The recumbent speaks: The disabled subject and literary creation (1900-1950)

Dr. Piet Devos

The lecture will take place on Wednesday 28 October 2015 from 16 until 18 pm in room 00.41 of the VHI-building (Vandenheuvelinstituut) in the Dekenstraat n°2 (Leuven, Belgium).

In a 1926 essay, Virginia Woolf argued that the ‘recumbent’ ill body should no longer be neglected in literature. According to Woolf, the articulation of illness would not only lead to the innovation of the traditional literary genres, it would also increase the collective awareness of the body’s vulnerability in a modern society obsessed with efficiency. While drawing on Woolf’s text as well as several other examples, I will discuss the emergence of the disabled subject in Modernist literature from the period 1900-1950. Just like Woolf, most authors to be analyzed – e.g. Joe Bousquet, Jacques Lusseyran and Pablo Palacio – were themselves all too familiar with sensory disabilities or chronic diseases. First of all I would like to suggest that, while writing from a disabled perspective, these authors opened up unexpected aesthetic horizons. That is due to the fact, as a (autobiographical) narrator or main character, the disabled subject required his/her own singular style and metaphorical structures as to articulate his/her ‘abnormal’ way of perceiving and being-in-the-world. Read from the viewpoint of the ‘normal’ common sense, such an aesthetics of disability was unsettling, sometimes even shocking, because it did not attempt to tell the story of overcoming and normalization. It rather uncovered the body in the perplexing diversity of its sensory practices and ‘messy’ tangibility. Secondly, I will also consider to what extent this aesthetics of the disabled subject actually fit in the larger context of the artistic experiments characteristic of Modernism. Some of the aforementioned authors had clear connections with the leading avant-garde groups of the day. But their writings should also be understood as a self-affirming act of disabled people as to resist their social marginalization, presenting themselves at once as creative individuals and as critical commentators of modern life. Their texts often raised unpleasant ethical questions, by attacking for example the wide-spread belief in the human control of the natural processes of life and death. More in general, my presentation will hopefully help to save a few exceptional writers with disabilities from oblivion, as well as to uncover the crucial role these writers played in the cultural emancipation of the disabled subject.

Piet Devos (Kortrijk, 1983) has a PhD in Modern Romance Literature from the University of Groningen. He himself went blind at the age of five, an experience which triggered his interest in sensory perception. In his PhD thesis, El cuerpo elocuente (Almenara Press, 2015), Piet developed a cultural-historical method for analyzing literary texts through the lens of contemporaneous sensory practices and discourses. From November 2015 on, he will be conducting research for his project on the Modernist aesthetics of disability, while in residence as a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Sensory Studies of Concordia University in Montreal. Piet also works as a translator, particularly of French and Latin American avant-garde texts.

The video of Prof. Jane Buckingham’s public lecture can be accessed by clicking on this link

Disabling Disease: Challenging the stigma of leprosy in the colonial South Pacific

Jane Buckingham is Senior Lecturer in History at University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand.

The lecture will take place on Monday March 9th 2015 from 14 o’clock until 16 o’clock and is co-organized by GRIP.

Venue: Provinciehuis Vlaams-Brabant – Provincieplein 1, B-3000 Leuven, Belgium

Leprosy disables both in the material sense of damaging the limbs, sight and speech of those affected and in the social sense of stimulating the disability of stigmatisation. In colonial contexts, dynamics of race and power add further layers of subordination to people already marginalised by the disease of leprosy and its physical manifestation. This lecture focuses on images of leprosy affected people in twentieth century British colonial Fiji and the role of such representations in educating medical specialists, colonial government officials and the wider public. It draws particularly on the history of the Central Leper’s Hospital opened in 1911 on the Fijian island of Makogai as an isolation and treatment centre for leprosy affected people from the British colonial South Pacific. Until its closure in 1969 images from Makogai including photo albums kept by the nursing sisters from the Missionary Sisters of the Society of Mary, photographs printed in the New Zealand and Fijian Press and images promoted by the New Zealand based charity, the Lepers’ Trust Board, played a major role in the visual construction of the ‘leper’ in Fiji and New Zealand. These images represented the leprosy affected person as a focus of medical attention, charitable investment and an object of pity and horror. But images from Makogai also attest to deliberate processes of intervention and normalisation. Images played a formal and informal educative role in demonstrating medical procedures and in reducing the physical and social disability associated with leprosy by showing the patients on Makogai engaged in everyday activities. Photographs were deployed not only to mark out the leprosy affected as separate but to disable the disease of leprosy by recording the effects of strategies of normalisation not only on the leprous body but on the social and daily life of leprosy affected people.

