Sins Invalid’s Interview with Terry Rowden
Terry Rowden
Sins Invalid’s Leroy Moore recently interviewed Terry Rowden, an Assistant Professor of English at the City University of New York, Staten Island. Terry is the author of The Songs of Blind Folk: African American Musicians and the Cultures of Blindness and coeditor of Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader.
Leroy of Sins Invalid: As a Black professor and author teaching and writing on topics of popular culture, transnational cinema and philosophy, do you have a personal connection to what you teach and write about? Please give some background on why you teach and write on subjects that you do.
Terry Rowden: My interest in disability emerged primarily from within my teaching and research interests in African American and queer literature once I began to realize that all marginalized social identities reproduce to some extent the dynamics of disability as both a social construct and a lived condition. Disability has a special force as a means of rewriting normalizing narratives because it occurs across all social groups and categories. My overall project as a scholar is to reveal that abnormality is really just a political construct used to ground social hierarchies. For instance, all people who live into advanced old age, simply for that reason alone, will eventually experience some lessening of physical functioning significant enough to remove them from the privileged space of normality and necessitate some type of social accommodation. Normalization is the watchword for conventional social politics and, as the word itself implies, disability is one of the most obvious forms of abnormality.
Around and within the interview of Staff Benda Bilili
photo by Pamela Juhl
By Leroy Moore
Watch Leroy Moore’s three-part interview with Staff Benda Bilili.
I like it when things come together! I can’t ask for anything better. November 1st, 2009 wrapped my family, disabled musicians, traveling and my forty-second birthday all into one big present to myself!
For two years I’ve been researching disabled street musicians Staff Benda Bilili, who live near the grounds of the Kinshasa Zoo in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo. They released their debut album Tres Tres Forte in March 2009, and were invited to perform at the annual World Music Expo (WOMEX), which has moved to Copenhagen. Denmark. Copenhagen is also home to my sister, Pamela Julh, and her lovely two children. I had no excuse not to go and visit with my sister and nephews and at the same time meet and interview the members of Staff Benda Bilili with the Copenhagen Voice, a media outlet that my sister started. Yes, both my sister and I are journalists for the people! Read the rest of this entry »
Why Write the Body?
by Elaine Beale
In 1988, when I was twenty-six years old, I was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, a chronic inflammation of the lower intestine. For several months after diagnosis, I became more and more seriously ill and, at one point, was rushed into hospital in the middle of the night. I remember very vividly lying in an exam room under flickering fluorescent lights. In pain, dehydrated, exhausted and very frightened, I asked the doctor if there was anything that could be done to cure the illness was playing such havoc with my body.
“Oh, there’s no cure,” she answered, not even looking up from the chart she was paging through. “You’ll have this for the rest of your life.”
It was in that moment that everything changed. Despite my diagnosis and worsening symptoms, I had considered myself “healthy” up until that moment. Now I was one of the sick, the disabled, the chronically ill.
I hated my body for this betrayal.
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