In the latest episode of the University of Press podcast, The UPside, JAF: A Global Quarterly, also known as the Journal of American Folklore, editor Dr. Lisa Gilman sat down with special issue guest editor Dr. Anand Prahlad to discuss a recent special issue of the Journal on “Folklore Studies and Disability.” Their discussion touches on how Dr. Prahlad found his way to disability studies, what folklorists can learn from disability studies scholars (and vice versa!), disability art, mentorship, and much more. You can listen to the podcast here or read below for a transcript of the conversation.
UIP: Welcome to the University of Illinois Press podcast, The UPside. I’m Michelle Woods, the Journals Marketing & Communications Manager for the Press, and today I’m excited to present our podcast highlighting a special issue of Journal of American Folklore. Volume 137, Issue 545, focuses on Folklore Studies and Disability. So, we’ll be discussing folklore, disability studies, and where the two intersect, with examples from this special issue. To learn more about the Journal of American Folklore, visit us online at go.illinois.edu/JAF.
In just a moment, I’ll be handing over the mic to the Journal of American Folklore editor, Dr. Lisa Gilman, who will be hosting today’s podcast. She’ll also be introducing our special guest, the guest editor for the issue, Dr. Anand Prahlad. Take it away, Lisa!
Lisa Gilman: Hi, my name is Lisa Gilman. I’m the editor-in-chief of JAF: A Global Quarterly, also known as a Journal of American Folklore. This journal is a flagship journal of the American Folklore Society. I’m also a professor of folklore and English at George Mason University, and currently a Fellow of the Refugee and Displacement Initiative at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C.
Today we are going to be talking about a special issue of the Journal on “Folklore Studies and Disability.” But before I do that, I’d like to offer a little bit more about what is folklore, a little bit more about the journal, to give some context for the special issue. So, our journal, JAF: A Global Quarterly, which has long been known as Journal of American Folklore, has been in existence since 1888, which is the year that folklore studies was originally founded in the United States. So, since 1888, the field has transformed pretty dramatically, as social realities have changed, technologies, different kinds of cultural practices. Though the field is continually changing, it’s also had a lot of continuity, and our discipline really has its roots in that, the whole kind of trajectory from 1888 into the present.
We work as folklorists in both academic spheres and public spheres and typically, we are interested in what we call folklore, which is a little bit different from what a lot of people in the world outside of the field think of as folklore. But we are interested in all kinds of informal and unofficial creativity that exists within different networks or groups of people. So, this includes things like visual culture stories, games, music, body art, holidays, dance. But we also are interested just as much in all sorts of cultural forms that are not necessarily thought of as traditional. So, things like contemporary Halloween decorations and costumes, digital forms of folklore, memes, conspiracy, theories, political humor. We are really interested in the role that folklore plays in the social world, the economic world, the political world, and how folklore forms are used in communication, identity formation, community building, articulations of difference, conflict. We recognize that this stuff that is often at the margins, that people think of as very trivial, are really at the center of how human beings function and connect with one another. Central to our field are engagements with issues associated with race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, citizenship, nationality, ability, and so on.
JAF as a journal is a platform for people across academic and public sectors. So, we have a lot of folklorists working in universities. We also have those working in the public sphere across many different kinds of organizations, different kinds of work. So, our journal includes both articles and essays that look more like scholarly essays, but also things like commentaries, interviews, dialogues, and creative work that engage with the important work that folklorists do that’s more public facing. So, a lot of folklorists work in advocacy or documentation projects or creating online or in-person exhibits organizing festivals, radio programs and so on and this special issue on folklore studies and disability really encapsulates the diversity of content that our journal is trying to really make a space for. So, it includes both scholarly and creative works. It has a lot of different ways of engaging with the field.
Today I’m really, really excited to have this opportunity to talk to Professor Anand Prahlad, who was the guest, the guest editor for a special issue called “Folklore Studies and Disability,” that came out recently in Summer 2024, Volume 137, Number 545. Before we hear from Professor Prahlad, I would like to briefly introduce him. Professor Prahlad is the curators’ distinguished teaching professor emeritus in the Department of English at the University of Missouri, where he served as co-director of the Folklore Studies Program and director of the Creative Writing Program. His scholarly works include Reggae Wisdom: Proverbs and Jamaican Music, African American Proverbs and Context that came out in 1996, and four edited volumes of The Greenwood Encyclopedia of African American Folklore, along with numerous articles. His creative works include the collection of poems As Good As Mango, which came out in 2012, and The Secret Life of a Black Aspie, a disability memoir that came out in 2017. He is currently an affiliate faculty at the Thompson Center for Autism and Neurodevelopment in Columbia, Missouri.
