Writing the History of Disabilities

Monika Baar is Professor of East-Central and South-Eastern Europe at the European University Initiative, Italy, and is a research affiliate at the Free University Amsterdam, Netherlands.Paul van Trigt is University Lecturer in Social History at the Institute for History at Leiden University, Netherlands.

• Table of contentsList of figuresList of ContributorsIntroduction, Paul van Trigt and Monika Baár 1. Using Postcolonial Approaches to Disability in a Historical Context; British missionaries and Indian and Sri Lankan children, c. 1880-1940, Esme Cleall 2. Disability, Gender, Care and Class in the Context of the 1937 Barbados Labour Protests, Stephanie van Dam 3. “Minority consciousness gone mad?” Disabled Queer Histories in Postwar Britain and the Netherlands, Noah Littel 4. Disability and Religion after the Second World War: from Histories of Opposition to Intersected Histories, Paul van Trigt 5. How can we write disability history without establishing a hierarchy between human lives? An example through the analysis of the lives of blind girls in metropolitan France (first half of the 20th century), Gildas Brégain 6. Dis/counting Disability: Health Disparities, Statistics and the Social History of Tuberculosis in the United States, Kristen Meister 7. The Nature of Exception: Architectures of Presentation at the Circus Sarrasani in Early Twentieth-Century Dresden, Brianne Wesolowski 8. From the first International Silent Games to a loud global movement: tracing the history of disability-inclusive sports from a post-structuralist viewpoint, Florian Kiuppis and Kim Wickman 9. Claiming recognition: The manifold meanings of deafness in the 19th and 20th centuries, Radu Dinu and Staffan Bengtsson 10. Theoretical and Practical Approaches to Disability in Eastern European State Socialism: A Challenge to Established Concepts and Methodologies of Disability History? Pia Schmüser 11. Interdependence through Interspecies Cooperation: Guide Dogs for the Blind in a Historical Perspective, Monika Baár

Disability is not marginal to history, but fundamental to it. Rigorously argued and wide-ranging, this volume repositions disability as a critical lens for rethinking citizenship, colonialism, normativity, and power, to unsettle assumptions that have previously shaped these histories.