Disabled movement beyond metaphor in Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table and Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea

ABSTRACT

This article offers a brief analysis of disability in relation to the Indian Ocean littoral, particularly in narratives related to migration and travel. It delineates a disciplinary gap between disability studies and Indian Ocean studies and foregrounds a series of close readings regarding the deployment of disability – a discourse worthy of inquiry beyond its use as a metaphor for postcolonial experience – in two key works of recent Indian Ocean literature: The Cat’s Table by Michael Ondaatje and By the Sea by Abdulrazak Gurnah. This article challenges the epistemic whiteness of disability studies and calls for new approaches to disability informed by Indian Ocean studies. It resituates disability as a site of colonial subjugation, containment and resistance – one that best serves the disabled pretender – by going beyond the Atlantic context of most disability studies scholarship.

KEYWORDS:

• Disability
• Indian Ocean
• migration
• Michael Ondaatje
• Abdulrazak Gurnah

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For more on the special susceptibility of the Indian Ocean littoral to climate change, see Cordner (2017).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Luke Brown

Luke Brown graduated from Georgetown University, Washington, USA with an MA in English literature in December 2018. His academic interests focus on disability studies, queer theory, writing pedagogy, and Indian Ocean literature. In 2019, with the support of a Fulbright fellowship, he taught at the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein, South Africa.