I want to begin our conversation by saying how pleased I was that you were interested in editing the special issue. I’ve long been an admirer of your work in proverbs and African American folklore. And on a more personal level, reading your memoir, The Secret Life of a Black Aspie, really transformed my own knowledge of autism, and has greatly helped me to become a better teacher and mentor to those of my students who are on the spectrum. So, I want to really just thank you for that book. I really loved it, and it really helped me on a personal level. So, I’d like to start by asking you to tell me a little bit about yourself, and why you were interested in editing this special issue.
Anand Prahlad: I don’t know where to begin talking about myself, but I’ll begin with thanking you for saying you appreciated reading the memoir. Because all too often, and you probably know this as well as I do, when we write books and then the book is published and it’s out there, we don’t really know necessarily how people are responding to it, or whether it makes a difference in people’s lives or anything like that. So, it’s always good to actually hear somebody say that.
LG: So, from what I know about you, you were primarily a scholar of African American folklore and proverbs, and more recently, you’ve gotten involved in disability studies and really exploring the relationships between folklore and disability studies. Can you tell us a little bit about why or when you started to incorporate more disability studies into your work?
AP: I’ll start with, before I was a folklorist, I was a creative writer. So, I started writing poetry when I was a preteen and my interest in disability actually goes back to when I was a child. I grew up in a community of people who were the descendants of slaves who worked on the plantation that our community was next to. In fact, my dad was born on that plantation, because many of the people who had been enslaved and their descendants continued to live and work on the plantation. When my dad was four years old, his father was taken away from the plantation to the asylum in Petersburg. So that community that I grew up in was filled with different kinds of disability; one being the trauma that people had experienced because of the extreme conditions of slavery, and then the post-slavery period, but also there were people with very visible physical disabilities and very visible intellectual disabilities.
So, as a teenager in my poetry, I was already writing about disabilities. At that point the idea of disability and disability studies didn’t exist, so I didn’t have any context to put that into, but that interest really continued my entire life as I went to college and met more people who were disabled. And then I went to California, I learned about the Center for Independent Living, I met people from there, and lot of my classmates were disabled. The interest in disability really was a thread that ran through my creative work from the very beginning. I came to disability studies after being diagnosed with autism when I was 57 years old, and I began reading and researching and trying to find out more about intellectual disabilities, and that led me into disability studies. And once I entered that field, I felt very at home in it and the memoir was a big catalyst because I had written a lot of that memoir before the diagnosis. So, I didn’t really have any intention of publishing it, and I didn’t have any real sense of what I was writing about.
Once I had the diagnosis, then it’s like, oh, okay, this is a memoir really about being autistic. So, then I finished it, and then people encouraged me to send it out with the idea in mind that it might make a difference to other people, so I did. From that moment on, I was just in love with disability studies, and feeling in some way that I had found a lot of my people, who I hadn’t previously identified as my people in a certain regard. That’s when the shift happened. And ever since that shift, most things I’ve written in some way engage disability, whether it’s my poetry, or my creative essays, or even my academic work. So that’s really how I came to it, and being a folklorist, then it was quite natural to want to integrate these interests: creative writing, folklore, and disability studies. And editing the journal was an opportunity to move in that direction and to encourage other people to also move in that direction.
LG: I know we’ve had a lot of conversations about this as we were conceptualizing this special issue, but can you talk a little bit about where the overlaps are between folklore and disability studies? And also, maybe what the two fields have to offer each other?
AP: Both folklore studies and disability studies pay very close attention to the nuances of communication between individuals and within groups. That’s one thing that I see as a real sort of overlap. They’re both very invested in cultural practices and cultural expressions, for different reasons in many cases. But still, for example, scholars in disability studies have been interested in proverbs because of the reflections of attitudes about disabled people that are reflected in proverbs or folk tales, or even music, or whatever the genre might be.
They’re both interested in dynamics that go on within groups, and between one group and another group. So, that would be another kind of focus. You’re familiar with Michael Owen Jones and Bob Georges’ People Studying People. That’s essentially what folklorists do, if you expand people to include the things that people do and are concerned with. Well, in a way that’s a big part of what disability studies also does and again, the focus might be different, but it’s still a very careful study of human beings, what it means to be human, how do human beings behave, what are human beings’ attitudes towards certain things, what are their perspectives. I think there’s a big overlap in in those ways between the two fields.
