Tracing Palimpsests From Within the Parenthetical: Curricular Encounters With Disability

• In Event: Thinking With the Parenthetical, the Palimpsest, and the Practical: When Curriculum Studies Meets Disability Studies

Abstract

Objectives:
Shifting from the ontological implications of the parenthetical, this paper explores the spatial implications of normative practices within the curriculum by engaging in a palimpsestous analysis. The normative imperative existent even within radical curricular theory/praxis casts that which it considers insignificant within parentheses that then morphs into the palimpsest, defined as “a parchment or other writing-material written upon twice, the original writing having been erased or rubbed out to make place for the second” (Oxford English Dictionary, n.d.). This paper describes the practices by which (disabled) body/minds are displaced such that their absent-presence serves as a palimpsest that dys/appears them and yet requires traces of their existence to shore up normative ideologies of the curriculum?

Perspectives/Frameworks:
In this paper, the metaphor of the “palimpsest” is deployed as a methodological practice that foregrounds displacement and erasure. The metaphor of the palimpsest appears in disciplines from literary theory, architecture, urban geography, media studies to technology, showing evidence of its metaphoric prowess and possibility (Powell, 2008). As described earlier, since the original writing of the palimpsest is always imperfectly erased, it can be accessed, providing a partial and yet complex layered reading of the text. More generally, it could be argued that a palimpsest captures “such serial, imperfect, synchronic and diachronic erasures and writings… each of them partly erased to make room for…. [a] multilayered structure that emphasizes the coexistence of multiple visions and impacts of different cultures” (Ciuta, 2016; p, 32). Thus, the goal of a palimpsestous analysis is “to offer an account of how an explanation and narrative of reality was established as the normative one” (Spivak qtd in Dillon (2005; p. 255).

Modes of Inquiry:
The mode of inquiry deployed in this paper is a textual analysis that examines the ways in which the normative curriculum locates within the parenthetical those body/minds who are seen disruptive of the normative curriculum and effects their erasure (the palimpsest) even within radical re-imaginings of the curricular praxis.

Materials:
Textual analysis of the Susan Nusbaum’s (2013) award-winning book, Good Kings Bad Kings will serve as the critical text to undertake this textual analysis. This novel about the lives of a group of disabled young adults and teens who are forced to live and work at an institution/nursing home foregrounds not only the diverse circumstances that locate these young people within the parenthetical space of the nursing home but also describes their disparate experiences/erasures within this space of confinement that evoke the palimpsest.

Analysis:
Given that curriculum theory engages embodiment as spatially informed, a palimpsestous analysis of this text foregrounds the normative tendencies of curricular space and practice that locates these young people within this parenthetical space of confinement reducing their possible lives to that of the palimpsest. Alternatively, some disabled young people in the book refuse this erasure, re-tracing the faint lines of the palimpsest to produce transgressive ways of be-ing and be-coming.

Significance:
This paper offers an innovative way of engaging the parenthetical and palimpsest at the intersections of curriculum studies and disability studies.

Author

• Nirmala Erevelles, The University of Alabama