Disability and colonialism : (dis)encounters and anxious intersectionalities

This special issue sets out to position disability within the colonial (the real and imagined), as it explores a range of (often anxious) intesectionalities as disability is theorised, constructed, and lived as a post/neocolonial condition. The issue emerged from serious and pressing concerns from disability and other scholars engaged in a dialogical praxis that seeks to critically explore, interrogate and challenge a series of epistemic, ontological and practical negligences. Much of this work has occurred at the margins of various disciplines and projects, in particular the intersections of disability studies and postcolonial theory, intersections that continue to be marked by ambivalence. Disability theorists who have traversed this path have mooted that, too often, disability is drawn upon as a metaphor by (post)colonial theorists, while for disability theorists, colonisation has become a key metaphor to describe experiences of oppression, marginalisation and exclusion to which disabled people are often subjected (Barker & Murray, 2010; Sherry, 2007). This process of conflation within either field has denied the 'necessary recognition of an uneven biopolitical incorporation' (McRuer, 2010, p. 171), while the spatial, historical, temporal and geopolitical factors that emerged to govern bodies-and-minds in differential ways, are confined to silence (Soldatic & Grech, 2014).