This video can be watched/listened to by clicking on this link

Disability and the Roman Antiquity:
Evaluating change and continuity regarding Christianity

Christian Laes is professor Ancient history and Latin at the VUB (Brussels) and the UA (Antwerp) and specializes in the history of mentalities of Roman Antiquity.

The lecture will take place on Thursday December 4th from 16 until 18 o’clock and is co-organized by the Research Group for Ancient History of the KU Leuven (Prof. Mark Depauw and Prof. Katelijn Vandorpe). A reply on the lecture of Prof. Laes will be provided by Korneel van Lommel.

Venue: Vanden Heuvel Instituut room 00.41 – Dekenstraat 2, B-3000 Leuven

This lecture will be based on my recent monograph Beperkt? Gehandicapten in het Romeinse rijk (Davidsfonds, 2014: Impaired: Disabled in the Roman Empire). First of all I will ponder upon some methodological issues of researching the history of disability in Roman Antiquity. After that I have opted for a capite ad calcem approach. The following disabilities will be presented: mental disabilities, eye problems, deafness and muteness, speech impairment and mobility impairment. For each of these impairment I will present concrete case studies on the basis of which some general conclusions will be drawn with regard to the issue of whether the relation between Christianity and the Roman Antiquity should be characterised as continuity or change. Throughout the presentation I will make use of text fragments as well as iconographical evidence.

This video is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8cVwpz_OBE&feature=youtu.be

A Dutch introduction by GRIP is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIx8JeDiGtE

Prof. Dr. Rosemarie Garland Thomson – Emory University – March 10th 2014 – Why Disability? Or Who Should and Should Not Inhabit the World?

This lecture is co-organized by Grip vzw & the Department of Special Education UGent

And will take place at Provinciehuis Vlaams-Brabant, Provincieplein 1, B-3000 Leuven (Belgium) between 15 o’clock and 17 o’clock

A sign language interpreter will be present

This presentation addresses the question of why we might want disabled people in the world. Much has been written about the logic of eugenics, the pseudoscience that developed along with modernity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Enacted worldwide in policies and practices that range from segregation to extermination, the aim of eugenics was to rid society of disability and, by extension, disabled people. Eliminating disability and disabled people from the world as a utopian effort to improve the social order, a practical health program, or a social justice initiative is simply common sense to most people. This presentation puts forward a range of counterarguments asserting that disability might be conserved and that we might want disabled people to inhabit the world. To do so, it examines an eclectic variety of positions and perspectives–often instrumental or pragmatic–that defend disability against the eugenic understanding that individual citizens and social orders should be liberated from disability. In short then, this presentation collects up speculations that range from ardent to skeptical about what disability might be good for.

Dr. Josephine Hoegaerts – KU Leuven – December 12th 2013 – To guard the public speaker from physical disability: Vocal practices and acoustic constructions of the able body in the long nineteenth century

Disability is often conceptualized in visual terms: its historical presence is imagined as a paradoxical situation of invisibility (in the historical record, and in most historical work), and of a simultaneous conspicuousness (according to Garland-Thomson, “the history of disabled people in the world is in part the history of being on display”). Especially in the nineteenth century, the story of disability is one of increasing scrutiny as disabled people became subject to not only casual stares, but also the medical gaze and the disciplining institutional gaze. To afford these gazed upon historical actors more agency, vocal metaphors abound: researchers have strived to “give a voice” to those forgotten by conventional history, or to simply “speak up”. While analyses of the hierarchic gaze and practices of gaining voice have debunked modern notions of the disabled body, they also seem to relegate disabled agency to the voice – and therefore run the risk of buying into what Jonathan Sterne has called the ‘audiovisual litany’ in which the powerful, rational world of the eye is juxtaposed with the more somatic, emotional sound of the powerless.

In this lecture, I will try to turn the metaphoric audiovisual litany on its head by focusing on those disabilities that were only audible. Vocal impairments (such as aphasia, dysphonia and stuttering) have an ambiguous relation to the body: they only manifest themselves during the act of speaking, and are therefore necessarily ‘performative’.Through speech impediments, a more fluid notion of disability presents itself, which calls attention to the necessity and inherent danger of the constant performance of vocal ‘ability’, and also problematizes the practice of ‘speaking up’ against the (medical) gaze.