Retrieving the Crip Outsider Representations of Disability in Literature and Culture

"Disability is not a universal category of human experience. It has manifested itself variously in different sociocultural locations at different times in history. This volume of essays illustrates this argument by critically examining a wide range of Indian disability representations--myths and legends, epic and contemporary literary discourses, theatrical and cinematographic narratives, diary entries and autobiographies of disabled people--to map and decode, within the Indian context, the ideological contours of what Sharon L. Snyder and David T. Mitchell call 'the cultural locations of disability'. While it examines the different strategies through which disability and disabled people have been and continue to be 'objectified' and systematically 'othered' in Indian culture, it also suggests various ways to negotiate and problematise this insidious process of othering and underscores the need to explore the materiality of disabled experience and transform disabled people into embodied agents of signification. retrieving the Crip Outsider, in a sense, builds a brief for transforming the lived life-experiences of disability into a disruptive site of cultural production."--