Disability and Colonialism

(Dis)encounters and Anxious Intersectionalities

Karen Soldatic, Shaun Grech

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781317239369
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

Decolonising Eurocentric disability studies: why colonialism matters in the disability and global South debate

Shaun Grech

Research Institute for Health and Social Change, Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK

The words ‘colonised’ and ‘colonising’ have recently been adopted in global North fields such as disability studies, highlighting notions of colonised bodies by colonising practices, with the implication that some or other ‘decolonisation’ is required. But these words remain little more than abstract and dehistoricised metaphors in these Eurocentric academic projects. This paper critically maps out some arguments as to why the colonial encounter is not simply a metaphor and cannot be bypassed in any global disability analysis. The paper argues how this historical event transcends the discursive, a violent materiality framing disability as a historical narrative and human condition, while (re)positioning disability as a useful optic through which to examine the dynamics of imperialism. The colonial provides the landscape for understanding contemporary Southern spaces within which disability is constructed and lived – neocolonised spaces hosting what I call neocolonised bodies. The paper concludes that decolonisation, just like colonialism, is not a metaphor. Instead, it is a continuous violent and political process owned by the global South but open to collaboration, drawing on forms of resistance that have long colonial lineages.

Introduction

Disability in the global South has garnered some attention in recent years, but rarely from within disability studies, a field of thought that retains an indiscriminate focus on the global North, echoing the voices of Northern academics and activists, particularly those in the UK and the US (Grech, 2009). Indeed, the global South, real or imagined, is often invisible or marginalised in the dominant disability discourse and literature (see for example Oliver, 1990). Disabled lives in the Southern context are often simplified and generalised in a dynamic of homogenising, decontextualised and dehistoricised discourse. Instead, concepts and knowledge from the global South, the Southern voice and epistemologies are rarely considered, sustaining an ‘academic neo-imperialism’ (Alatas, 2003, p. 601), itself traceable to the colonial creation and institution of imperial knowledge as ‘the knowledge’.

But while the global South is often marginalised or ignored in disability studies, notions which have more than symbolic significance in the global South are sometimes opportunistically employed. One of these is the ‘colonial’. Disability theorists have recently referred to the notion of colonised bodies and minds through practices such as medicalisation (see for example Shakespeare, 2000), as well as discourse and theory (Roets & Goodley, 2008). Infusing the colonial within the critique has implied for these theorists a call for decolonisation, whether in the way disability is talked about, researched or intervened in.

While these critical Northern accounts are laudable, the word ‘colonial’ is often little more than a metaphor for subjugation and domination, a metaphor disassociated from its historical lineages and the discursive and material power that made it one of the most important, destructive and lasting forces in human history. To be clear, metaphors can indeed be productive and performative (see Ricoeur, 1978) and have much use in our understanding of the post/neocolonial condition, including difference, oppression and alienation. But metaphors are limited in scope when, in practice, fields such as disability studies have rarely contemplated the historical event of colonialism, the event that ultimately gave rise to the metaphor and imbues it with meaning, and which is interpreted and lived differently by the colonised and the coloniser. Indeed, the metaphor can easily work ‘by subverting the need for conscious reflection’ (Betcher, 2004, p. 89).

The disengagement from the global South and the relegation of Southern epistemologies and voices to the peripheries is clear testimony that the word ‘colonial’ is confined to a Northern view of historical events sifted through a blatantly Northern optic.¹ It is important to note, though, that the disengagement of disability from the colonial is also compounded by a postcolonial studies that flagrantly continues to bypass disability in much of its content, its analysis often limited to gender and race, and where disability simply stands in as a metaphor for postcolonial repression.

