Interpreting Disability Metaphor and Race in Octavia Butler's "The Evening and the Morning and the Night"

Using the example of Butler's "The Evening and the Morning and the Night," this article argues that disability metaphors in African American literature can illuminate the mutually constitutive and overlapping relationships between ableism and antiblack racism. Analysis of the story is used to ground two larger arguments about the need for black disability studies to develop: one, more nuanced approaches to interpreting disability metaphors in African American literature; and, two, a crip theoretical expansion of the definition of disability to include illness and disease.