Gauhati University, Guwahati, India.
The present issue (vol. 3, no. 2) of the transcript: An e-Journal of Literary and Cultural Studies is a themed one with special focus on Disability Studies. With this aim in view, the issue comprises four articles and one book-review on various aspects of the area chosen for analysis. The subjects explored range from locating female experiences of disability and sexuality, followed by an analysis on the politics of subjugating female bodies to power structures, and then comprising two genre-based studies—one on Graphic novels and the other on cinema—thereby enabling the development of a truly multimedial perspective on Disability Studies. In her article on the twin issues of sexuality and violence, and their joint interface with women with disabilities, Dr. Mukul Chaturvedi analyses select narratives of such women, including a few court cases, and studies how violence inflicted upon them is often examined without due cognisance of the sexuality of the victims concerned. This engagement with the disciplinary rigours of repressive structures continues in the article by Rishiraj Sen & Shweta Jha which deals with a select lesser-explored short stories of Chughtai to show how regimes of surveillance, norms, and punishment are deployed to construct desexualised female bodies amenable to the unjust strictures of patriarchy. Mushrifa Rahim, in her article, examines the efficacy of the Graphic novels with its visual dynamics as a medium of expressing the intricate experiential dynamics of disability and also enabling newer orientations on the subject-matter explored through its medium. Roy Jreijiry & Carla Dreij continue this “medial” engagement with the representation of disability through an analysis of Lebanese cinema comprising characters played by actors with both assumed and real-life disabilities. The authors also shed light on the problematic consequences of normalising disability at the cost of trivialising or making light of the special needs of the persons with disabilities. The book-review by Dr. Krishna Kumar S examines Andrew Leland’s The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight as a work that looks at blindness both as a lived experience and a subject of historical inquiry, and shows how writing as an activity could ultimately prove to be an enabling experience and a faculty for “sightedness” thereby effectively countering the limitations of blindness.
As the issue editor (2023–2024), I would like to thank the contributors of this special issue for bringing out various dimensions of Disability Studies to the fore, and, by extension, also opening up fresh possibilities for developing a multidisciplinary approach to the subject. They deserve our sincere gratitude for the timely submission of their articles and also for their prompt response during the subsequent phases of reviewing and revision. We owe the anonymous reviewers a special note of acknowledgement for their incisive and constructive feedback to the articles compiled in this issue. The forthcoming issue (vol. 4, no. 1) will be an open-themed issue; however, we would welcome articles specifically dealing with the literatures of North-East India. The detailed CFP will be out soon in our website https://thetranscript.in along with the guidelines for the submission of articles.
Bionote
Dr. Dhurjjati Sarma is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Modern Indian Languages and Literary Studies, Gauhati University, Assam. His writings have been published under Springer Nature, Sahitya Akademi, Routledge, and Palgrave Macmillan, and in journals like Language and Language Teaching, Indian Literature, English Forum, Indica Today, Rupkatha Journal, Dibrugarh University Journal of English Studies (DUJES), Space and Culture India, and Margins: A Journal of Literature and Culture. He is presently working on a critical history of Assamese literature.
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3808-0152
Open Access:
This article is distributed under the terms of the Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission.
For more information log on to https://thetranscript.in/
Conflict of Interest Declaration:
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest about the research, authorship, and publication of this article.
© Author