The empire of ability: American exceptionalism and the specter of disability

Placing the field of disability studies in conversation with the field of American studies, this project examines the formative role of compulsory discourses of able-bodiedness in the constitution of America's imperial national identity. As a theoretical paradigm, the Empire of Ability traces a tacit logic of ability that has long animated America's exceptionalist self-representation, from the originary Puritan discourse of the "surviving remnant" called to build a "city on the hill" to the continued doctrinal denial of US imperialism in representations of America as the "leader of the free world," "the redeemer nation," "the conqueror of the world's markets," and most recently, "the global security state." Through readings of both literary texts---ranging from Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana and James Fenimore Cooper's The Pioneers to Edwidge Danticat's Brother, I'm Dying---and cultural and political events---ranging from the Salem Witchcraft trials to Hurricane Katrina and the recent earthquake in Port au Prince---I argue that America's conditions of belonging are often imagined and defined in relation to ideals of corporeal normativity, where discourses of disability function symbolically to naturalize the historical "exceptions" to America's norms of citizenship. In other words, the Empire of Ability consolidates the power of able(d) bodies---historically white, male, heterosexual bodies---while divorcing them from the realm of public scrutiny. Within this cultural logic, disability functions discursively to mark any type of difference---race, class, gender, sexuality, disability---from the privileged, able-bodied norm in order to justify the colonial subjugation of "deviant" bodies. While responding to recent theoretical interventions in the field of disability studies, I offer the vulnerable body as a potential site of resistance to contemporary forces of global capitalism, one that can transcend the divisive logic of the able-bodied/disabled binary and help us begin to imagine new and alternative forms of human community.