Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation (review)

Ato Quayson's book, Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation, is a first in many ways. It is the first critical study of global literatures to employ a disability studies framework, and it is the first disability studies informed literary analysis of global or postcolonial literatures, specifically, the works of Samuel Beckett, Toni Morrison, Wole Soyinka, and J. M. Coetzee. Quayson's aim, however, is not to provide a lens uniquely suited for reading postcolonial literature—or any other category of literature—but to open up the aperture, as it were, to encompass "other" visions, be they of the literary or the physical world. Indeed, Quayson's book ushers in a new way of reading for disability, both on the level of content and reading practices. The author is keenly concerned with uncovering those thematic and textual disturbances that dwell beneath the smooth veneer of literary representation. As Quayson's preface makes clear, being aware of the ubiquity of disability and actively reading for it—whether in a literary or cultural text or in another human's life experience—matters.

In the introduction, Quayson outlines his notion of "aesthetic nervousness," starting with an admirably concise overview of the social model of disability. Literary representations, after all, refract our world and the "subliminal fear and moral panic" (14) that arise in the encounter between the non-disabled and the disabled: not only do they remind the temporarily non-disabled of the radical contingency of his/her own health and wholeness, but they trigger an affective response. In literature, he explains, this anxiety reveals itself through a series of aesthetic crises whereby the dominant protocols of representation are "short-circuited" (15). As Quayson proceeds, he offers readings specific to the texts in question while providing larger frameworks by which to understand other works. Chapter 2 offers an extensive typology of disability representations that, while a bit formulaic, would prove useful for any literary analysis attentive to disability. In Chapter 3, Quayson considers disability in Samuel Beckett's Molloy and Endgame as a "hermeneutical impasse" because of the ways in which pain is consistently absented from characters who are obviously disabled and ailing. It is, as he argues, the only thing not subjected to interrogation within the Beckettian structure of doubt. Most interesting in this chapter is its reflection on the relationship between disability and pain, a relationship which is often discounted by those intent on maintaining the social construction of disability.

In Chapter 4, Quayson examines Toni Morrison's Paradise, Sula, and Beloved. Significantly, this chapter offers a sustained analysis of the complexities of motherhood and the maternal, arguing that it is at the meeting of this gender role and disability that Morrison's textual misstep occurs. Artfully deploying the literary figure of "surrogacy," whereby layers of meaning force a recasting of preceding scenes or images, Quayson uncovers the ways in which disability renders maternal love ambiguous or problematic. Quayson's attention to the complexities of gender and motherhood is astute here, and he provides a convincing re-reading of Rosemarie Garland-Thomson's claim that Morrison's protagonists represent empowered disabled women.

Quayson then considers Wole Soyinka's plays The Strong Breed and Madmen and Specialists in order to explore how the alignment of disabled characters with ritual and subversive power actually underscores a more ambivalent depiction of ritual authority and the manufacturing of docility. While his analysis is convincing, I have to wonder how Achille Mbembe's work on the aesthetics of vulgarity in postcolonial regimes of domination might have extended Quayson's claim. However, an intriguing strain of Quayson's argument is that of the "systemic uncanny", the internalization of real or perceived external social and political chaos and the constant threats they pose to physical and psychological well-being. This phenomenon is of course especially pertinent to the postcolonial context, where, in Soyinka's case, it produces such irreconcilable characters as...