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“The field of disability studies, especially the critical and cultural variants, has always learned and borrowed from work in feminist, postcolonial, and queer studies. This volume demonstrates that those invaluable relationships continue to produce meaningful explorations of social justice; it also demonstrates the ongoing need to disrupt dominance and appreciate alterity.” Professor David Bolt, Personal Chair, Disability Studies, Liverpool Hope University, UK “The range of Padilla’s knowledge is simply stunning. In this volume, he deftly weaves multiple theories and a rich history of intellectual thought with lived experiences of people, exploring agency from a dis/abled Latinx perspective, and bringing forth new ways of thinking about the Global North and South.” David J. Connor. Ph.D., Professor Emeritus, Hunter College, CUNY, USA “Must read for activists, scholars, and artists! Learn from one of the best at deeply describing radical solidarity and emancipatory learning across space and time. Dr. Padilla masterfully engages the reader with the problematic and the possibilities of transformative change.” Paulo Tan. Ph.D., Johns Hopkins University, UK “Dr. Alexis Padilla’s generative discourse is a groundbreaking, praxical liberation meta-counter-text against global racist and ableist hegemony. The meta-counter-text provides us with a fusion between theory and practice through the critical, analytical, autoethnographic and non-fictional counterstories, which bring to life the transformative power of LatDisCrit to take the reader at their positionalities and relationalities, inward and outward, about supremacies such as ableism, imperialism, colonialism and anti-blackness that are experienced by subalternate Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BPIOC) within global south and north bodyminds.” David I. Hernández-Saca, Assistant Professor, University of Northern Iowa, Department of Special Education, USA
Disability, Intersectional Agency, and Latinx Identity
This interdisciplinary volume links dis/ability and agency by exploring LatDisCrit’s theory and activist emancipatory practice. It uses the author’s experiential and analytical views as a blind brown Latinx engaged scholar and activist from the global south living and struggling in the highly racialized global north context of the United States. LatDisCrit integrates critically LatCrit and DisCrit, which look at the interplay of race/ethnicity, diasporic cultures, historical sociopolitics, and disability within multiple Latinx identities in mostly global north contexts, while incorporating global south epistemologies. Using intersectional analysis of key concepts through critical counterstories, following critical race theory methodological traditions, and engaging possible decoloniality treatments of material precarity and agency, this book emphasizes intersectionality’s complex underpinnings within and beyond Latinidades. Through a careful interplay of dis/ ability identity and dis/ability rights/empowerment, the volume opens avenues for intersectional solidarity and spaces for radical transformational learning. This book will be of interest to all scholars and students working in disability studies; intersectional disability justice activists; critical Latinx/Chicanx studies; critical geographies; intersectional political philosophy; and political and public sociology. Alexis C. Padilla is a blind brown Latinx scholar/activist and a Ph.D. graduate from the Language, Literacy, and Sociocultural Studies department at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, USA. Dr. Padilla is also a lawyer, sociologist, and conflict transformation engaged scholar. His work explores emancipatory learning and radical agency in the context of decolonial Latinx theorizing and critical disability studies. His published contributions emphasize the activist/disability advocacy vantage point combined with actionable dimensions of inclusive equity research and practice. Dr. Padilla’s postsecondary teaching experience encompasses almost three decades. He has more than 20 years of engagement in advocacy and conflict resolution work with Spanish-speaking families and English Language Learning students with disabilities in various USA settings. Since spring 2020, Dr. Padilla has been affiliated with Phillips Theological Seminary to expand his research agenda and his activism scope into intersectional disability theology.