LG: So, then I guess the follow up question would be, how would folklorists benefit from learning more about disability studies? Then I would ask after, what could disability studies people get from folklorists?
AP: Well, folklore, the field has been around so much longer than disability studies. And in the length of time in which folklore studies has existed, it has amassed tremendous bodies of knowledge about specific cultural and social attitudes and practices among such a vast variety of groups. I think that those bodies of knowledge could be very useful to people in disability studies in many ways. The ethnographic practices that are common among folklorists would be another way in which I think disability studies might benefit from folklore studies.
The essay in the special issue by Shuman and Caldeira, “Folklore, Disability, and Plain Language,” for example is a really good illustration of how important the tools of folklore can be in addressing issues related to not just intellectual disabilities, which is what they focus on in the essay, but disabilities in general, because at the core of that article, one of the issues is: How do non-disabled people in positions in which they’re interacting have some influence or power over the lives of disabled people? How do they communicate with them in a way that is respectful and grants them dignity and a certain degree of autonomy and self-definition? I think that’s one of the ways in which folklore studies can offer disability studies quite a bit.
I think folklore can be very helpful in creating and navigating public policies that relate to disabled people. And one of the other essays that comes to mind in that regard is Nora Groce’s article, in which she’s arguing that folklorists could be tremendously helpful in the efforts of global healthcare workers who are concerned with policies that affect disabled people because of their intimate knowledge of the attitudes, perspectives, and needs of the people within a particular community. On the level of global health and even local and global medicine and healthcare, folklore could play an important role and be really helpful for anyone who’s looking at issues of disability.
I think folklore studies could also be helpful in illuminating some of the dynamics within groups of disabled people. And up to this point, that hasn’t really been so much of a focus within at least American folklore studies. Teresa Milbrodt’s essay in the special issue really eloquently makes this argument. One of her focuses is looking at humor among disabled people in wheelchairs and trying to understand how that humor in a way empowers the speaker, but at the same time critiques the attitudes of non-disabled people insofar as some of the negative attitudes that they have toward people in wheelchairs. So, those are a few of the ways that I think folklore studies can be really helpful to disability studies.
Another would be, I think of all the disciplines, folklore studies is perhaps one of the best at highlighting the voices of people that have no power politically so that they’re presented in a way that’s really dignified rather than some of the other kinds of ways that those voices might be presented. Phyllis May-Machunda’s essay, which is really arguing that it would be beneficial for folklorists to study the stories that are told by caretakers of disabled children, would be an example of how that particular way of helping people with disabilities might work in her case. She’s focused on Black people and people of color who are caretakers of disabled children, but I think clearly that argument would apply to caretakers of disabled children in general. I often think about some of these issues when encountering autistic children and parents of autistic children and some of the work that I’m doing at the Thompson Center now, for example. So, those are four ways that I think folklore studies could really be important to disability studies work.
LG: I’d love to just add one thing, which is, I think also folklorists paying attention to the arts and creativity, like Teresa’s piece about humor you mentioned, and just recognizing that arts and the creative life is very much at the center for all people, and that people with disabilities need and use arts in a lot of important ways, in terms of personal expression and meaning making and connecting with others, education, feeling a sense of belonging within families or communities. And I think the fact that we’re looking at art forms that are often not paid attention to, right? I mean, you can have people coming together and painting, and these aren’t going to be paintings that are going to make it into onto gallery walls, but they have such an importance for the people producing them and people around them, and so much of what we do is really paying attention to that stuff that’s so critical, yet is often just marginalized and not thought of as important. Recognizing this importance is vital for making sure that those opportunities are really fostered for people who may not have as much access to it.
AP: Absolutely. And there’s a lot of disability art out there. Some of it’s public, but then there’s a lot of disability art that you only might find within a family or within a particular community. One of my recent essays is actually reflections on the art of Marlon Mullins, a Black nonverbal autistic artist who is quite prolific. And Rhode Island School of Design, their museum did an exhibit just devoted to disability art, and his art was one of the art pieces that were represented in that exhibit. They published a book of essays to accompany the exhibit, and my essay was in that book, and it’s a reflection on one of his pieces of art. So, I think you’re absolutely right.
