Disability in Moroccan Literature: Nabil in Au Pays, Tahar Ben Jelloun (original) (raw)
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In the world but not of it: Disability and belonging in Arabic children's literature on disability
This paper examines the representation of disabled characters as social beings in Arabic children's books. How do these books portray the relationship of disabled people to their societies and what strategies for inclusion and accommodation do they promote? I focus on the trope of the disabled over-achiever or ‘supercrip’, which recurs very frequently in Arabic children’s books and move on to analyze two books that expand this trope in illuminating ways.
2010
Children suffering from different forms of physical or intellectual problems can be viewed as representing a double minority group –both for their age and disability. As a result of these two factors, this minority group cannot speak for itself and needs an outside mediator to speak for it. Writers of children’s literature featuring disability can be seen to fulfill this role with the aim of promoting acceptance and greater understanding of difference and disability. The focus of the present paper is to investigate disability children’s fiction in Arabic as part of world minority literature. Critical studies of fictional representations of disability in English are consulted. A key element in deciding how vocal writers are in speaking for this marginalized group of children is through looking at the roles given in the stories to characters with disability, the treatment of the disabled child’s inner world, the point of view and tone in the stories and the messages they convey.
Disability as a Trope in selected Nigerian Children Novels
Literary perception of the treatments of disability changed in Africa during the last century. While medical professionals have developed better understanding of and treatments for physical illness, many areas of fear and ignorance however remain. Many literary texts and works written on this theme are attempts to humanize those afflicted by the illness and to promote a better understanding of what afflicts them in order to encourage the general public not to demonize or exploit them. These works strive to make the readers understand the difficulties and pressure the afflicted face each day. One concern, however, is the failure of these works to examine disability as a Trope, i.e. looking at disability from the angle of the society that surrounds the disabled and whatever people see as wrong with modern society. Therefore, this paper is an attempt to examine the poor societal indices that have contributed in some ways to subjugating and emasculating the disabled in the society. In addition, tropes of disability are also expanded to examine culturally constructed categories like class and sexuality.
Firdaus Kanga's novel, Trying to Grow, tells the story of Brit Kotwal, a young Parsi boy with osteogenesis imperfecta, negotiating his life in the Bombay of the 1970s. From the beginning, this semi-autobiographical work draws our attention to the common religious and medical perceptions of disability in Indian society. This paper proposes to study how the novel focuses on several aspects of the lived reality of a person with " brittle bones " who does not grow more than four feet tall. The paper also explores how the novel focuses on and confounds the commonly perceived notion of the asexuality of disabled individuals. Brit's voice is extremely aware and articulates positions of difference within disability and sexuality discourses. He is able to occupy what can be called a truly modern disability subjectivity. But, this paper shall show that Brit presents the reader with this modern, emancipatory rhetoric of disability because of the privileges of his gender and class status in the Indian context. Within the same text, Brit's disabled female cousin is literally and figuratively mute and meets with a very different fate. The paper shall thus investigate and try to complicate the representation of disability, sexuality and the " modern " disability subjectivity in Kanga's novel.
Disease and Disability: Missing in Arabic Narratives
Illness narratives are uncommon in Arabic fiction. Literary Disability Studies considers how disability operates in a text. This paper examines the lack of illness narratives in Arabic fiction and traces the sociological reasons behind this absence. A close-reading of an Arabic novel examining Multiple Sclerosis is presented. The novel (Āyām Jamīlah, (Beautiful Days) by Palestinian-Jordanian author Reema Humood) presents Multiple Sclerosis as a complex narrative of both illness and societal discrimination. An interview with the author is used for supplementary analyses.
Potrayal of Disable Characters in English Literature - A Study of Disability Literature
2019
Societal frames of mind towards people with disability have changed from time to time. Various factors add to these evolving dispositions. Gender, training, religion, occupation, income, nationality, significantly affects the dimension of inability cognizance. Portrayal of disabled characters have dependably been found in Writing, regardless of whether oral or composed. Alongside typical characters they attempt to make spaces of their own in stories. Be that as it may, the anecdotal space or position concurred to such characters is never equivalent to that of other standard characters. They are displayed contradictorily or as subsidiaries to the typical characters making due at the outskirts of the universe of the normals. This paper investigates the distinctive parts of portrayal of disability in writing. The methodology is interdisciplinary as it goes for acclimatizing the mental and sociological viewpoints in breaking down the fiction of disable characters. The present research p...
University of Jordan, 2019
This research intends to provide an analysis of the representation of children with disability in M. Draper's Out of My Mind (2010) and R. J. Palacio's Wonder (2012). Consequently, the two novels will be examined under the theoretical frame of Disability Studies and Freak Studies. Both representations will be compared and contrasted from the perspective of the two authors. The first novel, Out of My Mind, is written from the perspective of a mother who has a firsthand experience with disability, as she has a daughter with cerebral palsy. The second novel, Wonder, is written from the perspective of an author who has no prior knowledge of the notion of disability, but seeks to understand the realities of children with disability and the ways in which they should be approached. Thus, examining the representation of the two characters in the novels and the different yet very familiar realities they go through reveals the contradictory social construction of disability and troubles the binary opposition of non-disability and disability.
Toward a Disability Anthropology of the Middle East and North Arica
Hespéris-Tamuda , 2020
Disability anthropology, the study of disability and impairment in different cultural contexts using anthropological methods, is a growing field of inquiry that has recently begun exploring the Middle East and, to some degree, North Africa. One reason for this is the expansion of disability rights movements. As these movements in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) lead to more legal and social changes, and as anthropologists call for more research outside of North America and Europe, a disability anthropology of the MENA region is increasingly relevant. This article provides a review of disability research in the region, as well as explores ethnographic research in Morocco from my perspective (a white, physically disabled American). I suggest that an anthropological focus on disability in the area would reveal much, not simply about how impairment is conceptualized in this context, but about how people relate to one another, to politics, to medicine and to society at large. Furthermore, I outline the potential for a disability anthropology of the MENA region that denaturalizes disability and understands both local and global dynamics of impairment.
Disability’s Discontents - Vinay Suhalka and Tannistha Samanta
Doing Sociology, 2024
We revisit the term divyang, and ask – what (social-moral) function does such an invocation entail? We have argued that living with disability is neither heroic nor divine, nor an aesthetic subject of “representation” in social justice terms. We instead, draw attention to disability as an embodied, quotidian experience that can contest the (benevolent) state-citizen relation. Hence the conceptual and popular vocabulary of disability needs to jettison itself from the burdened language of morality (social) and individual-failing (medical) to one that is both political and non-exceptional. We find literary theorist and bioethicist, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s (2017) trenchant plea to understand disability “as a cultural interpretation of physical transformation” and a “comparison of bodies that structures social relations and institutions”, particularly potent in troubling these established hierarchies. Without losing focus on the body as a political project, we join this plea to (re)examine disability as a multivalent analytic that reveals possibilities for signification that go beyond monologic invocations to divinity, morality and heroism.