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 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 Billy Budd—both stuttering and cognitive difference—and I thought that Hans Asperger’s idea of “an intelligence scarcely touched by tradition or culture… strangely pure” (qtd. in Sacks, 252–253) might be a profitable lens through which to view Melville’s “upright barbarian” (110), that “child man . . . [whose] simplemindedness [had] remained unaffected” by experience or age (135). As Melville puts it, “Experience is a teacher indeed; yet did Billy’s years make his experience small” (136). I wanted to historicize the Handsome Sailor’s “essential innocence” (162), rescue it, for a time, from the brilliance of symbol and allegory by asking questions about how the nineteenth century understood stuttering and cognitive disability.

Read more of “Organic Hesitancy”: On Speechlessness in Billy Budd (PDF)

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 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” autistic. The article contends that Mukhopadhyay’s alternative embodiment gives rise to both a different sense of relation and a different way with words, each in some respects preferable to the neurotypical standard. Paying attention to Mukhopadhyay’s body challenges—with proprioception, sensory processing, over- and under-inclusion of details in his apprehension of the environment, word finding, a drive to associate, a persistent animism, and synesthesia—it suggests that he is a cross-cultural, cross-sensorial migrant: a neuro-cosmopolitan armed with metaphor in a world that is often quite hostile to the neurological other. Finally, it situates Mukhopadhyay’s writing squarely in the burgeoning neurodiversity movement, which, though recognizing the difficulties that autism often presents, nonetheless asks that it be treated and accommodated as difference.

Read Toward a Postcolonial Neurology (PDF).

So Frederick Douglass describes the impact of learning to read in his autobiography. “It had given me a view of my wretched condition, without the remedy,” he writes. “It opened my eyes to the horrible pit, but to no ladder upon which to get out. In moments of agony, I envied my fellow-slaves for their stupidity.”

My son, DJ, recently used this passage as an epigraph for his … Read More]]> “The silver trumpet of freedom had roused my soul to eternal wakefulness.”

So Frederick Douglass describes the impact of learning to read in his autobiography. “It had given me a view of my wretched condition, without the remedy,” he writes. “It opened my eyes to the horrible pit, but to no ladder upon which to get out. In moments of agony, I envied my fellow-slaves for their stupidity.”

My son, DJ, recently used this passage as an epigraph for his college admission essay, comparing his predicament as a nonspeaking person with autism who had been taught to read and to type on a computer to that of a famous, mid-19th century American slave. What use is knowledge, DJ asks, if it can’t be developed and mobilized to improve one’s life?

Read the full piece on the Huffington Post.