Interdisciplinary Disability Studies Series editor: Mark Sherry, The University of Toledo, USA
Disability studies has made great strides in exploring power and the body. This series extends the interdisciplinary dialogue between disability studies and other fields by asking how disability studies can influence a particular field. It will show how a deep engagement with disability studies changes our understanding of the following fields: sociology, literary studies, gender studies, bioethics, social work, law, education, or history. This ground-breaking series identifies both the practical and theoretical implications of such an interdisciplinary dialogue and challenges people in disability studies as well as other disciplinary fields to critically reflect on their professional praxis in terms of theory, practice, and methods. Disability and Citizenship Studies Marie Sépulchre Women with Disabilities as Agents of Peace, Change and Rights Experiences from Sri Lanka Edited by Karen Soldatic and Dinesha Samararatne Dwarfism, Spatiality and Disabling Experiences Erin Pritchard International Disability Rights Advocacy Languages of Moral Knowledge and Institutional Critique Daniel Pateisky Disability, Intersectional Agency, and Latinx Identity Theorizing LatDisCrit Counterstories Alexis Padilla Disability and Art History from Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century Edited by Ann Millett-Gallant and Elizabeth Howie For a full list of titles in this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/series/ ASHSER1401
Disability, Intersectional Agency, and Latinx Identity Theorizing LatDisCrit Counterstories
Alexis C. Padilla
First published 2022 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 Alexis Padilla The right of Alexis Padilla to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Padilla, Alexis, author. Title: Disability, intersectional agency and Latinx identity : theorizing LatDisCrit counterstories / Alexis Padilla. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2021. | Series: Interdisciplinary disability studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021001754 (print) | LCCN 2021001755 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367540395 (hardback) | ISBN 9781003084150 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: People with disabilities--Latin America. | Discrimination against people with disabilities--Latin America. | Sociology of disability--Latin America. | Group identity--Latin America. Classification: LCC HV1559.L38 P33 2021 (print) | LCC HV1559.L38 (ebook) | DDC 305.9/08098--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021001754 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021001755 ISBN: 978-0-367-54039-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-54038-8 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-08415-0 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003084150 Typeset in Times New Roman by Taylor & Francis Books
IN MEMORIAM
To La Nona, La Tia Albina, Our Brother David, My Friend John Sweeny, The COVID Victims Globally, With or Without Disabilities.
Contents
Acknowledgments 1 Introducing Latinx identity: LatDisCrit’s radical alterity
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Introduction: On identity and alterity 1 Defining and making sense of radical solidarity, emancipatory learning, and radical agency as relevant to LatDisCrit 2 Making sense of LatDisCrit through Arturo’s experientially grounded counterstory 3 LatDisCrit and intersectional pandisability agency links 5 LatDisCrit and radical exteriority 6 A word on agency: The creative vitality of relational power in action 7 The book’s thematic synopsis 8 Notes 10 2 The normalizing fantasies of Habilitación and mundane rehabilitation dynamics: A global south metanarrative exploration
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Introduction: Brief context notes 16 Hermeneutic notes: Broad counterstory background strokes 16 Zooming in: Habilitación’s unique situational aura 18 Closing reflexive testimonial musings 19 Notes 21 3 LatDisCrit as radical exteriority and new materialisms: Bridging the decolonial power of global south and global epistemologies Introduction: The intersectional poetics of disability 24
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Contents Intersectional disability agency and normalizing mythologies: Linking Barthes and Foucault 26 Intersectional disability agency, power, and freedom 29 Power, intersectional agency, and decolonial Latinx ways of knowing 30 Intersectional agency and the problem of mestizaje as coloniality of power in action: A look at the contours of supremacist identitarian hierarchy 32 Concluding preliminary thoughts on normalizing mythologies, intersectional agency, and the undoing of the coloniality of power, knowledge, and being 34 Notes 36 4 The betraying power of postcolonial rehabilitation: Beyond Fátima and Arturo
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Introduction: The counterstory’s scenario: On the situational micropolitics of global north rehabilitation 40 Intersectional disability agency and the irony of choice ideologies 41 Further reflections on the coloniality of disabled intersectional subalternity and rehabilitative betrayal as an alienated mode of agency 42 The plot’s critical unfolding 43 Notes 44 5 LatDisCrit and blackness studies: Intersectional solidarity lessons from Edwina’s and Lidia’s counterstories Introduction: Two counterstory scenarios: Reflecting on blackness studies and fugitive disability knowledges of subaltern intersectionality 46 Intersectional disability agency, truth telling, and techniques of the self 47 A critical look at employability as fugitive knowledges of disablement 48 Disability disclosure as truth telling: Agentic space or obedience duty? 49 Disability disclosure and radical exteriority: Identity surrender or subaltern identitarian rebirth? 50 Edwina’s emancipatory learning predicament 51
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Lidia’s predicament: From disability disclosure to relational power dynamics 51 Other relevant layers of reflection 53 Notes 54 6 LatDisCrit as an intersectional creeping decoloniality of blackness and indigeneity: Embodiment and subaltern transmodernities
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Introduction: The intersectional subalternity of embodiment 56 The habitus of embodied disability studies in Latin America and Spain: A critical look at functional diversity and “transductivity” 57 The role of intersectional agency as social-movement building in Latin America and beyond 60 Activism and interdependence: On the legitimation of multiple agentic knowledges 64 Revisiting new materialisms and relational epistemologies: Emerging race-based decolonial modes of intersectional disability agency practice and theorizing 67 Subaltern transmodernities and trans-Latinidades: On mestizaje and intersectional disability agency contours 71 Bringing the epistemology of Dei’s blackness studies into transLatinx intersectional agency analyses 75 Chapter summary and concluding intersectional agency reflections 81 Notes 82 7 Jóvenes Progresistas?: A radical solidarity counterstory Introduction: Returning to the micropolitics of global south contexts 88 Enacting decolonial modes of radical solidarity: Reflections from the Latin American global south 90 Critical LatDisCrit notes on intersectional disability agency, decolonial subalternities, and the search for feminist/masculine spaces of emancipatory unlearning and radical transgressive solidarity 93 LatDisCrit in the global south: Triangulating the ideological contours of ableist, racial, and gender/sex-based contractarian frameworks 98
