(New) Fascism: Contagion, Community, Myth by Nidesh Lawtoo (review)

Abstract

Expanding on his La condition handicapée (2017), as well as numerous other publications, Henri-Jacques Stiker clarifies disability as a condition in existentialist terms and locates its significance in current social justice concerns. Drawing extensively on personal narratives and methodologies from philosophy, psychoanalysis, history, sociology, and anthropology, Stiker meticulously defines and evaluates the stakes of this conversation. Stiker qualifies the disabled condition as a stigmatized experience that is the Other to ‘normal’ embodiment but shared among diverse groups of individuals. In Chapter One, Stiker relies on Pap Ndiaye’s studies of black identities to define disability as a prescribed identity that may become self-appropriated. The firsthand narratives he employs in Chapters Two and Three describe the importance of the disabling event that fractures disabled lived experience. In Chapter 4, he concludes that this simultaneous remembered past, current struggle, and imagined future is experienced as a haunted life, a palimpsest. In Chapter 5, Stiker recounts the history of the gradually expanding legal definitions of “handicapé,” a term with which he and his sources struggle. He considers various terms for “disabled,” landing ultimately on the Québécois term, “personnes avec des incapacités,” which implies other capacities. In Chapter 6, he affirms that a cultural shift needs to be made to focus on individuals’ capabilities. Despite its current stigmatized status, Stiker notes that people living with la condition handicapée overwhelmingly reject pity, categorization, commodification or a socially prescribed identity. In Chapter 7, he instead explores the value of knowledge production based on the narratives of disabled people or their loved ones. As a methodology, critical disability studies can be a useful lens for any scholar, disabled or not, with an inclusive “attitude d’esprit” (78). Nonetheless, the disabled condition is marginalized, requiring a movement towards social inclusion that Stiker asks in Chapter 8 his readers to begin immediately. He argues that it is a grave injustice that disabled people are effectively denied full citizenship and participation in society. All members of society must be recognized as unique and equal, with identities that cannot be broken down into bodies, minds or other fragmented pieces. What Stiker is calling for is thus nothing less than a paradigm shift, philosophically and socially, in mainstream conceptions of humanity and justice. His call for this “Quiet Revolution” seems especially significant in the context of COVID19, due to the virus’s heightened threat to some disabled individuals and many individuals’ deepened understanding of isolation and lack of economic productivity. At stake is not only the integration of marginalized members of society but the recognition of everyone’s individual humanity, outside of their seeming productive value. Stiker’s short work approaches the borderline between activism and scholarship. Given the evident urgency of addressing social injustice, his work will interest scholars interested in questions of identity, social justice, and the interdisciplinarity of critical disability studies. SALLY M. KESSLER University of Minnesota,Twin Cities