have affirmed disability to capture how their bodies, minds, and health have been made vulnerable to harm and impairment by the state and its citizens, others' assertion of disability symbolizes a sense of community as well as a willingness to imagine and create a world distinct from the dominant social order.
Honorable Mention for the 2022 Robert K. Martin Book Prize from the Canadian Association for American Studies (CAAS)
ASALH 2023 Book Prize Finalist
Reveals how disability and disablement have shaped Black social life in America
Through both law and custom, the color line has cast Black people as innately disabled and thus unfit for freedom, incapable of self-governance, and contagious within the national body politic. Disabilities of the Color Line maintains that the Black literary tradition historically has inverted this casting by exposing the disablement of racism without disclaiming disability.
In place of a triumphalist narrative of overcoming where both disability and disablement alike are shunned, Dennis Tyler argues that Black authors and activists have consistently avowed what he calls the disabilities of the color line: the historical and ongoing anti-Black systems of division that maim, immobilize, and stigmatize Black people. In doing so, Tyler reveals how Black writers and activists such as David Walker, Henry Box Brown, William and Ellen Craft, Charles Chesnutt, James Weldon Johnson, and Mamie Till-Mobley have engaged in a politics and aesthetics of redress: modes of resistance that, in the pursuit of racial and disability justice, acknowledged the disabling violence perpetrated by anti-Black regimes in order to conceive or engender dynamic new worlds that account for people of all abilities. While some writers have affirmed disability to capture how their bodies, minds, and health have been made vulnerable to harm and impairment by the state and its citizens, others' assertion of disability symbolizes a sense of community as well as a willingness to imagine and create a world distinct from the dominant social order.
Reviews / Votes
"In this bold and timely study, Dennis Tyler shows that the color line is not just a twentieth century problem, but one that began in the era of slavery and extends to the ongoing racialization of police brutality and the health disparities of the COVID-19 pandemic. In Tyler's account, the color line is not exclusively about race, but about the entanglement of blackness and disability. Drawing on a wide range of texts, he perceptively shows how disability was enlisted to shape conceptions of blackness in the United States, and a counter-tradition in which black authors confront what Tyler calls 'disabilities of the color line' to challenge racial injustice and demand redress." (Rachel Adams, Columbia University) "For too long, a conceivable but unfounded myth has been endemic in disability studies: the idea that Black thinkers have distanced themselves from affiliations with disability in contesting the racist construction of Blackness as inherently disabled. Disabilities of the Color Line puts this theory to bed once and for all, establishing a robust record of Black intellectuals' sustained and complex engagement with disability as both a stigma and a literal condition that white supremacist legal and political systems impose upon Black people." - Elizabeth Bowen (Public Books, Editors' Choice 2022) "Beyond Tyler's persuasive arguments, what makes Disabilities of the Color Line especially enlivening is a clear writing style, shaped by his evident introspection. Tyler takes readers on his journey through what is his own aesthetic of redressing such histories of dominations by cultivating community and care... Disabilities of the Color Line charts fresh and innovative directions in Black disability studies that will prove to be a must-read for anyone working at the intersections of race, disability, and social justice." (American Literary History) "Tyler's book makes a unique contribution to the field, provocatively linking disability with racialized arguments about the capacity of African Americans to occupy or claim-particularly under slavery and its aftermath-a space that would imagine them as both free and whole. Drawing on African American writings and acts from slavery to Civil Rights, Tyler asks us to further consider how claiming disability in relation to racialized violences might function as a means of creating community." (Canadian Association for American Studies)More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Illustrations
5 b/w illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
ISBN-13
978-1-4798-0584-6 (9781479805846)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Dennis Tyler is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Fordham University. His scholarship has been published in African American Review, Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, Gender: Space, and elsewhere.