Lecture Recording, Slides and Transcripts

Crip Perpheries as Crip Centres – slides with audio (prerecorded before class): https://drive.google.com/file/d/17VNdM1jbLoFSg4ljtnYxnTZZbFwnHyaq/view?usp=drive_web

Lecture Recording:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vgbmtytIFdfnT7BJN7SF1Hmki1GweF3n/view?usp=drive_open

Zoom Transcript (as yet unedited):

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Oj9L3z5c-XJTJ1poZ0Tk6CrPtppm6FX4

Chat file:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Oj9L3z5c-XJTJ1poZ0Tk6CrPtppm6FX4

Crip Peripheries as Crip Centres: access stories/art/realities/activations from the Global South

I want us to re-enter this space by reintroducing ourselves and our positionalities in the context of settler colonialism. Dylan Robinson, a scholar of Stó:lō descent, believes that land acknowledgements are always relational. Robinson urges us to move beyond the “spectacle of acknowledgement as a public performance of contrition.”  Instead, it is our duty as settlers to consider and centre our relationships with and duties to the land and its stewards, in the context of any given moment.

What are your contexts in this moment in time? Here are mine:

My name is

سما  نعمة ٱللَّٰه//sama nemat Allah. I am a mad-crip thinker, dreamer, and writer of otherwise with a fungal appetite for liberationist lifeways. I am guerilla access worker and activator and disability justice doula, whose conceptions of disability justice and body-mind-land emancipation are inspirited by and indebted to her siblings of the third world/global majority

I am a community researcher who asks questions far more than they answer them. I ground my makership, poetry, labours, and prayers in a transnational cartography of crip/mad/sick genealogies that hold her always in the subjunctive: towards the more and abundant, the imagined, the prefigurative, the possible/probable/inevitable. I yearn to architect an undisciplined, ungovernable, anachronic, and feeling praxis that mutualizes beingness and honours trans-corporeality and plural realities in productive tension.

I am bodymind opaque, illogical, untraceable, and incoherent to all but their comrades in struggle and in love (though she reads the two as synonymous). Were you to cut me open, i would bleed hues of egyptian ancestors passed, gazzawi kindred spirits, mycorrhizal mushroom ephemera, love letters, decolonial modulations of time, sunflower seeds, obscure words, cpc mouthwash, and masry mangoes.

as a diasporic settler who gets to breathe, live, learn, futurize and revolt on unceded, stolen, and occupied, i am indebted in perpetuity to the stewards of Tkaronto, Turtle Island: the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Haudenosaunee, the Chippewa, and the Huron-Wendat Peoples. Our interdependent liberations hinge on the return of land to their Original Caretakers. From Turtle Island to Palestine, landback forevermore.

Question

We begin, as Toni Cade Bambara implores us to, with the recognition that we are at war. We are at war with many things: settler-colonialism, empire, racial capitalism, disablement, debility, technological and ecological fascism and devastation, racial and abled superiority, dispossession and displacement, mass incarceration, industrial complexes and pipelines abound, the list (devastatingly) goes on.

Matrices of power have produced and promised these states not only as normal and common sense, but also as inevitable, as fixed, as unchangeable, as irreconcilable.

Bambara goes on to say that the war we are waging is “not simply a hot debate between the capitalist camp and the socialist camp on which economic, political, social arrangement will have hegemony in the world. It’s not just the battle over turf and who has the right to utilize resources for whomever’s benefit. The war is also being fought over the truth. What is the truth about human nature, about the human potential?”

I invite us to begin our several weeks of intimate, togethered conversations, and the protracted struggle against the casino of colonialism (Fidel Castro) which we take up both within and beyond this space, with an invitation: What new fruits can we bear when we demand that the normate world around us which dissatisfies us and our bodymindlands to the point of devastation, is not in fact natural? Rather, what happens if we understand it as naturalized? (emphasis on the process, the verb over the word).

