Kobus Moolman - Böcker

While Disability Studies has become more diversified in recent years, contemporary debates still favour the Northern Hemisphere, ignoring the lived experience of disabled people in much of the global South. Few theoretical studies pay sufficient attention to the range of beliefs and attitudes towards disability in specific African contexts, despite the fact that beliefs and explanations for disability permeate daily existence in sub-Saharan African places, and can have real consequences for persons with disabilities, leading to stigmatisation, marginalisation, and even violence.This volume is a timely intervention that seeks to address some of these imbalances and biases. Through frank life writing, evocative poetry, and critical reflections on African arts and literatures, the contributors highlight the urgent need for more culturally informed understandings of disability, as a means by which to challenge existing explanations. They examine the powerful role of different creative forms, tools, and methodologies in enhancing understandings of disability in African contexts.Demonstrating the power of cultural representation in building sensitivity to the range of issues related to disability, this book is of key relevance not just to scholars and students of disability studies, African studies, and sociology, but to all who seek to advocate for social change.The volume is a key outcome of the Disability and Inclusion Africa Network. It is edited by Charlotte Baker (Lancaster University, UK), Elvis Imafidon (SOAS, University of London, UK), Kobus Moolman (University of the Western Cape, South Africa), and Emelda Ngufor Samba (University of Yaoundé 1, Cameroon).

This story collection by multiple award-winning poet, author and playwright Kobus Moolman is a volume of unconventional potency. Written in a range of styles, voices and genres, each of the ten stories offers original insights into the difficulties of staying afloat. Whether the challenge is being differently abled (with all the outsider isolation this brings); lower-income family life under unbending patriarchal rule; or being born a female child in an abusive, gendered culture, the narratives are convincing (often humorous) in their portrayal of trapped lives striving for transcendence.The darkly funny Kiss and the Brigadier invokes the stultifying boredom of small-town life and the captured mentalities of its understimulated citizens; Extracts from a Dispensable Life offers a creative and sensitive reading of the gender violence theme; while the irreverent but never disrespectful Angel Heart ventures into the risky waters of religious send-up.The Swimming Lesson and Other Stories is a collection that stands out for its unusual perspectives; its frank, often uncomfortable treatment of taboo topics; its creative risk-taking; and its skilful and observant recreation of worlds gone by, which still leave their aftershocks.

This book was conceptualised prior to the global reckoning with 'this mortal body' unleashed by the Covid pandemic. It is an attempt to (re)turn attention to the body as that through which so much of our humanness is experienced, mediated, enjoyed, suffered, understood and expressed. But Covid forcibly returned us to the body in ways that none of us could ever have imagined. Perhaps Notes from the Body could not be more timely. The variety of possible bodies for which the contributors seek a voice reminds us of the multiple ways in which we may be human. Through various creative forms, the pieces in this volume present the body as, among other things: sick, violated, racialised, healed, performing, ageing, (multiply) gendered, spiritual, abused, 'disabled', broken, sexual, animalised, medical, controlled, interrupted, failing, rejected and abject. Several themes recur: humanisation and dehumanisation; the loss or recovery of agency; dignity and humiliation; violation of the bounds of self; the integrity or wholeness of the body; the body's betrayal; and mourning or celebrating the body.