Disability and Colonialism (Dis)encounters and Anxious Intersectionalities

The mapping, control and subjugation of the human body and mind were core features of the colonial conquest. This book draws together a rich collection of diverse, yet rigorous, papers that aim to expose the presence and significance of disability within colonialism, and how disability remains present in the establishment, maintenance and continuation of colonial structures of power. Disability as a site of historical analysis has become critically important to understanding colonial relations of power and the ways in which gender and identity are defined through colonial categorisations of the body. Thus, there is a growing prominence of disability within the historical literature. Yet, there are few international anthologies that traverse a critical level of depth on the subject domain. This book fills a critical gap in the historical literature and is likely to become a core reader for post graduate studies within disability studies, postcolonial studies and more broadly across the humanities. The chapters in this book were originally published as articles in Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture.

Introduction: Disability and colonialism: (dis)encounters and anxious intersectionalities 1. Decolonising Eurocentric disability studies: why colonialism matters in the disability and global South debate 2. Orientalising deafness: race and disability in imperial Britain 3. ‘Let them be young and stoutly set in limbs’: race, labor, and disability in the British Atlantic World 4. Postcolonial reproductions: disability, indigeneity and the formation of the white masculine settler state of Australia 5. WHO’s MIND, whose future? Mental health projects as colonial logics 6. A Foucauldian journey into the islands of the deaf and blind 7. Ain’t I a woman? Female landmine survivors’ beauty pageants and the ethics of staring

Karen Soldatic is an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow (2016–2019), Institute of Culture and Society, Western Sydney University. This Fellowship, Disability Income Reform and Regional Australia: The Indigenous Experience, draws upon her two previous fellowships: British Academy International Visiting Fellowship (2012) and The Centre for Human Rights Education, Curtin University (2011–2012) where she remains an Adjunct Fellow. Karen's research draws upon almost 20 years of international policy experience, examining the effects of globalisation on disabled people's lives with the neoliberal turn. Shaun Grech is director of The Critical Institute, Malta, visiting fellow at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK,and editor-in-chief of the international journal, Disability in the Global South (DGS). Shaun is also an activist and practitioner working with disabled people in extreme rural poverty in Latin America.