Disability and Difference in Global Contexts: Enabling a Transformative Body Politic by Nirmala Erevelles (review)

In Marxism and Literary History, John Frow argues the novel functions as a normative form of cultural production that allows authors to mesh with reigning ideologies of the day while also retaining a degree of creative autonomy. According to Frow and other neo-Marxist theorists such as Fredric Jameson (2), cultural modes of authority create the “real” of material existence and structure people’s experiences; as such, a political critique of experience can be located in “the codes [that govern] cultural literary convention” (154). Neo-Marxist literary critique helped transform a view of literature as relatively apolitical to a structuring domain of control within global bourgeois capitalism and, paradoxically, a site of resistance.

Nirmala Erevelles’s Disability and Difference in Global Contexts takes its place among recent neo-Marxist approaches by folding disability into analyses of globalization. Because Erevelles’s work comes out of the field of education (and disability studies in education in particular), it does not engage with literary conventions, but rather shares a sensibility characteristic of neo-Marxist methodologies that one is capable of mapping global patternings of ideology through case-study applications of “historical materialism.” By “historical materialism,” Erevelles means to foreground time-bound experiences of devalued embodiments replete with their attendant class (economic status and labor capacity) and racial implications.

Erevelles begins by citing disability studies as characteristically ignoring concerns specific to class and race. Consequently, Disability and Difference seeks a corrective to the over-determination of white, middle-class, heteronormative perspectives that have comprised the field of academic disability studies as well as disability rights movements, particularly in the US and UK. Erevelles also takes other minority studies of feminist, queer, and racial lives to task for erasing disability in their analyses of marginality. Through her employment of an at times almost dizzying dialectical strategy, Erevelles turns these studies of minority experience over and through each other in order to demonstrate them as inextricably intertwined with disability rather than tangential.

As such, Erevelles’s book helps cultivate an understanding of disability intersected by perspectives of lower-class, sexualized, and racially devalued bodies as “mutually constitutive” (45). It is at this fraught intersection of marginalized identities that the author locates the compounding nature of stigma as rendering some bodies as justifiably expendable. For instance, chapter 1 explores the ways in which the body-destroying conditions endured by slaves originate in the devaluation of Africans as intellectually inferior to their white European counterparts. Following Hortense Spillers’s analysis in “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” Erevelles argues that enslaved bodies had to be disabled first (i.e., determined as biologically deviant) in order to justify the necessity of white oversight through forced labor. Thus, whereas most accounts of slavery begin with racial savagery as the putative justification for enslavement, Erevelles argues that intellectual disability provided a grounding rationale as well. Further, slavery became a self-fulfilling disability prophecy in that it created impairments in those imprisoned on plantations through beatings, impoverishment, and the demands of the chattel labor system.

In chapter 2 Erevelles traces out the implications of this originary divestment of humanity from African American subjects by showing how latter twentieth-century educational policy continues to be inflected by rationales of enslavement. Her analysis explores the over-representation of students of color in special education and the ways in which race and poverty create a basis for diagnostic regimes of disability. This lethal conjunction creates abject student populations who experience neglect, criminalization, and expulsion as commonplace “interventions” in third-tier educational systems:

even though educational contexts teem with diverse bodies, traditional policy analysis prefers to focus on outcomes and standards, rather than having to deal with unruly, messy, unpredictable, and taboo bodies – bodies that are shaped by, and, in turn, shape the social, political, and economic contexts they inhabit.

(66)

This regime of oversight to catch students out for misbehavior results in what Henry...