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Contents Decolonizing intersectional disability movement building: Notes on the discursive materiality of organizational alienation as separatist identity constructions 100 Notes 104
8 A postcolonial LatDisCrit leadership: Development counterstory: Diving into global north contours of subalternities and intersectional disability agency
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Introduction: The intersectional subalternity of embodiment 106 Diasporic global south agency bifurcations: Interrogating organizational modes of alienation as expressions of radical exteriority in the global north, part 1 107 LatDisCrit and Sancho Panza modes of coloniality: Interrogating organizational modes of alienation as expressions of radical exteriority in the global north, part 2 108 Concluding critical notes on LatDisCrit, the racial/ableist contracts and collective agency 109 Notes 114 9 The power and perils of LatDisCrit’s situated emancipation: Bringing home lessons and forging possibilitarian intersectional disability agency paths Introduction: Toward actionable, embodied, diasporic/ transmodern, and transgressive decolonialities. Summing up the basis for an intersectional subalternity approach to LatDisCrit as intersectional disability agency movement building 116 Integrating critically new materialisms and discursive strands: Looking for thoughtful modes of intersectional disability activisms as actionable trans-Latinx metatheorizing 118 Creeping maroon/quilombo third spaces: LatDisCrit’s race-based transmodernities as decolonial paths for inventing diasporic, subaltern modes of intersectional disability agency and radical solidarity 122 An illustration from Canada on the drawbacks of normative reliance 123 Exploring LatDisCrit within the limits of the quilombo metaphor and maroon knowledges born in the struggle 124 Maroon knowledges as dis/gendered, racialized trans-Latinx modes of decolonial solidarity 125 Notes 127
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Contents Epilogue: Musings on global south distinctiveness and material precarities
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Notes 130 Bibliography Index
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Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Budd Hall for believing in this book project from the start; I also thank Mark Sherry for giving it the initial impulse within Routledge. Special thanks go to Carolina Ferrante who was always receptive to my inquiries these past three years, serving as a generous guide through the disability studies literatures within Latin America. Carolina introduced me to Miguel Ferreira, to whom I am grateful for having become an extraordinary intellectual sounding board. Lastly, yet most significantly, I offer my deepest thanks and warmth to Amalia, my beloved blue flower, who makes everything possible in my life and whose interdependent caring generosity goes way beyond what can be expressed.
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Introducing Latinx identity LatDisCrit’s radical alterity
Introduction: On identity and alterity Identity talk is alterity talk. Even sketching our identity means a fluid engagement with the contours of othering things, things related to identities other than our own. This book relies a great deal on counterstories. Counterstories are dialectical narratives where identity and alterity play a pivotal role. Thus, I am opting to start everything up in the book by introducing Arturo. I think it is crucial to do so, even before we dive into further conceptual considerations. This will help ground the book’s counterstories in their flow as identity/alterity tools, which make sense through one’s acquaintance with their dialectical origins. Arturo is a blind brown Latinx scholar and activist. He is old enough to have gone through the energy crisis of the 1970s. Arturo is now in his fifties, so he remembers clearly how his oil-producing home country was bursting with pie-in-the-sky hopes during those years. As usual, there was a lot of corruption in politics, but the possibilitarian spirit was undeniably there. This was even true among lower-class brown mestizo families such as Arturo’s. Our starting global south context in this first chapter of the book is Venezuela, where the oil industry was nationalized right in the middle of the 1970s energy crisis. Their founding membership in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC)1 was sold as a big deal, as a strategic advantage with an eye toward “non-aligned”2 development prospects at a time when Cold War powers controlled so many postcolonial contexts. In most third-world cases back then, collective territoriality was aspiring to some sort of precarious recognition and to a unique sense of emerging nationhood3 beyond the shadow of postWorld War II and other imperial-tradition superpowers such as England and France.4 Yet, although the possibilitarian spirit is conspicuously present in the following pages, this is not a typical macro-level Latin American Studies book. It is not an eclectic memoir of Arturo’s experiences either, at least not in the purely descriptive or literary meaning of the word memoir. In this book, I am much more interested in setting an invitational border-crossing tone. I want activists and various types of scholars to talk, think, and imagine with one another. I want this interdisciplinary volume to help them forge new, practical ways to weave the intersectional textures of alterity and identity, particularly with regard DOI: 10.4324/9781003084150-1
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to the subaltern decoloniality of disability and race. I want to explore with you, with each and all of you, innovative ways to theorize, apply, and understand together the intersectional agency dimensions of disability as a mode of what Du Bois called a century ago “double consciousness,”5 which in its interplay with race, gender, and class makes up a powerful multilayered consciousness of subalternity, creative resistance, and emancipation. I target the big-picture implications of microlevel experiences of Latinx folks like Arturo. These are folks at once self-identified and othered as disabled. They, by clinging to the political identity implications of this intersectional label (especially as people of color with disabilities), are bridging both global south and global north contexts. They are the embodiment of radical solidarity and emancipatory learning.
