"your body becomes more like mine... mine marks me, announces my weakness, displays it as yellow skin. it flagrantly tells my story, or a compacted, distorted version of it, to passersby curious enough to cast their eyes my way. it stunts their creativity, dictates to them the limited list of what i could be... generalized and indiscriminate, easily spotted and readily identifiable all the same."  -- Binh, The Book of Salt (152)

One of the most recent portrayals of disability in film was The Theory of Everything, starring Eddie Redmayne as Stephen Hawking. While many critics (and Hawking himself) greatly praised Redmayne's performace, he is still an able bodied actor playing a disabled individual, which is problematic. Some have argued that he did a fantastic, realistic job and that it was necessary to use an able-bodied actor because the film begins before Hawking's disability, while others have argued that there is predjudice in the casting and that it was robbing disabled actors of opportunity and representation. I thought it would be interesting to hear how the actors themselves thought of the movie and its meaning and representation.

I finished Americanah yesterday, and I'm very interested in Ifemelu's migrant identity and her journey to and from America. She and Obinze share some idealized vision of the country before leaving, but when they do, they are disappointed by their experiences in America and England. In America, Ifemelu becomes depressed as she adjusts to life where she faces dramatic exclusion. She cannot get a job because of her immigrant status and her race, she has to cope with the stress of being racialized as "black for the first time," and the politics of being non-American and black in the United States. The journey changes Ifemelu profoundly, she is marked by her time spent abroad, and she is called an "Americanah" when she returns to Nigeria.