Embracing the Ecstatic: Disability in the Afrofuture
D’Arcee Charington Neal
D’Arcee Charington Neal is a fourth-year doctoral candidate at The Ohio State University in English and Disability Studies, where he is coining the theory of Afrophantasm or the rhetorical applications of invisibility through Afrofuturism and black disability culture. With a double master’s in Creative Writing and Rhetorical Composition, he is writing and composing an audio novel and digital dissertation where his research is focused on recognizing historical and future black disabled people, as unseen agents of stigma he calls spectres. Believing that this association between race and disability can be weaponized through posthumanist applications of embodied culture, he believes that Afrophantasm can change how people both understand and experience disability culture. Further, he believes that the resulting black future can and should be both accessible and in Wakanda, forever. D’Arcee is also the recipient of numerous public research awards and scholarships including, 1st place in the 2021 Graduate Hayes Forum, a 2020 Best Digital Media Graduate Scholarship, and NEH, Sweetland Digital Rhetoric, and Black Quantum Futurist Fellowships, as well as 2020 Disability Studies award for Best Disability Scholarship, and the Comcast/Universal Tony Coelho Digital Media Award.