Interdisciplinary Dialogues: Disability and Postcolonial Studies
Main Article Content
Keywords
postcolonial literature, disability, Rushdie
Abstract
Disability is a constitutive material presence in many postcolonial societies but remains surprisingly absent as a subject of analysis in the field of Postcolonial Studies. Through a critical reading of disability in Salman Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children (1981), this article develops an interdisciplinary critical methodology that pays attention to disability both as an aesthetic textual device and as lived experience.
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Clare Barker, Lecturer in English, University of Birmingham
Clare Barker, Ph.D., is Lecturer in English at the University of Birmingham. She is currently working on a monograph that combines the critical perspectives of disability studies and postcolonialism to explore representations of disability in postcolonial fictions, and is guest co-editor of a forthcoming special issue of the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies entitled “Disabling Postcolonialism.” She has published articles on eating disorders in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions and on disability in Māori literature, winning the Journal of New Zealand Literature Prize for New Zealand Literary Studies. She may be contacted at: [email protected]