ABSTRACT
This chapter provides the historical background on the relationship between blackness and disability before the mid-century, and then turn to Langston Hughes’s short story collection The Ways of White Folks to discuss the myriad ways Afro-modernist authors represented and interrogated disability. Afro-modernism, as a broader and more geographically and temporally expansive alternative to “the Harlem Renaissance,” can be understood as black experimental artistic protest of Jim Crow-era segregation logics. Housing, employment, and educational segregation and discrimination are among the innumerable inequities addressed by Afro-modernism. While the majority of representations of illness and disability in The Ways of White Folks reference whiteness, the short story “Home” is an anomaly. In the place of such citizenship, Ellison paints Harlem as “nowhere.” Ellison describes a postwar malaise settling in Harlem that cannot be lifted until the African American is no longer a “‘displaced person’ of American democracy”.
