Book Review: Acesso Libre (Susan Antebi and Beth E. Jörgensen)Reviewed by Michael NorthenDisability studies is populated largely by the voices of white, English-speaking academics – voices not at generally lacking in the confidence about the legitimacy of their opinions – so I was excited to learn of the publication of Susan Antebi and Beth E. Jörgensen's Libre Acesso: Latin American Literature and Film Through Disability Studies. True, as its subtitle implies, many of the essays included in this collection are grounded in the work of some of the heavy hitters of disability theory, like Leonard Davis and David Mitchell, but Antebi and Jörgensen make it clear in their introduction that some of the Anglo theorists might need to slide over in their seats a bit to make way for other voices. While Libre Acesso is clearly written for scholars, it also leaves the door open for the many intelligent and interested readers who may not know postcolonialism from a post hole. One of the virtues of Libre Acesso is its organization, which serves as a sort of primer for the reader who comes to the book from outside the field of disability studies. As the authors describe in the introduction, the book unfolds in four sections that in some ways recapitulate the order in which awareness of disability rights and literature developed themselves. The first three sections of the book move: from a consideration of disability in the construction of individual identity an consciousness as expressed in autobiographical discourse; to an emphasis on collective phenomena and human rights in literary and filmic works of fiction in literary and filmic works of fiction and nonfiction; to an examination of the intersection of race and social marginality within disability. What this means for readers new to disability theory is that the book begins with a discussion of literary work in a way that most comfortably aligns itself with the medical model of disability. It's a view that sees disability as the problem of the individual, one that needs fixing. This contrasts with the social construction model of disability whose emphasis on collective responsibility is mirrored in section two of the book. The third section reflects the fact that race, ethnicity and gender play into the construction of disability as well as the thorny problem of hierarchy within the ranks of those who identify as disabled. Fittingly for a book with a focus on literature, Libre Acesso includes a fourth section in which non-normative literary forms or modes of experience are sampled. Though the book is peppered through with names like Borges, Bolaño and García Márquez that are likely to draw in the reader who might not otherwise approach a particular essay, it is the first section of the book, with its focus upon the work of individual authors is that is most accessible. In the spirit of "nothing about us without us" the first section kicks off with the book's sole example of literary work by a writer with a disability. Lina Meruane's "Blind Spot" traces her development from a sighted writer to one who had entered the realm of blindness, albeit temporarily. On the one hand, it seems odd that the authors chose the work of a writer with an acquired disability rather than one who identified as disabled from birth as their keystone piece, but given the title of the section in which it appears, "Disability and the Construction of Self," it does lead the reader through a process in which the acquisition of disability requires a total reassessment of identity and, in doing so, may give non-disabled readers a taste of what such a transition requires. An obvious bonus, of course, is that it whets the reader's appetite for more of a writer whose work is not a literary household word. Reasonably enough, the leadoff essay is followed up on one about Jorge Luis Borges, for whom blindness was not a sidebar, but increasingly bound up with his literary work. As one of the few literary writers of note to openly acknowledge his blindness, Borges maintained a lifelong ambivalence about it, but as the essay's author, Kevin Goldstein points out, "By not conceiving of blindness purely as a deficit, Borges forces us to consider the value of disability as difference." Moreover, like Stephen Kuusisto, whose book Letters to Borges plays off of the more famous writer's work, Borges dispels the myth that blindness can be equated to darkness. Goldstein's probing of the relationship between the loss of vision and the trajectory of Borges work is a fascinating one and too full of possibilities to explore in an anthology review, but it is terrain on which disability scholars and those interested in literature can meet for their mutual benefit. Following Goldstein's essay on Borges and rounding out the first unit is Beth Jörgensen's "Negotiating the Geographies of Exclusion and Access: Life Writing by Gabriela Brimmer and Ekiwah Adler-Beléndez. Bremmer and Adler-Beléndez are both writers with cerebral palsy, but in addition to introducing the point of view of writers whose identify as disabled was set from birth, they make an interesting contrast. Bremer's autobiography is a collaborative effort, which of course raises red flags in the contemporary disabilities studies community but as Jörgensen points out, given the context of 1970's Mexico, for a woman with cerebral palsy, it was an assertion of agency. However, quoting Thomas Couser, perhaps the foremost authority on disability life writing in English, the