You Cannot Fight Fascism with Imperialism: Transnational Disability as Political Imperative

• In Event: CDSC Sponsored Panel: Disability in an Age of Fascism (HYBRID)

Abstract

As the U.S. contemplates the naked fascist takeover of government functions and groups like US AID, critical minority rights and justice-based movements navigate their place within and against the state. One of these movements, disability rights, finds itself confronting a crumbling state infrastructure which already offered only limited access to care. Amidst this movement, disability justice activists remind the movement of the intersectional impetus to center Black, trans, and immigrant disabled voices, and disability studies as a field offers genealogies centering these key actors. What is missing, in this conversation, however, is the way that U.S. empire has shaped the history of disability rights itself. In this paper, I argue that attention to the transnational genealogy of the disability rights movement highlights the racism and eugenics central to some sections of the movement and its collusion with imperial global health and welfare programs. Emphasizing that the U.S. and its regimes of aid and patronage stunted the growth of disability rights in the Global South, I show using archival material that the "rights" and "identity" based logic of the disability movement relied not only on the material debilitation of Black and brown labor but also the clear, rhetorical distinction between Global North disabled "subjects" and Global South disabled "objects" as passive recipients of imperial welfare. Highlighting how these very disabled "objects" have resisted US empire and the rise of fascism in places like India, I argue that the disability rights movement needs to contend with its complicity in global empire and learn tools to fight fascism from those who have been harmed by it.

Author

• Jiya Pandya, Yale University