Elusive Kinship: Disability and Human Rights in Postcolonial Literature

Krentz (Writing Deafness), an English professor at Virginia University, “seeks to bring disability more forcefully into critical conversations” about literature and human rights in his rigorous latest. Krentz analyzes contemporary classics including Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (which “subtly critiques a traditional Igbo privileging of able-bodiedness”) and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (remarkable for its first-person disabled narrator), as well as lesser known works, such Indira Sinha’s Animal’s People, which highlights how disability is different in the global south than it is in the north, and Petina Gappah’s The Book of Memory, which emphasizes how “medicine and wealth can help to destigmatize a congenitally disabled person.” Krentz effectively traces the evolution of disability in literature from “a subtle, easy to miss presence” to something central to a work’s narrative, and while he makes a strong case for literature as an agent of change (depictions of disability in works by Jhumpa Lahiri, Anita Desai, and Edwidge Danticat have influenced the U.N.’s Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, he writes), he can lean a bit too heavily on jargon for the lay reader. Still, this should have a spot on the shelves of literature students and scholars. (Apr.)