essay reminds us that "not all life writing subverts social and cultural norms. In fact, it can, and often does reinscribe conventional, conservative views…." One argue, in fact, that to denigrate the testimony of a writer because she could not properly prognosticate the political atmosphere of another culture forty years into the future could be interpreted as willful denial of her agency." In choosing to focus on the work of Adler-Beléndez, possibly the best known Mexican poet with a disability, Jörgensen does readers a favor, but at the same time exemplifies the problem of trying to claim a writer from another culture as a disability writer who does not fit the north American paradigm. As Jörgensen points out, while much of Adler-Beléndez work is centered around his life experiences, disability does not play a dominant role and, in fact, the poet prefers to dwell on the traditional canonical themes of Western poetry. Reviewing a book with as much new material to offer as Libre Acesso is patently unfair because there is no way in the confines of a short journal review to give a realistic taste of what each entry has to offer. I have focused so far upon the book's first section because it is the volume's gateway and the most likely to be accessible to non-scholars. Contributors to the other sections of the book need not worry. Because of its importance, Libre Accesso will easily find its place on the bookshelves of university disability studies departments where their essays will be read. As a token of fairness, though, I would like to note the presence of at least one contribution each of the book's remaining sections. As mentioned, the book's second section focuses on disability as a collective phenomenon, one in which all of society is implicated. This is particularly pertinent when capitalist economics contributes to the cultural divide. Victoria Dickman-Burnett takes up this case in interesting fashion in her analysis of disability in Roberto Bolaño's 2666. Dickman-Burnett contrasts the way economics shapes the value of the body by comparing the situations of English artist Edwins Johns who cuts off his hand as an act of performance art and thus, through his own self-created disability makes his art economically valuable and the mass murders of women in Santa Teresa, Mexico (a stand-in for Ciudad Juarez) where the bodies of lower class women are considered valueless and their lives economically dispensible. The argument that historically negative views of disability and race are bound together forms the basis for the book's third section. Valéria M. Souza's essay with its subtitle "Leprosy as a Marker of Racial Identity in João Guimarães Rosa's Grande Sertão: Feredas" is typical of the essays in this section. Her thesis is that "in modern Brazilian literary, cultural, and medical imagination, leprosy became a coded way to talk about tensions and ambiguities of race and racial identity." As Souza points, out the characters who illustrate her points actually make up only a small portion of the literary work from which they are drawn; her analysis is a teasing out of relationships that would not likely be visible to the majority of readers. It is a type of literary analysis that is shared by-in-large with the other essays in this section. As mentioned, the fourth section of "Libre Acesso takes a slightly different approach than the previous sections by trying to look at how non-traditional literary approaches might give some avenues into understanding disability. In "The Blur of Imagination" Juan Manuel Espinosa looks at the magical reasoning in Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude against the diagnostic criteria for classifying individuals as having Asperger's syndrome. It is not an attempt to pick out characters in the novel and label them as being on the autism spectrum, but rather in the way that both exemplify the way that modern society has taken away the means that some people(s) have of expressing themselves. In the case of the novel, the characters are forced to try to express themselves in terms constructed by a modern scientific world that has been thrust upon them as a result of colonialism. In the case of Asperger's, the ability to be creative has been taken from them because of modern conceptions of the imagination inherited from Romanticism. Espinosa's states: What was new in this novel and what a magical realist text and Asperger's syndrome have in common is that the readers – and non-Asperger's individuals – are forced into understanding imagination in Kant's sense. That is, they are confronted with a singular way of organizing perceptions that is different form our culture's shared imaginative practices. It is a fascinating idea and one that tries to address the very difficult problem of looking at what disability literature has to offer literature in general. Robert McRuer, who seems to be ubiquitous in disability studies scholarly works, contributes the books epilogue and, his words provide both a rationale for the publication of Libre Acesso and a fitting note to close on: Indeed, I would venture to say that a Latin American disability studies, in part because of the ways in which Latin American literature and film have long engaged these issues, is primed to lead the field in a turn that it is now taking to a more thorough consideration of other impairments, including mental illness and mental disability.
Title: Libre Acesso
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