Blackness and Disability: The Remix

In the 1990s, when I wanted to learn the lyrics to various songs, I would purchase or dub a cassette tape so I could listen to the songs over and over again.¹ If I got stuck on a particular verse, I usually pressed rewind. Sometimes, I'd flip the tape over and fast forward, or if the film unwound—as was most often the case—I grabbed a pencil, which allowed me to manually turn the spool to the desired spot on the recording. I was not particularly adept at this. There was a lot of clicking in the recording and, sometimes, I would break the spool of the magnetic tape: "I let my tape rock 'til my tape popped." ² Of course, I counted myself especially lucky if I found a deluxe single on sale at the now defunct The Wiz, Sam Goody, or Tower Records stores, because the single was guaranteed to have multiple remixes. And the remix promised to radically alter certain parts of the song; often, the remix provided clarity or, at the very least, provided a rap or a new hook that I casually performed with greater facility. In other words, the remix was not only pleasurable, but useful.

And, so it is with the remix you now hold. With all due respect to Babyface, I obviously do remixes.³

This scholarly remix, like its musical counterpart, contorts and transforms the original by adding, altering, and, for some, speeding up or slowing down the pace of the scholarship. As with the remixes of the 1990s, there are definitely samples. Let me explain: In 2011, with the help of his mother, Patricia A. Bell, and his colleagues, Sabine Broeck, Marcelle Haddix, and Steve Taylor, Christopher M. Bell posthumously published Blackness and Disability: Critical Examinations and Cultural Interventions. (I deliberately name them as a scholarly politic that highlights labor often rendered invisible.) The collection was the first of its kind, marshalling Bell's trademark political energy, wit, and wry humor into a collection of essays that highlighted some of the main concerns that continue to permeate the burgeoning field of Black Disability Studies. Influenced in many ways by Bell's work, in 2017, I edited a special issue of African American Review, also entitled "Blackness and Disability." That editorial project felt akin to a posthumous festschriften because it also allowed us to extend conversations originating out of Bell's original Blackness and Disability.⁴ This current collection, Blackness and Disability: The Remix, adds to and deepens the ongoing conversations about Blackness and disability. These topics include, but are not limited to, theorizing about Black Disability Studies and interpretive strategies;⁵ Black women's mental health;⁶ the afterlives of slavery, including the carceral state;⁷ the disabled lives/deaths of prominent Black figures;⁸ connections between Black communities and other communities of col-or;⁹ the possibility of liberation while being Black and disabled;¹⁰ the stigma of disability and its relationship to racialization processes;¹¹ the repercussions of U.S. military action on Black disabled people;¹² and the presence of disability in Black music.¹³ You will notice that the footnotes here provide information about scholars who have produced similar work in the two previous volumes of Blackness and Disability. I invite you to theorize from above and below.

There is something you should know about this volume. Its completion was shaped by experiences of disability. Typically, edited volumes—whether books or special issues of journals—usually require three to five years to complete. The editor must propose a special issue, create a call for papers or solicit contributions, receive and review submissions, await reviewers' input, cohere and distribute submission reviews, receive and review revisions, create an introduction, review copy-edits and page proofs, and publicize the publication. Generally speaking, the process is arduous. In the intersectional analysis of Blackness and disability, the process must also contend with the way structural and institutional racism and ableism shape the scholarship available. For instance, when writing about Blackness and disability, scholars often have to justify the presence of that scholarship and...