Falling, Floating, Flickering: Disability and Differential Movement in African Diasporic Performance

Insists on the importance of embodiment and movement to the creation of Black sociality

Linking African diasporic performance, disability studies, and movement studies, Falling, Floating, Flickering approaches disability transnationally by centering Black, African, and diasporic experiences. By eschewing capital’s weighted calculus of which bodies hold value, this book centers alternate morphologies and movement practices that have previously been dismissed as abnormal or unrecognizable.

To move beyond binaries of ability, Hershini Bhana Young traverses multiple geohistories and cultural forms stretching from the United States and the Mediterranean to Sierra Leone, Nigeria, and South Africa, as well as independent and experimental film, novels, sculptures, images, dance, performances, and anecdotes. In doing so, she argues for the importance of differential embodiment and movement to the creation and survival of Black sociality, and refutes stereotypic notions of Africa as less progressive than the West in recognizing the rights of disabled people.

Ultimately, this book foregrounds the engagement of diasporic Africans, who are still reeling from the violence of colonialism, slavery, poverty, and war, as they gesture toward a liberatory Black sociality by falling, floating, and flickering.

Hershini Bhana Young is a Professor in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at University of Texas, Austin and author of Haunting Capital: Memory, Text and the Black Diasporic Body and Illegible Will: Coercive Spectacles of Labor in South Africa and the Diaspora.