I’m organizing three Author Meets Critics sessions at the 2018 Cultural Studies Association conference. Come on by!
Sami Schalk
in conversation with Anastasia Karklina
an Author Meets Critics session
Listen to a recording of this event on episode 66 of the Imagine Otherwise podcast!
When
May 31, 2018. 3:15–4:45 pm ET
Where
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA
Speakers
Sami Schalk (featured author), Anastasia Karklina (discussant), and Cathy Hannabach (session chair)
About Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction
In Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction, Sami Schalk traces how black women’s speculative fiction complicates the understanding of bodyminds—the intertwinement of the mental and the physical—in the context of race, gender, and (dis)ability.
Bridging black feminist theory with disability studies, Schalk demonstrates that this genre’s political potential lies in the authors’ creation of bodyminds that transcend reality’s limitations.
She reads (dis)ability in neo-slave narratives by Octavia Butler (Kindred) and Phyllis Alesia Perry (Stigmata) not only as representing the literal injuries suffered under slavery, but also as a metaphor for the legacy of racial violence.
The fantasy worlds in works by N. K. Jemisin, Shawntelle Madison, and Nalo Hopkinson—where werewolves have obsessive-compulsive-disorder and blind demons can see magic—destabilize social categories and definitions of the human, calling into question the very nature of identity. In these texts, as well as in Butler’s Parable series, able-mindedness and able-bodiedness are socially constructed and upheld through racial and gendered norms.
Outlining (dis)ability’s centrality to speculative fiction, Schalk shows how these works open new social possibilities while changing conceptualizations of identity and oppression through nonrealist contexts.
About Sami Schalk
Sami Schalk is an assistant professor of Gender & Women’s Studies at University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Her work focuses on the role of disability, race, and gender in contemporary American literature and culture, especially African American literature and women’s literature.
Sami’s first book, Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction (Duke University Press, 2018) explores how black women writers of speculative fiction reimagine the possibilities and limits of bodyminds, changing and challenging the way we interpret and understand the categories of (dis)ability, race, and gender in the process.
