New Book Roundtable | Care at the End of the World: Dreaming of Infrastructure in Crip-of-Color Writing

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

Featuring key scholars in disability, race, and queer-of-color critique, this roundtable discusses Jina B. Kim's new book Care at the End of the World: Dreaming of Infrastructure in Crip-of-Color Writing (Duke University Press 2025). Jina's book demonstrates why we need radical disability politics and aesthetics for navigating the manifold crises of care constituting late-stage American Empire. Examining the literary afterlife of major US welfare reform in 1996, it turns to feminist- and queer-of-color wriitng that contends with the disabling effects of state austerity measures and eviscerated social safety nets. Jina’s book develops an explicitly intersectional disability framework, or “crip-of-color critique,” in order to interrupt dominant narratives about who deserves care and support. In this way, it connects the intellectual and movement lineages of disability politics and feminist-/ queer-of-color critique, thereby extending the work of building solidarity across difference modeled by texts such as This Bridge Called My Back. Following this, our roundtable discussion will foreground the necessity of coalition work in this particular political climate, and the utility of disability politics in bringing people together.

While disability has often been cast outside the scope of racial justice and political liberation, Care at the End of the World argues that contemporary ethnic American writers such as Audre Lorde, Jesmyn Ward, Karen Tei Yamashita, Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany, Aurora Levins Morales, and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha bring disability and dependency to the forefront of their literary freedom dreaming. In particular, this book considers the responses of these writers to the state-authored narratives of dependency driving welfare reform, articulated through figures such as the welfare queen, the undocumented or non-citizen immigrant, and the disabled non-worker. Not only have these narratives crucially shaped contemporary U.S. public policy, but also the writing of women- and queers-of-color who dreamed, theorized, and fought under the long shadow of Reagan. Looking to feminist disability and feminist-of-color theories of interdependency, this book demonstrates how contemporary ethnic American writers recuperate the maligned condition of dependency. They do so through their imaginative engagements with infrastructure, which organize the book’s four chapters: infrastructural divestment (chapter 1), sanitation (chapter 2), transportation (chapter 3), and healthcare (chapter 4). By drawing readerly attention to these networks, such texts emphasize our contingency on human and material infrastructures alike—the pipes, wires, roads, and labor networks that coordinate contemporary life yet so often go unnoticed. Public infrastructure thus becomes a key figure for articulating a counter-discourse of dependency—one that documents the disabling violence of state neglect while foregrounding a public ethics of care.

This roundtable will begin with some framing remarks by the author, which will briefly describe the book's key interventions and connect it explicitly to our current political moment. Then, each of the other participants will offer a comment on the book and pose some questions, which the author will address. In the last 20 minutes, we will open up conversation to the audience and engage in collective dialogue about the book's main ideas.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Britt Rusert, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Panelists

• Jina Kim, Smith College

• Sony Coráñez Bolton, Amherst College

• Sami D Schalk, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Comment

• Robert McRuer, George Washington University

Biographical Information

Jina B. Kim is a scholar, writer, and educator of feminist disability studies and queer-of-color critique. She currently lives and works in Western Massachusetts as an assistant professor of English and the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Smith College. Broadly, Jina’s teaching and research aims to connect the intellectual and movement lineages of disability politics and feminist-/ queer-of-color critique, thus extending the work of building solidarity across difference modeled by texts such as This Bridge Called My Back. Her book, Care at the End of the World: Dreaming of Infrastructure in Crip-of-Color Writing (Duke University Press 2025) brings a disability lens to bear on feminist- and queer-of-color literature in the aftermath of 1996 U.S. welfare reform. Through developing an intersectional disability framework called “crip-of-color critique,” it demonstrates why we need radical disability politics and aesthetics for navigating contemporary crises of care. In 2021, Jina was supported by a Career Enhancement Fellowship from the Institute of Citizens and Scholars (formerly Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation) and a Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America Visiting Faculty Fellowship at Brown University. She has received the Irving K. Zola Award for Emerging Scholars in Disability Studies, MELUS's Katherine Newman Best Essay Award, and Smith College's Sherrerd Prize for Distinguished Teaching. Jina’s writing has appeared in Signs, Social Text, American Quarterly, GLQ, MELUS (Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States), South Atlantic Quarterly, Disability Studies Quarterly, Lateral, and The Asian American Literary Review.

Dr. Sami Schalk (she/her) is Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of Bodyminds Reimagined (2018) and Black Disability Politics (2022), both available open access through Duke University Press. Dr. Schalk’s research focuses on race, disability & gender in contemporary American literature and culture. She is currently working on a project about the creation of pleasure spaces for multiple marginalized people.

Sony Coráñez Bolton is associate professor of English & Spanish and chair of Latinx and Latin American Studies at Amherst College. He is the author of Crip Colony: Mestizaje, US Imperialism, and the Queer Politics of Disability in the Philippines (Duke 2023). It demonstrates the ways that colonialism and disability are part of a unified ideological structure in Philippine mestizo politics. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Critical Ethnic Studies, Journal of Asian American Studies, Periphêrica, and Verge: Studies in Global Asias. His second book, Dos X: Disability and Racial Dysphoria in Latinx and Filipinx Culture is forthcoming with the University of Texas Press.

Robert McRuer is Professor of English at George Washington University, where he teaches queer theory, disability studies, and critical theory more generally. He is the author, most recently, of Crip Times: Disability, Globalization, and Resistance (NYU Press, 2018) and of Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (NYU, 2006).