Decolonising disability: thinking and acting globally

Abstract

This paper argues that the dominance of the global North in the universalising and totalising tendencies of writings about disability has resulted in the marginalisation of these experiences in the global South. This constitutes an intellectual crisis for disability studies in the periphery. The experience of colonisation and colonialism in the global South was both disabling and devastating for the inhabitants. The production of impaired peoples continues as a result of a multiplicity of phenomena including: war and civil strife, nuclear testing, the growth of the arms trade, the export of pollution to ‘pollution havens’ and the emergence of sweatshops. Yet the agendas of disability pride and celebration in the metropole may appear to stand in stark contrast to the need to prevent mass impairments in the global South. The paper concludes by attempting to articulate a southern theory of disability that challenges some of the implicit values and concepts of contemporary disability studies and includes analyses of the lasting disabling impact of colonialism.

Keywords:

• disability
• colonialism
• global south
• impairment
• Indigenous knowledge
• settler societies

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this article was originally given as a Keynote paper given to the 4th Biennial Disability Studies Conference, 2–4 September 2008, at Lancaster University, UK. The author wishes to thank Raewyn Connell and Russell Shuttleworth for their help and ideas in the writing of this paper. The author is also grateful for the feedback from conferences in England and the USA where this paper was given.