Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper critically examines overlaps, intersections and differences between Postcolonialism and Disability Studies. After recognising that disability is not evenly distributed among populations, and that certain racial and ethnic groups have much higher rates of disablement than others, the paper asks two questions:

- to what extent can we consider disabled people as postcolonial subjects?

- to what extent are postcolonial subjects disabled?

The paper will critically analyse the use of postcolonial concepts such as hybridity, ambivalence, exile, the borderlands, and diaspora within disability studies. However, it will also bring a critical disability studies perspective to postcolonial literature - problematising disablist language, poorly theorised notions of disablement, and the lack of recognition given to disabled subjectivity within such literature.

By bringing a critical postcolonial edge to the sociology of disability, and a critical disability studies stance to the issue of postcolonialism, the paper explores and complicates the intersectionality of disability and postcolonialism.