The absence of the colonial from Eurocentric disability studies is perhaps unsurprising because the coloniser does not want to recollect colonialism as it challenges his/her own ‘civility’. Deconstructing and engaging the colonial is sometimes interpreted as apologising for something the colonialists feel they had nothing to do with. And the colonialist, as recent history reminds us, does not like to apologise. When Great Britain destroys the records of colonial crimes, it is clear that what people are meant to recollect are solely the assumed/distorted benefits and bounties of colonialism found in the aesthetics of colonial art hanging on the walls of its rich art galleries. When the colonised wants to recollect the material colonial (part of his/her political project), perhaps even of ontological decolonisation (see Fanon, 1963), the coloniser is hardly interested. The colonised is perpetually left trying to create not only interest in, but also legitimacy for his/her own narrative. In the opening page of The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Oloudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, The African, Written by Himself, Equiano, a former slave, feels compelled to justify his text, and perhaps even downplay his narrative, deeming it perhaps not exciting enough for the colonial reader, but which, he hopes, may still serve some or other emancipatory purpose:

People generally think those memoirs only worthy to be read or remembered which abound in great or striking events … which in a high degree excite either admiration or pity: all others they consign to contempt and oblivion. It is therefore, I confess, not a little hazardous in a private and obscure individual … especially when I own offer here the history of neither a saint, a hero, nor a tyrant … I am not so foolishly vain as to expect from it either immortality or literary reputation. If it affords any satisfaction to my numerous friends … or in the smallest degree promotes the interests of humanity … and every wish of my heart gratified. Let it therefore be remembered, that, in wishing to avoid censure, I do not aspire to praise. (Equiano (1789/2001), pp. 19–20)

In this paper, I critically engage with the colonial encounter and its connections with disability as I attempt to highlight some arguments as to why and how this encounter transcends the metaphorical, and why engagement with the colonial is critical in any analysis looking at disability in the global South. Through this I hope to support the development of broader theoretical engagements with disability and colonialism in a range of disciplines, especially disability studies, while sustaining efforts at decolonising global disability discourse and practice as a political project of praxis.

Historicising the disability narrative: colonialism matters

Starting this section, I shall be stating the obvious: colonialism cannot be ignored because this is probably the only common experience in the complex, fragmented, and heterogeneous Southern spaces, an experience that defines and constructs these spaces. As Islam (2012, p. 163) emphasises, many Southern countries and people were not simply colonised, but were ‘essentially constituted in and through colonization’. Colonialism is buried deep in the psyche and embodied collective memory of the coloniser and the colonised, bound to speak about and from their specific locations, within power structures, past and present, their knowledge situated, their narratives often shared. These are the geopolitics of their knowledge (Mignolo, 2008). Disability existed and was constructed, imagined and lived in the colonial, providing the backdrop for and framing the contemporary disability landscape, with the implication that understanding the disability narrative in the global South means (re)positioning it and understanding it as a global historical narrative. Furthermore, this implies that it is also possible to examine imperialism through the lens of disability, providing useful avenues for engagements with disability in fields such as postcolonial studies.

The materiality of the colonial

The colonial encounter stretching back to the late 15th century, with the domination of the Atlantic commercial circuit, is indeed far from metaphor or abstraction, and indeed any serious materialist disability offering cannot possibly bypass the colonial encounter, because it is the ‘crucial moment in which modernity, coloniality, and capitalism, as we know them today, came together’ (Mignolo, 2008, p. 248).² Instilling the colonial project was far from harmless, initiating systematic mechanisms of pillaging, brutal violence and oppression (see Martínez Peláez, 2009). Land was appropriated through capture or measures such as land titling introduced for the first time, and food and water, among other things, were imputed a value and became tradeable commodities, reducing their local consumption. This resulted in gross impoverishment, starvation and death. Importantly, livelihoods were transformed as landlessness met the introduction of forced, hazardous, exploitative labour to contribute to the economies of their rulers by all means.

