Cripping the Archive: Disability, History, and Power

How do we explain the conspicuous absence of disability from the histories we write? What forces and factors create this dynamic? How can disability be everywhere and nowhere, present and absent, and obvious and overlooked in both the historical record and historians’ interpretations of the past? Jenifer L. Barclay and Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy edit a collection of interdisciplinary essays that consider how and why physical, sensory, intellectual, and psychological disabilities are underrepresented, erased, or distorted in the historical record. The contributors draw on the methodology and practice of cripping to uncover disability in contested archives and explore ways to build inclusive archives accountable to, and centered on, disabled people and disability justice. Throughout, they show ableness informing the politics of the archive as a physical space, a discriminatory record, and a collection of silences. An essential contribution to research methods and disability justice, Cripping the Archive offers a blueprint for intersectional and interdisciplinary approaches that bridge disability studies, history, and archival studies.

Jenifer L. Barclay is an associate professor of history at the University of Buffalo. She is the author of The Mark of Slavery: Disability, Race, and Gender in Antebellum America. Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy is an associate professor of history at the University of New Brunswick. She is the author of Between Fitness and Death: Disability and Slavery in the Caribbean.