The Oppositional Labor of Disability in Framing South Asian Feminist Identities in Diasporic Educational Contexts

• In Event: 67.025 - Contested Liminalities, Erasures, Invisibility, and Hypervisibility: Global South Perspectives on De/Colonizing Social Context of Education

Abstract

Objectives
Within the South Asian diaspora, disabled women and girls struggle against the social stigma of having a disability notwithstanding the determined struggles of disabled activists to challenge the oppressive structures that shape their lives. Simultaneously, disability as a discursive construct, is taken up in complex and contradictory ways (albeit without recognition) to describe how South Asian feminist identities are framed within educational contexts in oppressive but also transformative ways. I will, therefore, trace the entangled trajectories of these discursive constructions of South Asian feminist identities by foregrounding the critical work disability does in anti-colonial/decolonial/oppositional educational contexts.

Perspective(s)
I use three different frameworks to map these trajectories. The first framework draws on the history of colonial education as encapsulated in the (in)famous Macaulay Minute of Education of 1835 that has shaped the framing of South Asian identities even today by seeking “to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern, -a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect” (para 34).

Nearly 200 years later, South Asians in the US, Canada, and the UK still grapple with that legacy caught at the borders of colonization/decolonization/collusion/solidarity as they negotiate K-12 and higher education. Thus, the second framework foregrounds the political and embodied costs of this colonial legacy now manifested in the scholarship of Kakali Bhattacharya’ innovative deployment of Gloria Anzaldúa’s conceptualization of denizens at the borders - the nepantlera – inherent nomadic subjectivities abounding in liminal spaces and encompassing the contradictory, contested positions of multiple worldviews (Bhattacharya & Payne, 2016). For Bhattacharya and Payne (2016), these borderlands are “spaces of isolation and exile, unsettling understandings of home and belongingness, and the deep excavation of wounds that maintain and proliferate divisions between self and other” (p. 1100).

Noting how both colonial framework and its decolonial imperative of the nepantlera invoke discursive constructs of normativity and disability, the final framework is that of critical disability studies which considers, “how institutions, cities or societies ‘dis-able’ people systemically and socially as well as looking into how the body and impairment can critically be incorporated into the discussions of disability and disablement” (http://mia.mobilities.ca/criticaldisability/).

Methods
I will analyze three texts: a) disabled activist Anita Ghai’s (2015) book, Rethinking Disability in India; b) Bhattacharya and Payne’s article (2016), Mixing mediums, mixing selves: Arts-based contemplative approaches to border crossings, and c) Naraian’s article (2015), Dis/ability, agency, context. In each of the texts I will trace the discourses of disability as they frame South Asian feminist identities in postcolonial/decolonial/transformative educational contexts.


Conclusion/Significance
Disability has been the missing narrative in decolonial/postcolonial/transformative educational contexts as they frame South Asian feminist identities. By marking the critical work that disability does in the framing of these identities, I offer a way for us to read disability studies, South Asian studies, and colonial/decolonial analyses as intersectional frameworks that can enable oppositional and thereby transformative educational subjectivities.

Author

• Nirmala Erevelles, The University of Alabama