From Inflexions 5, “Simondon: Milieu, Techniques, Aesthetics” (March 2012). 184-223.

In his short commentary [2] on a “papal red” painting entitled “Birds would violate airline dapper standards for appearance but the skies sport vivider dayglo colors when it can fly freely and uncensored by mankind” (Biklen 2005: 179), autistic painter Larry Bissonnette imagines a realm of unencumbered artistic activity. “Not allowing people with disabilities their patterns of inspiring art through total freedom of expression,” he reiterates, “is like limiting creativity … Read More

From Secret Sharers: Melville, Conrad and Narratives of the Real, edited by Pawel Jedrzejko, Milton M. Reigelman and Zuzanna Szatanik:

It is all the rage, in autism circles, to diagnose a particular historical or literary figure as autistic. Some scholars have even diagnosed fictional characters—Bartleby, for example—as being on the spectrum. When I began writing this chapter, I had just finished a book on autism, and I was seeing it everywhere. I knew that I wanted to analyze disability in … Read More

From the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies (4.3, 2010)

The article proposes the need for a postcolonial neurology, countering recent concerns about the dilution of the term postcolonial when used as metaphor. Adapting George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s notion of “philosophy in the flesh”—the fact that cognition is embodied, which is to say radically conditioned by physiological systems—it analyzes the nonfiction work of Tito Mukhopadhyay, an Indian writer in America whom the medical community would describe as “severely” … Read More

From Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies (October 2003; Volume 5, No. 2)

Recall the moment in Moby-Dick when Stubb proclaims, after Queequeg has been pulled from the shark-infested waters,

Ginger? ginger? and will you have the goodness to tell me, Mr. Dough-Boy, where lies the virtue of ginger? . . . Is ginger the sort of fuel you use . . . to kindle a fire in this shivering cannibal? . . . The steward, Mr. Starbuck, had the … Read More