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Sari Altschuler - Before Disability, Inbunden

Inbunden, Engelska, 2026

Before Disability

A History of American Citizenship

Av Sari Altschuler

Del i serien Early American Studies

591 kr

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Beskrivning
A literary, legal, and cultural history of disability, race, and citizenship between the Revolution and the Civil WarThe history of disability rights is often told as a recent one, but it is not. In the wake of the American Revolution, many of the differences we now call disabilities could be accommodated into citizenship—and for some even exemplified its promises. By the antebellum period, however, disability was becoming a powerful, racialized tool of civic exclusion and, by the century's end, a target for eugenic elimination. In Before Disability, Sari Altschuler tells the story of how this dramatic transformation occurred.Before Disability is a literary, legal, and cultural history of the relationship between disability, race, and citizenship. It shows how disability helped to shape US citizenship and, in turn, how the formation of US citizenship shaped disability. There were two key drivers of the transformation from accommodation to exclusion and eugenics: the difficulty aligning the reality with the rhetoric of civic inclusion and the co-opting of mental and physical difference as evidence in debates about Black citizenship. The stigmatizing ways race came together with mental and physical difference to deny Americans rights were, however, not inevitable.Before citizenship was federally defined in the late 1860s, Americans were still working out what it meant. They used the narrative forms available to them—from melodrama and the gothic to the slave narrative and the criminal confession—to do this work. While possibilities narrowed by the antebellum era, Americans continued to imagine, articulate, and enact broader definitions. As we seek to imagine the relationship between disability and citizenship more equitably and expansively for ourselves, we should begin by remembering that many disabled and nondisabled Americans before us did, too.
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Sari Altschuler is Associate Professor of English and Founding Director of the Health, Humanities, and Society Program at Northeastern University. She is co-editor of Keywords for Health Humanities and the author of The Medical Imagination: Literature and Health in the Early United States, which is also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

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"Before Disability is a fascinating and insightful work that explains the central role 'disability' avant la lettre played in the evolution of US citizenship from the Revolution to the Civil War (and ultimately into the present). Sari Altschuler demonstrates not only the role of disability in legal and cultural belonging but how the debates around the nature of disability helped to shape the character of the times. An exquisite book." - Priscilla Wald, Duke University"Before Disability is a terrific book. It will take its place alongside the exciting new work that is offering an ambitious and generative rewriting of US citizenship from the perspective of race and disability. Sari Altschuler shows how ideas about race, disability, and capacity were baked into conceptions of American citizenship from the outset—and she reads those complex conceptions through literary texts by Charles Brockden Brown, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Harriet Jacobs, Frances E. W. Harper, Harriet Wilson, Frederick Douglass, and Hannah Crafts." - Michael Bérubé, Pennsylvania State University"In Before Disability, Sari Altschuler brings the history of age-old categories such as blind, deaf, and mad into our current concepts of disability as a civil and human rights category and identity. This meticulous history connects Americans' experience and understanding of bodily difference from the country's earliest years to our present moment, tracing the arc of disability through lives and across communities. This eloquent and graceful story clarifies the persisting endurance of disability experience as a force that shaped the history of American citizenship." - Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Emory University

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