Think about the ongoingness of the dominating systems that buttress the world as we know it; why would disablism, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, settler colonial epistemes have to be continually reinforced, reified, shapeshifted and transmuted time and time again if they were natural epiphenomenon (a secondary symptom, phenomenon that occurs alongside or in parallel to a primary one)? Why would the ruling class have to “devise ideological systems that normalize state violence” if our beingness inhered them (Jaffee and Sheehi, 2024)? Neo-liberalism’s biological rubrics play a role in this as philosopher Mihalio Markovic discusses in Women’s Liberation and Human Emancipation: “If selfishness, aggressiveness, the drive to conquer and dominate really are among the defining human traits…the oppression in civil society is a fact of life.”

What we will unravel in the weeks to come, through activities, dialogues, contentions, conversations, assemblages and connections is that oppression is not a fact of life; it is a fact of power and ideology. That is what we are loggerheads with. That is what are here to belie and reject. Undoing this fixity—of concentrated and consecrated power, of axiomatic capital production, eco-cides and genocides and slow, social death, of of of ad nauseaum—that is the nexus wherein we gather and wherein our crip aims come into full focus.

In Disrupting Fixity: Palestine as Central to Decolonial Disability Justice, Lara Sheehi says that when our entry point is disability justice, which for our purposes it is, “as an integral part of abolitionist thinking and enacting, we need to disrupt the processes that are regularized, modes of being and doing and functioning as normative”

This disruption of not what we know is true but what we’ve been made to believe is true acts as bedrock of disability justice and of the decolonial crip outcroppings that we take up today henceforth. And I think daily and necessarily every single one of us penetrates these so-called immovable systems regularly. So I ask:

I practice my anarchistic calisthenics by not straightening my hair, eating on the floor instead of on a table, intentionally gaining weight and revelling in the pliability of my egyptian bodymind, crossing the street when there are no cars around even when the crosswalk signals otherwise. Wearing a mask.

Fritsch (2010), discursively follows through with our ethos of non-assimilation and subjective reality refusal here in reiterating that “there is no necessity that the structures of the present subject must persist. Through an ongoing critical engagement with new practices, it is possible to form new kinds of subjects and create kinds of social relations that do not re-inscribe the same social inequities that have historically marginalized disabled people and others. The point, then, is neither to glorify nor to dismiss the status of the marginal but to transform the very foundation of any political interaction”.

Have the Audacity: Epistemological Justice and Crossing the Epistemic Line

So let us begin, though normative spaces rarely do, from the outskirts and the peripheries of disability justice. In twin-time (in simultaneity) and in the legacy of crip un-sense and dis/order, we affirm the peripheries (of knowledge, embodiment, labour, thought, and ontology) as our centre.

In their text on the dynamics of epistemological decolonization; towards epistemic freedom, Sabelo J Ndlovu-Gatsheni outlines five-ways-forward in the African struggles for epistemic freedom. 1) Return to the base/locus of enunciation 2) shifting the geo and bio-of knowledge/moving the centre 3) decolonizing the normative foundation of critical theory 4) rethinking thinking itself and finally 5) learning to unlearn in order to relearn. These will serve as honorary interventions that we lean on and architect from to challenge the ongoing privileging, primacy, and omnipotence of the Global North and the West as the founders and maker(s) of universal histories and presents (Bhambra, 2007) (if such a universality can exist).

Beginning with an epistemically liberated discourse on disability within and beyond cultural institutional contexts calls for what Lewis R Gordon (2006) renders as “shifting the geography of reason.” It requires us to agitate the ways in which disability in the Global North has been coded through the interstices of colonial structures and systems of thought (Nguyen, 2018; Meekosha, 2011; Ervelles, 2011; Puar, 2023). The knowledge and ontological economy has a “hegemonic centre from which it circulates,” argues Ndlou-Gatsheni. And that centre is Europe and North America. Epistemological justice and decolonization is thus defined as “the right to think, theorize, interpret the world, develop own methodologies and write from where one is located and unencumbered by Eurocentrism”