Defining and making sense of radical solidarity, emancipatory learning, and radical agency as relevant to LatDisCrit Both radical solidarity and emancipatory learning are long-term existential modes of becoming. This means that they express as nonlinear modes of identity development. In their complex contours, they shape life trajectories of resistance or conformity for intersectionally subaltern/oppressed individuals and groups. They operate in decolonial spaces (e.g., global north tribal reservations, rehabilitation settings, every instance where these people’s embodiment makes a fuss via the transgression of normalcy’s alterity limits and thus gets regulated and controlled).6 The substance of emancipatory learning resides in the continuous reflexive unearthing of what and how emancipation becomes possible, sustainable, and/or stifled. Radical solidarity, on the other hand, is about the relational make-up of alliance formation and networking toward collective decolonial modes of resistance and change making. Radical agency is another core concept I will use throughout the book. It alludes to the very heart of the dynamic trajectory of nonlinear change attempts and successes in an interplay between desire and resistance, freedom and unfreedom, learning and unlearning, will, memory, forgetting, and betrayal.7 These are things that subaltern intersectional actors undergo as they try to collaboratively subvert the relational, ideological, and systemic status quo elements that keep them at the margins of dignity-granting, embodied modes of social justice and equitable inclusivity.8 In his essay “Extension or Communication,” Paulo Freire9 stresses that education “is communication and dialogue … it is not the transference of knowledge, but the encounter of subjects in dialogue in search of the significance of the object of knowing and thinking.” In this sense, the collaborative subverting intrinsic to radical agency and radical solidarity involves at once a process of reflexive self-educating and dialectical ways of alterity dialogue with those who challenge our identitarian foundations of sameness.10 Thus, it could be said that Arturo is a subversive embodiment of LatDisCrit in action. In broad terms, LatDisCrit integrates critically LatCrit11 and DisCrit.12 These are two very important intersectional bodies of literature. They look at the
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interplay of race/ethnicity, diasporic cultures, historical sociopolitics, and disability with regard to multiple Latinx identities in mostly global north contexts. Global south/transmodern epistemologies are also firmly incorporated into the LatDisCrit equation, especially among decolonial Latinx and intersectionally grounded critical feminist political philosophers.13 I said in the preceding paragraph that Arturo is “an embodiment,” not “the embodiment” of LatDisCrit by any means. First, Arturo’s intersectional disability14 outlook is restricted to a particular set of existential, hermeneutic, material precarity, performative, and ideological experiences. Second, and most importantly, Arturo is what Chicanx scholar Tara J. Yosso15 calls a “counter-storytelling” archetype. This does not mean that Arturo is a fictional character invented by the author. Arturo is critically real, to use the onto-philosophical language employed by critical realist thinkers such as Margaret Archer and Roy Bhaskar.16 Arturo’s critical reality status is associated with the fact that I follow critical race theory (CRT) methodological traditions. In line with these traditions, I filter my intersectional treatment of agency through critical counterstories. These are selected testimonial instances of real experiential occurrences. These counterstories are construed in such a way that they engender (very much in the way that wisdom parables do) metatheory avenues for emancipatory and practice-oriented reflexivity.17 In other words, I depart from the idea that experientially grounded values and knowledge paradigms make possible emancipatory learning and collective resistance. Emancipatory resistance is not only an external manifestation but an embodiment of values. Therefore, understanding/explaining these underlying values and epistemological components allows for a deeper hermeneutic analysis of the roots of resistance that can lead to emancipation/ liberation. Emancipation/liberation should by no means be an outcome that actors achieve once and for all. Thus, counterstories serve to unearth these complex processes, exposing the value and multiple knowledge metanarratives that make them possible and/or hinder their liberation fruits.
