Disability, Coloniality, Decoloniality

Catalog description

This course takes a multidisciplinary approach to disability justice, history, art, and activism. We will situate the social and medical models of the disabled, sick, and fat body within institutions of empire–such as the plantation, camp, and penitentiary) to examine how disability and other forms of bodily difference become scripted within liberal humanism. In doing so, we recast familiar debates in Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies on topics such as sovereignty, ecological extraction, and global capitalism through a Critical Disability Studies lens. Exploring historical and literary texts, films, poetry, embodied performances, and other aesthetic objects, we will identify how shifting formations of colonial and scientific knowledges reverberate onto our contemporary understandings and lived experiences of bodily difference as they are scaffolded through race-gender-labor relations.