A board game on disabled authors designed by the Department of English at Jadavpur University aims to bring disability to the centre of literary teaching and discussions through collaborative playing cards with Braille and other tactile cues.
Funded by the Global Jadavpur University Alumni Foundation based in Danville, California, the ‘Crip Lit’ card game requires players to match time period, disability, gender, and/or sexual orientation, along with other similar factors associated with the featured author, in order to score points.
Crip Lit Cards feature several tactile cues like Braille, raised portraits of the writers, roundels to hold point values, embossed English text, clear textures along the edges, and colour contrast to help players with visual disabilities. | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement
The deck also includes “power cards” featuring queer and transgender disabled figures, which redistribute turns, points, and choices among players to challenge assumptions about power and productivity.
“We do not usually find disabled literary figures outside of John Milton and Helen Keller in literature curricula. For instance, even though Krishnadasa Kaviraja, the canonical author of Chaitanya Charitamrita, is taught widely in Bengali literature syllabi, it is seldom taught that he is a disabled author or how his disabilities inform his writings. This card game aims at challenging ableist, normative literary curricula,” Ishan Chakraborty, Assistant Professor at the Department of English and the designer behind ‘Crip Lit Cards’ told The Hindu.
