Three Days to Walk: a personal story of life writing and disability consciousness in China |
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Authors: | Sarah Dauncey |
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Institution: | School of East Asian Studies, University of Sheffield , Sheffield , UK |
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Abstract: | Through a close reading of Three Days to Walk, a memoir of disability by Chinese writer Zhang Yuncheng, this paper develops a new understanding of self-narrated life writing and its intersection with disability consciousness in the contemporary Chinese context. It examines the changing nature of disability life writing since the end of the early 1980s, a time when the images and voices of disabled began to emerge from effective cultural invisibility and silence. In a move away from state-sponsored ‘triumph over tragedy’ biographical narratives typical of the immediate post-Cultural Revolution period, Three Days to Walk is characteristic of a new popular trend to publish self-narrated life stories that reveal unique and intimate histories of disability experience both imbued with and propelled by a burgeoning sense of disability consciousness in the Chinese context. |
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Keywords: | Life writing China disability consciousness self-representation identity |
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