And there is an essay in the special issue that’s dedicated to art and at times people have said, “Well, why did you put that one in there?” Ann Millett-Gallant is a disabled artist whose work is really well known in disability communities, and I felt I really wanted an essay in the issue that in some way reflected disability art and to have the artist kind of talk some about their work. So yes, I would love to see like state folklorists or some folklore group at some point that does exhibitions and events do an exhibit of disability art.
LG: So, now tell us a little bit about what you think folklorists will gain from paying attention to what’s going on in disability studies.
AP: I think an engagement with disability studies would offer folklorists a fresh way to look at some of the issues that they have sort of struggled with over the decades. For example, “What is folklore?” It’s still kind of a term without a specific definition. “Genre” is another sort of concept that folklorists occasionally return to and have discussions about. I think some of the focus of disability studies would offer new avenues for addressing some very old questions within folklore studies. That’s one, I think, that would also enable folklore studies to examine ways in which the field has elements of ableism deeply embedded in a lot of what we do. One of the core issues of disability studies is redefining what it means to be human. And I think that redefining what it means to be human would be beneficial to folklore studies itself because we do what we do based on commonly accepted ideas about what human is. I think that’s probably one of the issues in folklore studies that’s kind of led to certain kinds of ableism. I actually started writing notes for a book that does just these things that I’m talking about, but it’s not far along for me to say much about at this point.
It would offer new ways of thinking about ethnographic practices, because the way we’re taught to do ethnography in folklore studies won’t necessarily work for doing ethnographies within many disabled groups. It’ll expand on their notions of what ethnography is, and how we actually do ethnography. A few of the essays actually speak to some of these things. I think Allison Stanich’s essay, “All the World’s a (Neurotypical) Stage,” highlights this idea that the normative culture of which folklore studies is a part doesn’t imagine itself necessarily as performing, and in highlighting that autistic people commonly mask and this idea that the neurotypical world is a stage, it emphasizes the idea that autistic people aren’t the only ones masking. They aren’t the only ones performing, they’re a certain kind of performer on a stage of other people who may not realize that they’re also performing. I think that’s an important issue to look at.
With the issue of genres, I think Gwendolyn Paradise’s essay, “The Last Cherokee,” and the way that she interrogates folkloric knowledge about native people and folklore ideas about storytelling offers a sort of fresh way to look at, not just storytelling, but other genres of folklore in the context of people who have disabilities. She doesn’t necessarily put it this way, but I think her essay suggested, “What does it mean to a storytelling tradition when a person who tells the stories has a disability and can no longer remember them?” In her case she might be able to tell her mother’s story, but there’s not always going to be a person like herself. Those are some ways that I think disability studies can help.
As far as the ethnographic practices, I made a note: Andrea Kitta’s essay really speaks to that issue, because within the essay, well, first she’s highlighting in disability studies and among disabled people often they have the phrase “TABs,” which means temporarily able-bodied. And the acronym “TAB” suggests a particular attitude that able-bodied, non-disabled people have, which is that disability will never happen to them, that disability is for some other people and very often it reflects some sort of character deficiency if they become disabled. Andrea’s essay speaks to that at the same time raising questions about the appropriateness or the ethics of asking people to tell their stories. And I think that’s an important issue for folklorists to think about. When is it simply unethical to ask people to tell stories, simply because we’re doing this research, and we want to benefit from the stories?
Then the last thing, as far as ways in which disability studies can be helpful to folklorists. I think disability studies could give folklorists in-roads to doing more work in healthcare, medicine, and social work, and I think folklorists have the tools already to play important roles if they get engaged in fields like healthcare and medicine and social work. That point is made in Traci Cox’s article when she’s detailing issues with her own disability. At some point, she gets around to suggesting that folklorists could have made a really big difference in how employers, for example, treat their disabled employees and the policies within different institutions that make it difficult for disabled people to do their jobs and be recognized for the value that they bring to that particular job or to that particular company.
I think disability studies can offer folklorists ideas about multiple ways of sharing research. Some of the essays in this special issue are hybrid essays that include academic writing, creative writing, and disability writing. That’s uncommon for the most part in folklore studies and it was one of the reasons why, when I was talking to the potential contributors, I said, “I really want you to write the essays the way that you feel is going to be the most effective and not feel that you have to stick to academic discourse, or even creative writing formats, or anything like that.” So, I think disability studies offers different models for ways in which we can write and still have it be accepted as valuable.
