Disability Works: Performance After Rehabilitation

Ok, it's now September so I guess summer is officially over? Is vacation a state a mind more than an arbitrary date on a calendar? I'd like to think so. I have some exciting book giveaways lined up this fall and winter starting off with Disability Works: Performance After Rehabilitation by Patrick McKelvey available now from NYU Press. I'm delighted to offer 5 paperback copies to anyone in the US, UK, and Canada. Details below.

About the book

In 1967, the US government funded the National Theatre of the Deaf, a groundbreaking rehabilitation initiative employing deaf actors. This project aligned with the postwar belief that transforming bodies, minds, aesthetics, and institutions could liberate disabled Americans from economic reliance on the state, and demonstrated the growing optimism that performance could provide job opportunities for people with disabilities.

Disability Works offers an original cultural history of disability and performance in modern America, exploring rehabilitation’s competing legacies. The book highlights an unexpected alliance of rehabilitation professionals, deaf teachers, policy makers, disability activists, queer artists, and religious leaders who championed performance’s rehabilitative potential. At the same time, some disabled artists imagined a different political itinerary for theatrical practice. Rather than acquiescing to the terms of productive citizenship, these artists recuperated rehabilitation as a creative resource for imagining and building a world beyond work. Using previously unexplored archives, Disability Works portrays the history of disabled Americans’ performance labor as both a national aspiration and a national problem. The book reveals how disabled artists and activists ingeniously used rehabilitative resources to fuel their performance practices, breaking free from the grasp of rehabilitation and fostering more just institutions.

From state-funded “sign-mime” to Black modern dance, community theatre to Stanislavskian actor training, speculative activism to epistolary performance, Disability Works recovers an expansive repertoire of aesthetic and infrastructural investigations into the terms of how disability works in modern American culture.

Patrick McKelvey is Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre Arts at University of Pittsburgh

Details

1) Any disabled person in the US, UK or Canada is eligible to receive a paperback. You do not need to disclose any details about your disability.

If you already received a book from one of my previous giveaways, please consider letting other people have a chance.

2) If you do not receive a reply that means the books have been claimed or you did not include all the required information.

3) Send an email to DisabilityVisibilityProject@gmail.com with 'Patrick McKelvey Giveaway’ in the title of the message. Do not reply to this post!!

4) Include the following information in your message:

• First and last name
• Mailing address

Please note: I will send this information along with your email address to the publisher. They are responsible for confirming your details and sending you the book. Please be patient!