Disability and the majority world : a neocolonial approach

Abstract

Global guesstimates suggest that around 80 per cent of the planet’s 650 million disabled people are located in the so-called Global South, the bulk in rural areas and most suffer the brunt of disproportionate poverty. In spite of this, disability studies remains profoundly WENA (West European and North American) and focused exclusively on urban post-industrialist settings. In spite of this, its theories and tenets such as the social model of disability are consistently exported to a Global South it never intended to address. As the imperialistic trail of Western knowledge and practices legitimises this process, debates are perpetually re/neocolonised, discourses are simplified and generalised, contexts (places and spaces), cultures and histories (temporalities) homogenised, and many critical issues ignored or intentionally resisted. They become ontological invisibility. Disability studies becomes complicit in the neocolonising of the Southern space. This chapter is inspired by elements of post-structuralism and Latin American writings on coloniality/neocolonialism (Coronil, 2000, 2008; Quijano, 2008) and seeks to explore and critically discuss some of the gaps that emerge when attempting to articulate a critical debate around disability in the majority world. The chapter takes on the call by some to decolonise methodologies (Tuhiwai Smith, 2002), as well as thought and debate (Fanon, 1967; Meekosha, 2008; Goodley, 2010). It concludes that a critical disability studies that is open, situated around prioritising, engaging with and learning about the Global South in its full complexity is necessary, a project I term Critical Global Disability Studies.