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  • Moving, with Curved Strength
  • Ajitpaul Mangat (bio)
Studying Disability Arts and Culture: An Introduction by Petra Kuppers. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. 204 pages. $110.00 hardback, $38.00 paperback.

Already in 2004, the question was being asked as to where the field of disability studies was heading. In his presentation at the Conference on Disability Studies and the University titled “Disability: The Next Wave or Twilight of the Gods?,” Lennard J. Davis asked “Are we in the dawn, the midday, or the twilight of disability studies? Is there a post-disability studies waiting in the wings? Or, to think in other language, is there a second or even third wave of disability studies in the offing?”1 Whereas some influential scholars—Davis cites Tobin Siebers and Simi Linton—argue that the next wave of disability studies should refrain from emphasizing the instability of the field, Davis suggests that this very instability will allow identity politics to progress beyond their current shape. For him, the destabilization of identity—from questioning the validity of race to notions of a gender continuum to emphases on a new globality—corresponds to “the kind of identity proposed by a second-wave disability studies.”2 Petra Kuppers’s introduction to disability studies, Studying Disability Arts and Culture: An Introduction, reflects this second-wave emphasis on the openness of the category and potential categorization of disability. By keeping this question open, Kuppers’s introduction to disability studies remains attuned to not only [End Page 441] the nondominant and nonnormative voices that have informed the field but also those voices that still need to be heard.

Early in her book, Kuppers declares that “you will likely not come up with a single firm definition of disability—throughout this book, ‘disability’ will be a machine rather than an entity, something to do stuff with, to move with, to think with—not something one can name and nail down” (10). This is the promise and originality of Kuppers’s book: far from simply acting as an introduction to the terms, figures, and themes of disability studies, it presents disability as a machine, as an embodied learning practice by using “multiple modalities to allow for access, for aesthetic complexity, and for different kinds of ownership of the material” (170). For example, while university instructors are typically assumed to be nondisabled—that is, the epitome of able-mindedness—chapter 1 draws on the work of Kristina Knoll to promote a pedagogical practice founded on an ethos of “interdependency,” which emphasizes the dependency of instructors on their students and therefore their respective position as cocreators in enriching the classroom. Studying Disability Arts and Culture clearly and creatively brings together quotations from foundational texts as well as exercises and activities (i.e., longer-form exercises) that allow for explorations of the various ideas and themes introduced in the book. Kuppers frequently references “The Observation Wheel” (found in the appendix), an image of a wheel divided into four sections— (1) see, (2) hear (3) shadow resource, and (4) joy, vibration, self—that shifts depending on which images and videos are being analyzed. This wheel epitomizes the book’s pedagogical style, as concepts are worked through with multiple modalities to “honor many different learning styles” (172).

Chapters 2–5 of Studying Disability Arts and Culture offer different perspectives on disability: language, discourse, embodiment/ enmindment, and disability culture, respectively. These chapters speak to the openness of disability, a refusal to assert answers in favor of questions and artfulness. Rather than strict definitions of disabilities, the reader is presented with “narratives and stories that do not offer truth, but exploration and experience,” which allow one to “think differently about [oneself] and [the] cultural world” (9). This is not to say that the book neglects the key terms, theories, and models of disability studies such as the medical and social model, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s influential conception of the “normate,” Robert McRuer’s theorizing of the queer crip, and David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder’s important notion of narrative prosthesis. Instead of simply defining these ideas, Kuppers places them alongside multimodal texts and activities that require the [End Page 442] reader to interrogate how the category of disability...

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