Engaging with Disability with Postcolonial Theory

Abstract

Following a brief introduction about disability in India, I underscore disability (and gender) in postcolonial theory and practice. I discuss some of the postcolonial scholars – such as Albert Memmi, Edward Said, Homi Bhabha and Chandra Mohanty – with the hope that an assimilation of postcolonial thinking would enrich the disability studies perspective. Briefly, I examine the social framing and ideological work of disabled characters in a recent film Black. Using this film I underscore the dialectic between coloniser (read ‘able subject’) and colonised (read ‘disabled subject’). Although cinema resists simple ‘answers’ to the question of how gender intersects with disability in the postcolonial world, films also offer stimulating instances of the transgressive potential of ‘different’ bodies.