ASALH 2023 Book Prize Finalist
Reveals how disability and disablement have shaped Black social life in
America
Through both law and custom, the color line has cast Black people as
innately disabled and thus unfit for freedom, incapable of
self-governance, and contagious within the national body politic.
Disabilities of the Color Line maintains that the Black literary
tradition historically has inverted this casting by exposing the
disablement of racism without disclaiming disability.
In place of a triumphalist narrative of overcoming where both disability
and disablement alike are shunned, Dennis Tyler argues that Black
authors and activists have consistently avowed what he calls the
disabilities of the color line: the historical and ongoing anti-Black
systems of division that maim, immobilize, and stigmatize Black people.
In doing so, Tyler reveals how Black writers and activists such as David
Walker, Henry Box Brown, William and Ellen Craft, Charles Chesnutt,
James Weldon Johnson, and Mamie Till-Mobley have engaged in a politics
and aesthetics of redress: modes of resistance that, in the pursuit of
racial and disability justice, acknowledged the disabling violence
perpetrated by anti-Black regimes in order to conceive or engender
dynamic new worlds that account for people of all abilities. While some
writers have affirmed disability to capture how their bodies, minds, and
health have been made vulnerable to harm and impairment by the state and
its citizens, others' assertion of disability symbolizes a sense of
community as well as a willingness to imagine and create a world
distinct from the dominant social order.
