The Future Is Disabled

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Description

Publicity by Beth Parker PR

Author tour (in-person or virtual): Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Boston

Advance reader copies (print and digital) to major reviewers and health/disability, LGBTQ+, cultural media

Advertising in library wholesaler catalogs and health/disability, LGBTQ+, and cultural media, online and print

·        This is Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s (they/them) followup to their bestselling 2018 nonfiction book Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, which has sold over 30,000 copies and continues to be among our week-to week bestselling titles. Care Work has become a seminal text in disability justice circles, a growing field which asserts and uplifts the rights of the disabled (see also the well-received Netflix documentary Crip Camp, and books by other disability activists such as Alice Wong and Eli Clare among others).

·         In The Future Is Disabled, Leah does a deeper dive into the issues discussed in Care Work, especially disability justice in the age of the pandemic; those who argue for Covid immunity through exposure espouse a eugenics approach to its cure that in essence treats the disabled as disposable. As in Care Work, Leah’s work can and should be viewed through a queer, racialized lens, on issues such as interdependence, care and mutual aid, disabled community building, and disabled art practice.

·         There are essays that also deal with crips dealing with potential evacuations during the 2020 wildfires in the Pacific Northwest, and with working with community to make the abolitionist/BLM protests (also 2020) accessible for all. Other essays deal with essays on disabled grief (especially during Covid), disabled homes as holy places, cripping pleasure activism, and “What We Mean/ What We Fuck Up When We Do This Thing Called Interdependence.”

·         Leah’s other books from Arsenal are the memoir Dirty River (2015) and the poetry collection Tonguebreaker (2019). Leah is also the co-editor of Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement (AK Press, 2020). They won a Lambda Literary Award for the poetry book Love Cake (2012).

·         Publicity by Beth Parker PR.

Sujets

• People with Disabilities
• LGBTQ+ Studies
• Social Science
• LGBTQ+
• Sociologie, société et politique
• General officer
• General

