Falling, Floating, Flickering

Hershini Bhana Young's study joins African diasporic performance, disability studies and movement studies. Rather than confining disability to a single national frame, it examines the subject across borders and places Black, African and diasporic lives at its center.

The book questions how economic systems assign worth to certain bodies, and it turns instead to bodily forms and ways of moving that have been labeled deviant or unintelligible. It seeks to move past the opposition between able and disabled. Its terrain runs from the United States and the Mediterranean to Sierra Leone, Nigeria and South Africa, and its sources include experimental and independent film, fiction, sculpture, photography, dance, live performance and personal accounts.

Young contends that embodiment and movement, which vary from body to body, are central to forming and sustaining Black social life. She also challenges the assumption that Africa trails the West in recognizing the rights of disabled people. Her focus is on people of the African diaspora, many still affected by colonial rule, slavery, poverty and armed conflict, as they point toward a liberatory Black sociality through falling, floating and flickering.