LG: I’m so glad you brought that up because I wanted to emphasize just the range of different kinds of writing that’s in this special issue and the different kinds of people. I think you did a really wonderful job of bringing together people, many of whom themselves identify as having a disability or disabilities, or their family members do and it’s a big part of their lives. And so, you really have people writing about firsthand experiences as well as, you know, it’s kind of a range of different kinds of writing, and the self-reflective and the creative.
And the other thing I would just like to spend a couple minutes just saying and hear your thoughts on, is that Allie Stanich, whom you mentioned earlier, they graduated from our Master’s program at George Mason, and they were a student of mine and they have autism. And I asked you early on in the process, whether you would be willing to mentor them, both in writing a piece for the special issue, but also whether they could work with you as an editorial assistant, and you were very generous and welcoming of that. I knew for Allie, who would like to work in academia or as an advocate for people with disabilities, that it would be really important for them to have somebody like you as a mentor and role model. I’m wondering if you can just talk a little bit about what that meant to you in terms of integrating kind of [mentoring] practice with producing this product for the special issue.
AP: Well, it was a real blessing in many ways. As you probably know, mentoring is one of the things that I really love doing and I had retired, and so I wasn’t really mentoring many students anymore. At that point, I still had a couple of grad students who were writing dissertations, and I agreed after retiring that I would stay on as chair of their committees. But it was just really special, it was really a joy to work with [Allie]. Besides the aspect of mentoring, it was an opportunity to have the fairly regular conversations with another autistic person. And I don’t often have the opportunity to have regular conversations with another autistic person, and I don’t know quite how to explain this, but there’s a way in which it’s just different to talk to autistic people. Maybe part of it is some of our shared experiences, our shared perspectives, I don’t really know. I have a theory of why it’s different but at any rate, I really enjoyed it. They are very sharp. They’re very intelligent. They’re a good writer and it was just very enjoyable to work with them as they moved from “this is my idea” to some early writings and then, eventually, the development of a really good essay.
LG: I love that. I mean, I think, as the editor of this journal, one of my priorities has been, how do we make this journal a place, a space for a lot of different kinds of people to do their work and share their work and have other people engage with their work. And we’ve talked a lot about accessibility, and mentoring has been a really important piece of that. This is going to be a place for them if we help them learn how to be a part of this space, and also make this space a place that’s open and really inclusive of a lot of different kinds of people. So, I just want to thank you. I’m glad that in your answers you reference a lot of the different kinds of material and the different essays that are in there.
I just want to kind of give an overview quickly that in the end we have eleven pieces. We have your wonderful introduction, which talks both about folklore and disabilities, and how the two inform and can reinforce one another. We have some scholarly essays; we have some creative work. We have pieces that are really reflexive and deeply personal. We have pieces that are more, talking about things more external to the person. So, we have a really wonderful range of material, and really a diverse set of authors, both in terms of all different kinds of diversity, in terms of their disciplinary perspectives, the kind of professional work they do, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality. So really, I think, an exemplar of what our journal can be in terms of doing really kind of cutting-edge work that really reaches out to people outside of folklore, brings them in, but also folklore kind of going out in terms of what other people might be able to get from our field.
I just want to thank you for the incredible work that you did editing this special issue. And then this thoughtful conversation where you’ve really brought out so many important things about the synergies between disability studies and folklore, but also what each field can get from the other. So, thank you so much. I don’t know if you have some final words you would like to say before we end our conversation?
AP: Just that I hope that readers like the issue and feel that it’s making a valuable contribution to folklore studies and disability studies.
UIP: What a great discussion. Thank you so much, Lisa and Prahlad. And a big thank you to our listeners for tuning in to hear more about folklore and disability studies from this special issue of the Journal of American Folklore. To learn more about the Journal, please visit go.illinois.edu/JAF.
For further reading on related topics, the University of Illinois Press is also the publisher of Journal of American Ethnic History, which had a recent special issue on Asian American Disability (Volume 43, Issue 3). The Press also publishes books in both folklore and disability studies. Check out “Ain’t I an Anthropologist: Zora Neale Hurston Beyond the Literary Icon” by Jennifer L. Freeman Marshall and the forthcoming title “Unmentionable Madness: Gender, Disability, and Shame in the Malaria Treatment of Neurosyphilis” by Christin L. Hancock, out in January 2025. You can view all of those and more at press.illinois.edu. Thank you.
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