Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Call to Wonder reimagining disabilityRosemarie Garland-ThomsonComing to WonderI came to wonder last summer on a research visit to the Ringling Brothers Museum in Sarasota, Florida. Scattered with garish posters and peculiar objects, the museum’s circus archive was a cabinet of curiosities documenting a lost world of the extraordinary. Circuses, sideshows, and early museums were entertainment venues that offered good jobs to people with disabilities at a time well before disability rights or accessible workplaces integrated people with disabilities into public life. At the Circus Museum, I came to understand more fully that many of the people on the freakshow’s broadsides are my ancestors, people with rare congenital disabilities that gave them uncommon appearances and occasioned for them some creativity in carrying out the tasks of daily living.That muggy summer day in Sarasota, the archivist opened for us one by one the thin but wide drawers of the filing cabinets designed to store rare and valuable documents. As each assemblage of posters revealed its strange contents, I came to recognize a lost community of ancient ancestors. All manner of human variation in extravagant shapes, sizes, and forms peered out of the drawers, beckoning our attention and igniting our wonder. The dwarf musicians, legless cyclists, exotic albinos, fat ladies, hermaphrodites, and giants who entertained and charmed circus audiences then have today been transformed into people with disabilities. Civil rights legislation such as the Americans with Disabilities Act, an [End Page 483] accessible designed and built public environment, and broad awareness of disability inclusion offer these unusual people opportunities for education and wider employment opportunities today. Many of my friends and colleagues resemble these circus celebrities and performers. All of us now go about our lives quite differently from these lost ancestors. We have lives, work, families, communities, and environments that are much more compatible with our ways of being. Nonetheless, my shudder of sympathetic recognition witnesses our congruence, despite the decades and centuries that separate us from them. As I move along the unsettling archive they have left me, my vanished ancestors stare back at me from the scrapbooks, circus posters, tattered photos, and ancient prints tucked into the drawers and cabinets along our tour. Their steady returning gaze demands my response. They pull from me an unsettling merger of awe and tenderness, familiarity and strangeness. They have awakened in me the ancient affect of wonder.For me, the most compelling occupant of these archival coffins was the “The Little Man of Nuremberg,” the armless calligrapher, Matthias Buchinger (Figure 1). This prodigy of ornate micrography gazed frankly back at me with dignified contemplation, inviting me into his elaborate realm of the miniature (see Schjeldahl 2016). His diminutive hands peeked out of the velvet cuffs, startling me with their familiarity to my own unusual arms and hands. Famous during his lifetime (1674–1739) as “The Greatest Living German,” Buchinger was a calligrapher, artist, performer, and entrepreneur who was an early exemplar of a genre of legless and armless disabled performers who inspired wonder and awe in their audiences and communities.1 Buchinger’s 1724 engraving offers his viewers an early 18th-century resume or social media page. The illustration’s loquacious caption describes, “the wonderful Little Man of about 29. Inches high, born without Hands, Feet, or Thighs, June the 2, 1674. In Germany.” The “last of nine Children,” he goes on to verify his own reproductive robustness by detailing that he “has been married four times, and has had issue Eleven children, one by his first Wife, three by his second, six by his third, and one by his present Wife.”Amazement apparently requires detail for its realization. His self-portrait engraving continues to variously solicit our wonder. “This little Man performs such Wonders as had never been done by any; but Himself,” he assures us. These wonders include playing various instruments, including the flute, bagpipe, dulcimer, and trumpet. Moreover, he designs and makes musical instruments and draws coats of arms and pictures of life “with Pen.” His astonishing feats include playing cards and dice, performing tricks with “Cups and Balls, Corn, and Live Birds,” playing at “Skittles or Nine Pens to...