Tuesday 11 June, 5.15-6.30pm

Hovenden Room, All Soul's College

Yassine Ait Ali (St. Cross) – ‘Blind Writers and Writing Blindness, a counter-discourse?’

Writing about oneself as an impaired person implies this inevitable tension between expressing his or her own lived reality and attempting at the same time to debunk all the harmful myths held against this condition in the collective imaginary. In the recent field of disability studies, scholars have shown how often contradictory discourses on impairment were held at the expense of those primarily concerned: in artistic and philosophical works of Europe, seldom if ever has the focus been on their everyday or real lives. On the contrary, historians of disability tend to show that this condition has long been synonymous with social marginalisation and therefore misrepresentation. In this paper I intend to show that the visually impaired found in life-writing a powerful tool for expressing their own realities which were far from all that had been speculated about them in the past. By focusing primarily on Jacques Lusseyran’s Et la lumière fut and Le monde commence aujourd’hui, this paper shows that these autobiographies may represent an example of counter-discourse while paradoxically accentuating the very prejudice they attempt to abolish.