Analyzes the diverse roles and pervasive presence of disability in Latin American literature and film. Libre Acceso stages an innovative encounter between disciplines that have remained quite separate: Latin American literary, film, and cultural studies and disability studies. It offers a much-needed framework to engage the representation, construction, embodiment, and contestation of human differences, and provides tools for the urgent resignification of a robust and diverse Latin American literary and filmic tradition. The contributors discuss such topics as impairment, trauma, illness and the body, performance, queer theory, subaltern studies, and human rights, while analyzing literature and film from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, and Peru. They explore these issues through the work of canonical figures Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, João Guimarães Rosa, and others, as well as less well-known figures, including Mario Bellatin and Miriam Alves.

Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction: A Latin American Context for Disability Studies Susan Antebi and Beth E. Jörgensen Part I. Disability Life Writing and Constructions of the Self 1. Blind Spot: (Notes on Reading Blindness) Lina Meruane 2. "La cara que me mira": Demythologizing Blindness in Borges’s Disability Life Writing Kevin Goldstein 3. Negotiating the Geographies of Exclusion and Access: Life Writing by Gabriela Brimmer and Ekiwah Adler-Belendez Beth E. Jörgensen Part II. Global Bodies and the Coloniality of Disability 4. Otras competencias: Ethnobotany, the Badianus codex, and Metaphors of Mexican Memory Loss and Disability in Las buenas hierbas (2010) Ryan Prout 5. Cripping the Camera: Disability and Filmic Interval in Carlos Reygadas’s Japón Susan Antebi 6. Bodily Integrity, Abjection, and the Politics of Gender and Place in Roberto Bolano’s 2666 Victoria Dickman-Burnett 7. Violence, Injury, and Disability in Recent Latin American Film Victoria L. Garrett Part III. Embodied Frameworks: Disability, Race, Marginality 8. So Candelario’s Inheritance: Leprosy as a Marker of Racial Identity in Joao Guimaraes Rosa’s Grande Sertão: Veredas (1956) Valéria M. Souza 9. "A solidao da escuridao": On Visual Impairment and the Visibility of Race Melissa E. Schindler 10. Mythicizing Disability: The Life and Opinions of (what is left of) Estamira Nicola Gavioli 11. "En ninguna parte": Narrative Performances of Mental Illness in El portero by Reinaldo Arenas and Corazón de skitaleitz by Antonio Jose Ponte Laura Kanost Part IV. Imagining Other Worlds 12. The Disability Twist in Stranger Novels by Mario Bellatin and Carmen Boullosa Emily Hind 13.The Blur of Imagination: Asperger’s Syndrome and One Hundred Years of Solitude Juan Manuel Espinosa Epilogue #YoSoy Robert McRuer Contributors Index