‘Physician, Heal Thyself’: Disability, Aesthetic Nervousness, and Diasporic Authority in Tope Folarin’s Miracle

Abstract

The paper addresses a critical gap in disability scholarship on African diasporic literature where impairment is often read as a metaphor or as a social stigma without sufficient attention to its structural function within migrant religious spaces. Focusing on Tope Folarin’s short story Miracle, the paper examines how blindness operates within a Nigerian Pentecostal community in Texas. The study draws on Ato Quayson’s (2017) theory of aesthetic nervousness, particularly the typologies of disability as a signifier of ritual insight and disability as epiphany, supplemented by social and materialist disability models (Oliver, 1990; Brown, 2008). Through close textual analysis of the narrative, the analysis yields three central findings. First, the blind prophet’s impairment functions as ritual capital that authorises his charismatic legitimacy within the diasporic congregation. Second, his inability to heal himself produces aesthetic nervousness that destabilises his authority and exposes the commodification of disability within migrant religious economies. Third, the narrator’s failed healing generates epistemic reorientation through which faith, performance, and community survival are critically re-evaluated. The paper concludes that in Miracle, disability operates as a contested site where embodiment, belief and diasporic identity are negotiated. The paper contributes to disability and diaspora studies by suggesting how literary representations of impairment can function as a structural critique of charismatic authority within transnational contexts.