Informations

• Publié par: Arsenal Pulp Press
• Date de parution: 04 octobre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781551528922
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR THE FUTURE IS DISABLED
“Groundbreaking, hilarious, and brilliantly written, this book is a vital manual for navigating disabled grief, joy, and survival in pandemic times. If you need advice on how to crip mutual aid, how to make revolutionary disabled art, or how to make some really good chicken soup, this book has you covered. The Future is Disabled cements Piepzna-Samarasinha’s status as one of the most important disability thinkers of our generation. They make the disabled future absolutely irresistible.”
– JINA B. KIM, assistant professor of English and of the Study of Women and Gender, Smith College
“ The Future Is Disabled is a timely and necessary collection of essays about what disability justice is, has been, and could be. It contains the disabled stories, secrets, knowledge, humor, and creativity that we need now and what we will need to create the just futures we deserve. The brown cripqueer femme love and hope and rage and grief contained in these pages is astounding and necessary— a gift to us all. It’s the kind of book you dog-ear, write in, quote from memory, and pass along to every disabled-even-if-they-don’t-use-that-word friend, lover, comrade, and fellow artist you hope to make a better world with. It’s a community building tool and a personal balm for anyone invested in collective liberation, especially disabled people of color. Buy it. Read it. Pass it on.”
– SAMI SCHALK, author of Black Disability Politics
“Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha has created a guidebook for Deaf, Mad and disabled activists and artists everywhere—a love letter to all of us in these times of change and speculative futures turned into lived realities. The Future Is Disabled dares to dream of a different kind of future—and asks us to consider how we will show up for each other in these new realities. There are stories about our newly passed on kin and strategies for building mutual aid and DI groups from scratch. This book is everything we need in a moment of profound change, and at a time when the disabled and Mad futures described by Octavia Butler are settling in around us. Thank you, Leah, for helping us to dream, and helping us to consider what we need to do to survive into the future.”
– SYRUS MARCUS WARE, co-editor of Until We Are Free: Black Lives Matter in Canada
“The Future is Disabled moves us past disability as an identity category, or awareness of disability justice as an anti-oppression check mark. By addressing her beloved community on her own terms, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha teaches us that disability justice is a possible world that already exists, full of the love we deserve and the complexity we already embody.”
– ALEXIS PAULINE GUMBS, author of Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals
“The Future is Disabled is the kind of world making that has until now been reserved for science fiction. This book is committed to community, blazingly experimental, and embedded in the practical work of everyday disability justice.
“ The Future is Disabled speaks in a multitude of voices, including words of wisdom, interludes, herbal remedies, recipes, ‘autistic long form,’ and access riders, to provide clear instructions on how disabled people can get free. Throughout this groundbreaking work, Piepzna-Samarasinha finds meaning in recent history, and leaves readers with no doubt that the disabled future is now.
“Piepzna-Samarasinha has provided us with a primer, a language, a lucid image, and a guide to disability justice, one of the most vital and rapidly expanding movements of our time.
“With reverence for the work of their contemporaries, elders, and the next generation of disability justice thinkers, Piepzna-Samarasinha sets out to honor, elegize, and create ‘disabled and chronically ill citizen scientists.’ The Future is Disabled will leave any crip saying, ‘I could be disabled like that.’”
–Cyrée Jarelle Johnson, author of Slingshot
LEAH LAKSHMI PIEPZNA-SAMARASINHA
THE FUTURE IS DISABLED
Prophecies, Love Notes, and Mourning Songs
ARSENAL PULP PRESS VANCOUVER
THE FUTURE IS DISABLED
Copyright © 2022 by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any part by any means—graphic, electronic, or mechanical—without the prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may use brief excerpts in a review, or in the case of photocopying in Canada, a licence from Access Copyright.
ARSENAL PULP PRESS
Suite 202 – 211 East Georgia St.
Vancouver, BC V6A 1Z6
Canada
arsenalpulp .com
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council for its publishing program, and the Government of Canada and the Government of British Columbia (through the Book Publishing Tax Credit Program) for its publishing activities.
Arsenal Pulp Press acknowledges the x m k y m (Musqueam), S wx w 7mesh (Squamish), and s l ilw ta (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, custodians of the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories where our office is located. We pay respect to their histories, traditions, and continuous living cultures and commit to accountability, respectful relations, and friendship.
Lyrics from “ THIS IS A PROTEST FOR YOUR HEART !!!” by Left at London are reprinted with permission.
“Pod Mapping for Mutual Aid” is reprinted with permission of Rebel Sidney Fayola Black Burnett.
Cover and text design by Jazmin Welch
Edited by Lisa Factora-Borchers
Copy edited by Jade Colbert
Proofread by Rachel Spence
Printed and bound in Canada
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication:
Title:The future is disabled : prophecies, love notes and mourning songs / Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha.
Names: Piepzna-Samarasinha, Leah Lakshmi, 1975-author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20220228779 | Canadiana (ebook) 20220228957 | ISBN 9781551528915 (softcover) | ISBN 9781551528922 ( HTML )
Subjects: LCSH : People with disabilities. | LCSH : People with disabilities—Social conditions—Forecasting. | LCSH : Social justice.
Classification: LCC HV 1568 .P54 2022 | DDC 305.9/08—dc23
For Stacey, LL, Carrie Ann, Mel Baggs, Elandria, Don, Eugenia, and Graeme, forever.
And for all of us—living, dead, and not yet born—creating the disabled future.
Disability justice dreams got me this far, and I’m going to keep betting on them.
—STACEY PARK MILBERN
I could cut my wrists up
I could put my fists up
Either way, I can’t cheat death
I don’t wanna live, that’s fine
’Cause the years will still go by
I don’t wanna miss them
I don’t wanna miss them
I don’t wanna miss them
Not this time.
—LEFT AT LONDON, “THIS IS A PROTEST FOR YOUR HEART!!!”
Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom—poets, visionaries—realists of a larger reality.
—URSULA K. LE GUIN
I may be small, I may speak soft, But you can see the change in the water.
—JAMILA WOODS, “ZORA”
TABLE OF CONTENTS THANKS AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS INTRODUCTION Writing a Disabled Future, in Progress PART I DISABILITY JUSTICE IN THE END TIMES CHAPTER 1 “We Were Maybe Not Going to Save the World, but We Were Going to Save Each Other”: How Disabled Mutual Aid Is Different than Abled Mutual Aid TINY DISABLED MOMENT #1 Small Moments of Disabled Knowing CHAPTER 2 Interdependence Is Not Some Giant Living in the Hillside Coming Down to Visit the Townspeople: The Church of Show the Fuck Up, in Real Life TINY DISABLED MOMENT #2 “There Is No Disabled Community Here” INTERLUDE Pod Mapping for Mutual Aid, by Rebel Sidney Fayola Black Burnett CHAPTER 3 Disabled Grief Technologies: Disability Justice Future-Building in a Time of Mass Grief RECIPE Rosewater for Crying Eyes CHAPTER 4 Nobody Left Behind and Wanting to Run Like Hell: Disabled Survival in Climate Crisis CHAPTER 5 Cripping the Resistance: No Revolution without Us RECIPE Stacey Soup CHAPTER 6 Still Dreaming Wild Disability Justice Dreams at the End of the World TINY DISABLED MOMENT #3 The Free Library of Beautiful Adaptive Things CHAPTER 7 The Future Is Disabled (with Karine Myrgianie Jean-François, Nelly Bassily, Sage Lovell, Sarah Jama, and Syrus Marus Ware) PART II THE STORIES THAT KEEP US ALIVE:DISABILITY JUSTICE ARTS IN THE INTERREGNUM CHAPTER 8 Twenty Questions for Disability Justice Art Dreaming: A Winter Solstice Present CHAPTER 9 I Wanna Be with You Everywhere (And I Am): Disability Justice Art as Freedom Portal CHAPTER 10 Disability Justice Writing, the Beauty and the Difficulty CHAPTER 11 Autistic Long-Form, Short-Form, No-Form, Echotextia: Autistic Poetic Forms CHAPTER 12 Cripping the Book Tour SAMPLE ACCESS RIDER PART III THE DISABLED FUTURE TINY DISABLED MOMENT #4 ADA 30 / DJ 15 CHAPTER 13 Disabled Secrets CHAPTER 14 What Really Happens in DJ Groups CHAPTER 15 Home Is a Holy Place: The Sacred Organizing Spaces of Disabled Homes TINY DISABLED MOMENT #5 LL Comes to Me CHAPTER 16 Loving Stacey: An Honor Song TINY DISABLED MOMENT #6 Adaptive Trike CHAPTER 17 Wild Disabled Joy: Disabled Pleasure Activism CHAPTER 18 Wild Disabled Futures: The Future Is Now
THANKS AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First of all, thanks to the Cheasty Greenspace, the urban forest in Beacon Hill, South Seattle, Duwamish territories, where I lived as an uninvited guest, tended and got taught by, and where I wrote this book. Thank you for being the land I listened to and built relationship with, for keeping me alive during the pandemic, and for being the container for so much writing and healing for the past seven years.
Thank you to this book, for showing me who you were and how you wanted to be written.
Stacey Park Milbern, thank you for being on my shoulder for every moment of writing this book, and for being one of the