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theses

Working at the interface of literary studies, decolonial theory, and disability studies, my dissertation draws on literature and film across a variety of genres, including fiction by Ralph Ellison, Gabriel García Márquez, Toni Morrison, and Junot Díaz, to demonstrate how literary narratives about illness and disability contribute to understanding racial formations and ameliorating colonial wounds. The dissertation develops a critical framework for understanding the ways in which a sustained encounter between critical race studies, disability studies, and the medical humanities can generate new conceptions of health and healing. I accomplish this through a reassessment of the writings of decolonial theorist Frantz Fanon, a physician who used narrative case studies and ethnography to illuminate the imbrication of race, illness, and disability. By introducing a decolonial perspective to the study of narratives of illness and disability, this project not only challenges the medical humanities and disability studies to consider the experience of race and the effects of colonialism, but also foregrounds questions of disability and illness within the fields of race theory and postcolonial studies, where they have until now received minimal scholarly attention. Chapter one argues that Fanon’s clinical and philosophical perspective offers the medical humanities critical tools with which to dismantle binaries at the center of Western hegemonic thought and which serve to perpetuate Eurocentrism. As I build a theory of decolonial embodiment in chapter two, I work with Fanon’s and Ralph Ellison’s scathing critiques of Mark Robson’s 1949 Home of the Brave, a Hollywood film that problematically conflates blackness and disability. Read against the grain, the film also illuminates the limits of Eurocentric psychiatry’s understanding of the black subject. In chapter three I perform a comparative reading of Toni Morrison’s iconic neo-slave narrative Beloved and Gabriel García Márquez’s underexplored Of Love and Other Demons to examine the healing power of love in a decolonial context. My final chapter examines ethnographies of illness by medical anthropologists Paul Farmer and Cheryl Mattingly in light of Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, which itself can be understood as a radical form of ethnography, to argue that beyond recognizing the suffering of people of color it is essential to take seriously the need to create a new narrative of the human that is not defined by European standards.

ETD_7899

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Carolyn Margaret Ureña

doi:10.7282/T3PG1VNC

ETD doctoral

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