Recommendations: Ability/Disability/Ableism

[sanguinity]

As promised, here is the ability, disability, and ableism recommendations post.

• Both books and blogs are eligible for this post.
  
  

• As always, the authors of the books or blogs must be poc/chromatic, and should also be people with disabilities or non-normative abilities. (Note, not all people with non-normative abilities identify as disabled.) Disabilities and non-normative abilities include, but are not limited to: physical disabilities, non-normative body structure or function, chronic illnesses, mental illnesses, and non-neurotypicality.
  
  

• Recommended books and blogs do not have to be about ability, disability, or ableism. There are far more ways for one's identify to inform one's writing than to explicitly discuss it in non-fiction, but even if one's identity didn't inform one's writing, it would still be worth noting that authors of color include authors with disabilities and non-normative abilities.

Anonymous commenting is still turned off, but those without LJ logins can comment with OpenID, Facebook, Twitter, or Google logins, or you can email me your recommendations (this username at gmail) and I'll add your recs manually.

Comments

[sanguinity]

I haven't read any of these yet.

Damara Goff Paris and Sharon Kay Wood (eds), Step Into the Circle: The Heartbeat of American Indian, Alaska Native, and First Nations Deaf Communities. (2002) Anthology of fiction and essays by d/Deaf American Indians, Alaskan Natives, and First Nations members.

Mary Herring Wright, Sounds like Home : Growing up Black and Deaf in the South. (1999) Memoir of growing up black and deaf in the 20s and 30s in North Carolina.

Mary Herring Wright, Far from Home: Memories of WWII and Afterward. (2005) Sequel to the above.

Ernest Hairston and Linwood Smith, Black and Deaf in America: Are We That Different?. (1983) I can't find out much about this, other than that it exists, and that Smith is black and Deaf. (I'm not seeing right off if Hairston is.)

Kenny Wayne Walker, Roar of Silence. (1998) Autobiography of a deaf NFL player.

The next two are DVDs instead of print, but given that ASL is not a written language, and that preservation of ASL is a hugely important issue in the Deaf community, I'm including them under the "book-like things" clause of the FAQ.

Glenn Anderson, Still I Rise: The Enduring Legacy of Black Deaf Arkansans Before and After Integration Interviews documenting the era of segregated schooling and the first integration of the Arkansas School For the Deaf in 1965.

Nathie Marbury, No Hand Me Downs. Autobiographical stories and poems.

[dorothean (from livejournal.com)]

I recommend The History of Mary Prince. This is in the slave narrative genre; it's by (surprise!) Mary Prince, who lived in Bermuda, Turks Island, Antigua, and England in the early 1800s.

I reviewed it here, where I mentioned Mary Prince's disability and how she describes it affecting her life as a slave (also how it was worsened by her life as a slave) and how she sought freedom. I didn't mention that she also observes the effects of disability on other enslaved people.

The review contains a link to the complete text online.