Race, Genetics and Disablement: Colonial Longings for Racial Certainty

Keval, Harshad

Abstract

This chapter explores the relationship between disablement, race, coloniality and the social and cultural production of naturalised, embodied difference. Race here is a fluid, relational, technology of power that speaks to coloniality and often un-articulated histories of producing and maintaining notions of inherent inferiority and superiority. Racial science, hegemonically written normal bodies and blood purity perform important roles here. The centring of white, Anglo-American-European identities within and outside of disability discourse is part of a ‘Universalising’, colonial modern, scientific rationality embedded in epistemic and material relations. It excludes the racially marginalised within the global North and eliminates the possibility of racialised disability in the global South. Constructing racialised, inferior bodies as existentially deviant positions disabilities internally, making the individual the holder, originator and manifestation of incorrectness and pathology. I argue that this is fundamentally located in racial and colonial world-making, resulting in raced, gendered and embodied dis/abilities. Anxieties about defining essences and ‘blood-purity’ are written onto and into particular bodies, manifested as the need for forms of embodied certainty. Using race-critical sociologies, global Southern, postcolonial and decolonial frameworks, I reflect on and unpack the persistent longing for a ‘final’ truth to the Western modernity framed problem of embodied abnormalities and racial difference.

Citation

Keval, H. (2024). Race, Genetics and Disablement: Colonial Longings for Racial Certainty. In T. Chataika, & D. Goodley (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Postcolonial Disability Studies. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003310709-29

• Acceptance Date: Apr 1, 2024
• Online Publication Date: Mar 29, 2024
• Publication Date: Mar 29, 2024
• Deposit Date: May 24, 2024
• Publisher: Routledge
• Book Title: The Routledge Handbook of Postcolonial Disability Studies
• Chapter Number: 22
• ISBN: 9781032316499
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003310709-29
• Keywords: Disability; Postcolonial; Race; Racism; Decolonial