The newly emerged interdisciplinary field of Disability Studies
offers a sociopolitical analysis of disability, focusing on its
social construction, and shifting attention from biology to
culture. In the past fifteen years, disability-related scholarly
work has been undertaken in a variety of disciplines, and
disability now occupies a central place in cultural analysis, along
with well-established categories like race/ethnicity, gender,
sexuality, and class. The Oxford Handbook of Disability Studies
represents a comprehensive "state of current research" for the
field of Disability Studies and Music. The forty-two chapters in
the book span a wide chronological and geographical range, from the
biblical, the medieval, and the Elizabethan, through the canonical
classics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, up to
modernist styles and contemporary musical theater and popular
genres, with stops along the way in post-Civil War America, Ghana
and the South Pacific, and many other interesting times and places.
Disability is a broad, heterogeneous, and porous identity, and that
diversity is reflected in the variety of bodily conditions under
discussion here, including autism and intellectual disability,
deafness, blindness, and mobility impairment often coupled with
bodily deformity. Cultural Disability Studies has, from its
inception, been oriented toward physical and sensory disabilities,
and has generally been less effective in dealing with cognitive and
intellectual impairments and with the sorts of emotions and
behaviors that in our era are often medicalized as "mental
illness." In that context, it is notable that so many of these
essays are centrally concerned with madness, that broad and
ever-shifting cultural category. There is also in impressive
diversity of subject matter including YouTube videos, Ghanaian
drumming, Cirque du Soleil, piano competitions, castrati, medieval
smoking songs, and popular musicals. Amid this diversity of time,
place, style, medium, and topic, the chapters share two core
commitments. First, they are united in their theoretical and
methodological connection to Disability Studies, especially its
central idea that disability is a social and cultural construction.
Disability both shapes and is shaped by culture, including musical
culture. Second, these essays individually and collectively make
the case that disability is not something at the periphery of
culture and music, but something central to our art and to our
humanity.
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