But, as Grosfoguel (2011, p. 5) highlights, what arrived in the Americas was not only labour and resource abstraction but a wider power structure: ‘a European/capitalist/military/Christian/patriarchal/white/heterosexual/ableist male’, establishing ‘simultaneously in time and space several entangled global hierarchies’. Colonialism shifted gender roles, created or intensified patriarchy, while cultural assets, beliefs, knowledge, customs, languages, indigenous communities and traditions were subjected to serious attempts at eradication by producing uniform alienated cultures that the empire could better dominate. This was done through both violent means as well as the Christianising mission of ontological and spiritual indoctrination, domination and purity. The latter relegated native beliefs and religions such as the Maya cosmovision (complex spiritual and world views) to the confines of the supernatural and the incredulous, ‘the anomalies peopling the horizon of the Christian imagination’ (Betcher, 2004, p. 87). Critically, the colonial ‘civilising’ mission introduced racial ‘Otherness’ as the key ideological component for colonialism to function, rule and dominate. Quijano (2000, p. 533) emphasises how the idea of race did not exist before colonisation, was instituted to demarcate the differences between the colonisers and the colonised, and was later expanded to incorporate ‘supposed differential biological structures’. Race and racism, therefore, were not only instrumental, but indeed constitutive of the colonial encounter and of capitalist accumulation.

The violence of colonialism: framing and reframing disability

Disabled people, like others, do not exist outside history, and were impacted as part of the colonised. The coloniser changed the natural and human landscape forever, also importing previously unknown diseases such as measles, small pox and the plague, pandemics ravaging and weakening whole populations and a major cause of native depopulation (e.g. among the Amerindians). The poverty, hunger and starvation that followed land appropriation, taxation and violent work conditions were a major cause of illness and disease. The violence of slave labour and colonial corporeal punishments of the ‘native’ left many with visible impairments, a violence constitutive of the broader colonial project of managing difference, whereby controlling the ‘native unreason … could only be addressed by the exercise of unreasonable violence’ (Rao & Pierce, 2006, p. 2). As the coloniser encountered the Other, it had to construct the Other, racially, culturally, bodily, and spiritually. As Martínez Peláez (2009, p. 281) stresses in the case of Guatemala, it was colonialism that ‘transformed pre-Hispanic natives into Indians … a large class of servile labourers … subject to colonial authority’. But after constructing the Other, the coloniser had to manage and subjugate it, to discipline and civilise him/her as a moral duty and obligation, using all means necessary – ‘violated bodies were by definition colonial’ (Rao & Pierce, 2006, p. 21). Corporeal means such as violent labour and the whip subjugated but also cleansed the native from his/her evil spirits, legitimising and perpetuating this violence as an enterprise of God, and the coloniser, governed by his omphalos syndrome, believed he was the God inflicting it. Flogging, stretching, breaking of bones, mutilating, dismembering are well documented punishments in historical documents, for example among sugar plantation workers in the Caribbean, with punishments meted out even by courts for petty crimes such as theft (see Clarkson, 1789). Equiano (1789/2001) recounts in intricate detail the ‘cruelty of the whites’ (p. 41), who ‘looked and acted … in so savage a manner’ (p. 40), a brutal cruelty he claims ‘he had never seen among any people’ (p. 42), a cruelty positioning the coloniser as the real uncivilised, a cruelty the empire continues to vehemently try to occlude.

This corporeal violence and its visible manifestations not only managed, but also perpetuated the same racial and other categories of difference, and bodies became the medium upon which these differences were permanently inscribed and displayed. It is at this point that the scarred, unfree body of the colonised slave became a disabled body, and where disability and colonialism fused together as ‘the deforming element, disfiguring all that has to do with beauty or morality … the depository of maleficent powers’ (Fanon, 1963, p. 32). They came together in the mass known as the ‘degenerate’, or rather the ‘internal enemies’ as described by Foucault (1977), incorporating among others, women, the working class, racial others, and disabled people (Razack, 1998, cited in Betcher, 2004). The resulting impairments from these punishments, the body parts hung in dominant locations and the missing limbs, embodied in full view of others the outcome of transgressive behaviour, and the power of the coloniser to intervene and manage. Importantly, it served to curb resistance, pitching impairment as the ultimate and irreversible punishment. These bodies, now a source of aesthetic and ontological anxieties and tensions, served to regulate the colonised by sending clear messages to others that the coloniser tolerated no dissent, triggering the politics of ‘staring’ that would navigate into disabi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 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
• Index