Leon J. Hilton’s Counter-cartographies: Neurodivergence and the Errancies of Performance (Minnesota UP, 2025) is a book that does what it says. In a vital contribution to the field of performance studies, Hilton’s methodology models performative writing, evading the often drawn (academic) distinction between “content” and “structure” in favor of an errant wander that stutters and flows through the arrangement and de-arrangement of its chapters. Hilton performs and restages the page as montaged scenes and constant cuts that open onto a constellation of inquiries in an array of artistic works amid an historically situated alongsideness with autism. The main accompaniment on the journey is Fernand Deligny (1913–1996), an educator and writer who staunchly opposed psychiatric treatment and institutionalization. Hilton situates Deligny as a practitioner of alternate ways of collectively living with autistic children and young adults outside the institutional frameworks of the asylum.
In cases where Counter-cartographies encounters the ongoing histories of brutality waged against disabled people—as any writing on disability must—Hilton always seeks to return to the life that persists beneath it. In this respect, Counter-cartographies itself arises from and with the ensemble, forming and deforming in the spaces it doesn’t hold just as much as in those it does. The book’s insistence on historical terminology can in this regard be read as calling into contrast the medical-science industry’s assignations as assaults on autonomy, the ever-evolving law’s constant codification and policing, and the built world’s structural-social imposition of ongoing isolation that disproportionately affects disabled people. In stark contrast to these, and against the grain of all a diagnosis can do, remains the effervescence of neurodivergence, cross-disability’s insistence on aesthetic experimentation, and the coalition building necessary to elaborate our difference beyond separation.
It is from within this ensemble that I approach Leon J. Hilton’s Counter-cartographies as a contribution to an aesthetic movement that seeks to build sociality; out of a sentiment that refuses the imposition made in every act of naming (making) a discrete category—an impetus that Counter-cartographies takes up through the specificity of in/capacity for speech, or verbal communication and the philosophical gates to subjectivity that undergird it.
The first chapter opens with the civilizing experiments of the French physician Jean Marc Gaspard Itard on a “feral child” captured in a village in Aveyron in 1798 and subsequently sent to the National Institute for Deaf-Mutes in Paris. Itard named the boy Victor and embarked on a five-year long “civilizing educational mission,” that was hinged on Victor’s ability to “learn” to speak as inseparable from his capacity to exercise moral judgment. Central to the historical context here is the broader early-nineteenth-century European preoccupation with the figure of the “wild child,” inextricable from the project of European colonialism and the accompanying philosophical frameworks that would sediment “the developmental trajectory” of those granted entry to the confines of the human, “culminating in the enlightened, modern citizen governed not by nervous sensibility but rationality” (41). Hilton’s historical context foreshadows the pedagogical and developmental premises that would result in both the scientific project of eugenics and segregated education for disabled people that would continue to unfold in centuries to come. At the heart of the chapter are two films that diverge in their approaches to the figure of the “wandering child”: François Truffaut’s L’enfant Sauvage (1970) and La Grande Cordée members Fernand Deligny, Josée Manenti, and Jean-Pierre Daniel’s La moindre geste (1971) that Hilton engages through the generous framework of performance studies. Where L’enfant Sauvage is read as formally mirroring Itard’s belief in the necessity of a civilizing process, Hilton’s analysis moves with La moindre geste’s radical approach to cinema and/as pedagogy that refuses narrative cohesion and capacity to participate in linguistic structures. Introduced here is the robust throughline that will guide the readers throughout the rest of the book: a desire to move with people who attempt to contest and evade the undergirding logics of institutionalization.
Chapter two engages the difficult history of the asylum—both as a physical place of enforced confinement and as the underlying carceral logic that presents such physical places as an inevitability. Here Hilton takes up Deligny’s “asyluming” (asiler) as a practice of making refuge. “How,” Hilton asks, “might this evocative notion of asylum as an action that is done, a thing that is made–that is, as performance–help illuminate how institutions that came to be known as asylums became understood as crucibles for the shaping of subjectivity as such?” (71) This chapter brings in the history of the La Borde clinic, founded in 1951 by Jean Oury, who together with Félix Guattari would formulate “institutional psychotherapy,” a practice which “might best be understood as a form of psychotherapy for the institution” (73). Where institutional psychotherapy sought to relocate the subject of treatment from (the assumption of) an individualized patient, to “transform the milieu–that is, the social and physical environment in which patients, staff, and clinicians live and work,” Hilton situates Deligny’s work as an alternative mode that rejected both the idea that there could be a subject of treatment and the subjectivity said treatment was ushered in to make. The chapter montages between Deligny’s contention with theories of subjectivity, Frederick Wiseman’s unbearably difficult Titicut Follies (a 1967 documentary film shot inside the Bridgewater State Hospital for the Criminally Insane) and the counter-cartographic methods devised by Deligny, that resulted in ephemeral maps made neither for knowing or codifying a terrain, nor for interpretative excavations of meaning-making, but rather performed both a “place where the individual can find refuge from the demands of being made into a subject,” and “a mode of making or giving asylum that would completely detach itself from the asylum system that was the inheritance of the nineteenth-century psychiatric apparatus” (93–95; emphasis mine).
In the third chapter, Hilton situates cartographic mapping in the broader context of racial surveillance post-deinstitutionalization. Placed alongside the “counter-cartographic” work of the artist Pope.L and a critical engagement with Autism Speaks, the chapter focuses on the engineered anxieties about “wandering.” Hilton examines Avonte’s Law (today renamed “Kevin and Avonte’s Law”), legislation introduced after the search for Avonte Oquendo, a fourteen-year-old autistic Black boy who wandered from his school’s special education classroom in Queens in 2013. Hilton examines how the search effort’s public circulation of the pixelated CCTV stills of Oquendo throughout New York City’s subway system and the extraction from Oquendo’s death were used by the state to funnel even more funds into the fiscal enterprise of policing and constituted a making of an image of autism. (Avonte’s Law, proposed by then-senator Chuck Schumer, sought funding “to provide ‘voluntary electronic tracking devices’ to be worn by autistic students enrolled in public schools” (104)). Hilton’s analysis shows the historical alliances of (the creation of) racial difference and disability, by revealing (the extraction of) legal consent as one of the central philosophical and material problems that such alliances have both inaugurated and concealed.
The book’s fourth chapter and coda turn to more contemporary artistic practices, constellating the works of Jonathan Berger, Mel Baggs, Wu Tsang, and Hamja Ahsan. Against the legal framework that equates subjectivity and capacity for speech, Hilton examines the (tactile aspects of the) voice, via Fred Moten, as “‘that phonic substance’ that both supports and exceeds the verbal utterance” (128). Drawing on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s “pursuit of nondualistic accounts of personhood and relationality–of acting, doing, being, and making with or alongside” (159), what recurs throughout the discussed works in the two concluding chapters is the shared desire to make possible continuously differentiating forms of “social coalition.”
Counter-cartographies plots with some of the more obscure figures who have attempted to practice a preference for disability’s unruly movement and performs an invitation to join those who already love dependency. The urgency of such an invitation cannot be stated enough.