So if we understand colonial whiteness as having imposed itself as the fulcrum of the social, political, onto-epistemological stratosphere—as in our imaginaries, our behaviours, our knowledges, our studies, our worlds and their operations are bred by (and breed) a white and imperial order— then we can understand with greater facility that this too implicates disability studies, disability arts, and even our own projects of cultural accessibility. An ingress of resonance can come from the sheer fact that an unforgivable corollary, or more accurately, a condition of producing this work is the theft and settlement of Indigenous land and the multi-generational genocide of the Indigenous Peoples of Turtle Island. Consider also how the government grant (of a settler-colonial nation state) which has financed this work is accrued at the expense of mass de-soverignitizing, disabling, disappearing projects carried out against the Global South (Puar, 2017).

Peripheralized narratives, which ought to be focalized in a discipline that promises an anti-establishment and anti-assimilationist doctrine, are subsumed, submerged and silenced in what the late Chris Bell (2018) calls the “whitewashing of disability history, ontology and phenomenology” (p.406). Nguyen adds to this (2018, p.6) arguing that “colonialism has continued to manifest itself through the knowledge practices which have rendered the experiences of disabled people in the global South invisible.”

If non-metropolitan or southern theory, praxis and widsoms are indeed named in our work, they are mere footnotes, drivebys, or “relegated to a place of epistemic difference and alterity” (Puar, 2023) — all of which continue to reify white, imperial, western capital D Disability and its outcroppings as the central, the dominant, the nucleus, the sun.

Nguyen enumerates 4  key ways that settler-colonial disability studies reproduces the epistemic empire:

Falastine

For example, in their world-reordering chapter Critical Disability Studies and the Question of Palestine in Crip Genealogies, Jasbir Puar renders messy the perceived merit and perfection of disability justice and access work. What happens when, as Laura Jaffee (2024) asks, the “hypervisibility of disability—some disability—[justifies] practices, programs, and politics that harm or exploit disabled and (non)disabled oppressed groups?”

Palestinian disability justice ontologies will frequently offer us these counter-readings, rubrics and directives that bang on our doors once, twice, three times until they break down the galvanized propensity in white settler disability studies to lay claim to disability as an identity to hold rather than a politic to wield (especially when and because said identity is cohered, made legible and valuable through and only through the logics and grammars of empire and its liberal humanisms).

Think for example to the military program “Ro’im Rachok,” started by three mosad agents in the Ziowestern entity of the apartheid state of Israel. It purports to “harness the superpowers” of Autistics whose so-called unique aptitude prime them to visually analyze satellite images “for the slightest sign of enemy activity” (Jaffee and Sheehi, 2024). Disability and neurodivergence is rendered prideful, meaningful, useful when it services the settler-colonial nationstate (of settler colonialism, a structure that requires “perpetual injury as genocide,” and its eliminationist violence against Indigenous Palestinian Peoples. The category of disability is instrumentalized by state discourses of inclusion not only to obscure forms of debility but also to actually produce debility and sustain its proliferation. Though empire and its outposts attempt recursively to convince us otherwise, social maturation and redress do not come at the heels of offshoring the colonial labours of the elite to the marginalized.

Southern crip theory offers us pedagogies and praxis that enable a reckoning with disability outside the genealogies or narratives that centre the canonical. As critical disability studies scholars and access practitioners, it’s integral that we consider how the colonial production of disability challenges the idea that disability is universal and natural, especially as we steep ourselves further in the terrain of study that hinges on an exalt of embodied and experienced difference.

Because the moment we push ourselves beyond the myopic colonial lens of Global North disability activism and its single stories, we notice that perhaps the Indigenous Elder who acquires disability through colonial trauma or the domestic worker who is rendered mad by the cataclysms of war, or the communities forced to inhale poisoned and polluted air or live in ecosystems ravaged by legacy factory sites and environmentally racist practices of eco-fascism, industrial growth, and developmentalism (Jampel, 2018), may not see their identities as markers of pride. As Jasbir Puar writes in her preface to Right to Maim, “Disability empowerment and pride are part of rights discourses even as expressions of maiming, debility and disabling are central to economies and vocabularies of violence and exploitation.”  Helen Meekosha (2011) parallels this indictment in Decolonizing Disability, noting that “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”.

