Disability and Illness in Imperial and Postcolonial Literature

Abstract

The intersections of disability/illness, colonial power, and postcoloniality within imaginative literature have fascinated scholars for decades. This article surveys the extant scholarship on representations of disability and illness in imperial and postcolonial Anglophone literatures. It argues that scholarship on the nexus of disability and imperial literature has centered on canonical works of fiction; these works represent disability in the colonial tropics to both register the degeneration of Europeans in these settings and to construct a racialized, disabled Other whose existence justifies the civilizing mission of the British Empire. Meanwhile, scholarship on disability in postcolonial literature has largely centered on how to theorize the concurrent representations of disability, nationalism, and (post)coloniality in these works: whether as metaphor, materiality, or something else. The article suggests that in this case, disability serves different ideological ends. In canonical postcolonial literatures disability may be read as a vestige of colonial violence, as an allegory for the postcolonial nation-state, or as an embodied engagement with the vicissitudes of migration and exile.