Book Description

The Oxford Handbook of Disability Studies represents a comprehensive state of current research for the field of Disability Studies and Music. The forty-two chapters in the book span a wide chronological and geographical range, from the biblical, the medieval, and the Elizabethan, through the canonical classics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, up to modernist styles and contemporary musical theater and popular genres, with stops along the way in post-Civil War America, Ghana and the South Pacific, and many other interesting times and places. Disability is a broad, heterogeneous, and porous identity, and that diversity is reflected in the variety of bodily conditions under discussion here, including autism and intellectual disability, deafness, blindness, mobility impairment often coupled with bodily difference, and cognitive and intellectual impairments. Amid this diversity of time, place, style, medium, and topic, the chapters share two core commitments. First, they are united in their theoretical and methodological connection to Disability Studies, especially its central idea that disability is a social and cultural construction. Disability both shapes and is shaped by culture, including musical culture. Second, these essays individually and collectively make the case that disability is not something at the periphery of culture and music, but something central to our art and to our humanity.