These examples highlight that many of the main tenets of the disability movements by Western advocates—a rejection of the medical model, identity and pride, human rights—do not carefully weigh in transnational experiences of disability. So as we come to the final parts of this module, we must challenge ourselves by asking: How do we reconcile the colonial experiences of manufactured disability with the (more centred, more colonial, and often times more desired) discourse on human rights and disability pride? Can we hold both without denying the lived experiences of either, namely those in the Global South whose non-White lifeworlds are seldom first on the agenda if they make the list at all? How can we ensure that our disability justice practices are always rooted in a dismantling of the colonial enterprise, without pathologizing and undignifying the very body-minds that have been disabled by it? How do we account and name and weaponize the privileges accrued as power-laden disabled subjects absorbed into regimes of visibility to organize insurrectionary access scripts that embolden dissent rather than deference? How are we centring disability and access realities and knowledges the world over?

Earlier, we spoke to positionality. I raise this point again to engage with the biopolitical risk of being that differentiates debilitation from disability. This is important to do now as we, in painful and yet rhizomatic simultaneity, witness the “slow violence” of Global Southern communities as well as the quiet and slow death, capture, and disappearance of our assemblages of capacity, disability, and debility here, “modulated across historical time, geopolitical space, institutional mandates, and discursive regimes” (Puar, 2017, xiv)

Access Washing

The co-optation and absorption of access by imperial systems and dictates has wrought about terrains of “access-washing,” a term that the late disability justice activist Stacey Park Milbern (2019) describes as both the “leveraging ‘accessibility’ as justification to harm communities of color and poor & working-class communities” and as “antithesis to disability justice.”

In their dissertation, Access Washing at the Imperial University: Militarism, Occupation, and Struggles Toward Disability Justice, Jaffee (2020) accents, through transnational crip frameworks, the ways that this practice and logic is deployed systematically by Zioamerican and western hegemony, with their universities acting as their tool and trojan horse, to “conceal imperial and settler-colonial complicities in the U.S. and Israel.”

In naming higher education institutions as ecosystems of disability injustice, Jaffee necessarily implicates us too.

As access activators, we are implicated in erecting a movement that sprouts from, is invested in, is indebted to the periphery. It is not merely a duty, but a necessity for southern crip narratives and access attunements and cravings to penetrate this hegemonic core (Kelly, 2013) if a desire for fulsome justice is really the lighthouse of our praxis. As Theri A Pickens (2023) writes in the forward of Crip Genealogies, citing the text’s editorial inquiry of aim: “[W]ho is left out of a field that champions itself as the most marginalized?” How do we remedy this with cultural and collective access instead of reaffirming it with access washing (Milbern, 2020)) or access exceptionalism (Chen, Kafer, Kim, Minich, 2023)?

Example:

Access Exceptionalism, as nominated and defined by Mel Y. Chen. Alison Kafer, Eunjung Kim, and Julie Avril Minich, anticipates and indexes the ways access is weaponized to exert whiteness, “severing disability access from broader social justice.” This happens, these thinkers argue, when access is understood in atomistic or individualized ways, “as something with which to comply” instead of as something that demands us to be non-compliant (against euro-american paradigm, against world orders, against reform, against deathmaking, against coloniality and colonial ablenationalism…,,,) This results opportunistically and intentionally in aggressions against BIPOC crips who are then forced to carry the purported burdens of access failures.

Our purposes come into a fully and politically sharp view at these junctures and playgrounds of dreaming accesses and accessibilities of alterity—as in a cultural accessibility buttressed and scaffolded by and steeped in anti-empire modalities, feelings, justifications, and futures.

Group Ideating Activity

Let’s make a changeable list together of our desired orientations as access activators. We will discuss this together in class, as well as on the discord in General.