Making sense of LatDisCrit through Arturo’s experientially grounded counterstory The self (Arturo’s just like anybody’s) is historically developed and fluid. Its formation simultaneously contains domination and liberation components. These components get collectively activated through reflexive critique and alterity manifestations.18 These manifestations are conscious and unconscious. They are often triggered by external dimensions of the very dynamics of oppression and exploitation intended to perpetuate status quo modes of domination, either deepening hegemonic dynamics or awakening emancipation/liberation utopias.19 Because of this, I use existential becoming in the tradition of Kierkegaard.20 Critical theory thinkers such as Adorno and Marcuse21 challenge Kierkegaard’s and other versions of existentialism because they find it incompatible with their Hegelian theory of historical dialectics toward emancipation. I, on the contrary, like precisely the flow of epistemological and axiological ambiguity these
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approaches to existentialism introduce. Their treatment brings about a sort of proto-postmodern ethos, especially in the political philosophy of “Latinidad,” or what I will often opt to call “trans-Latinidades” throughout the book (to emphasize the many ways Latinxness is embodied, suffered, and/or embraced).22 This kind of existential ambiguity has been intrinsic to Latinx radical agency as it relates the whole tradition to the aesthetics of “el Quixote” with its stubborn utopian character, its transgressive sense of resistance.23 Getting back to Arturo, it is important to underscore that a core distinguishing feature in my approach to counter-storytelling is the unifying metatheorizing role played by Arturo. Like other CRT counterstories, mine recreate nonfictional situations. However, Arturo constitutes a sort of distanciation alter ego. What I mean by this is that Arturo is a textual way for me to read along with readers through critical events and find alternative means to interpret them in a metatheoretical light. In other words, these are all events that I have experienced firsthand. Nevertheless, I tackle their analysis throughout this book in terms of Ricoeur’s24 assertion that authors are the first interpreters of their text. In this regard, Ricoeur allows me to enact his metatheoretical understanding of social/ collective action as a text subject to multiple interpretations by its co-authoring partners.25 To be sure, this authorial/interpretation choice does not mean that the present interdisciplinary volume is an autobiographical empirical case study or a qualitative analysis. My reflexive counterstories are metatheoretical. They illustrate what Moraga26 calls theory in the flesh. They give a sense of existential embodiment to the conceptual and metatheoretical explorations that make up the political philosophy spirit of the present book project. First, this allows me to be congruent with the existential ethos I mentioned above. Second, through each of the reflexive counterstories, I check/deconstruct concrete techniques of the self.27 Third, and most importantly, this process helps me articulate in practical ways that techniques of the self operate both in oppressive and liberating/unlearning spaces. Lastly, through the life trajectory spirit of reflexive counterstories I model the comprehensive, border-crossing ethos I envision in LatDisCrit. Stressing life trajectories allows intersectional agency explorations to become relevant to radical adult education, nonschooling community learning and social justice spheres, popular and grassroots modes of education, disability justice, disability labor organizing, justice-oriented transnational cosmopolitanism and politics,28 and many other kinds of movement building and practice-driven theorizing. Thus, Arturo’s counterstories help enact an understanding/explanation of activism best practices. These, in my view, are the most important elements that lie at the heart of actionable dimensions of decolonial intersectionality. Therefore, this applied approach to counterstories rescues explorations of radical agency possibilities from being mere speculative/metaphysical exercises. Arturo’s reflexive counterstories show how the nonlinear performative enactment of life trajectories can serve to teach and/or cultivate radical agency possibilitarian spaces. They often flow within contexts where racialized ableism’s learned hopelessness has worked long and hard to impose its colonizing grip.
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The careful examination of their performative relationality in action makes clear that radical agency possibilities are grounded on the love of freedom versus the fear of freedom. They express the love of life-giving things versus death and enslaved or enslaving modes of domination.29
LatDisCrit and intersectional pandisability agency links The truth is that Arturo’s advanced education accomplishments would probably not have been thinkable without the macro-sociopolitical transformations made possible in Venezuela as a result of its 1970s oil nationalization process.30 This is especially significant given Arturo’s conflation of disabled, working-class, and brown mestizo statuses. There is a recent paradoxical development. In Venezuela, these oil nationalization macro-sociological transformations are being drastically undone by political agents who preached a revolutionary spirit. They claim to be acting in favor of marginalized populations31 among which folks like Arturo, who claim disabled intersectional identity statuses, have disproportionate prevalence. But, as tends to happen with many other important life-changing dynamics, these broad nationhood transformations were things that Arturo did not realize when they were taking place. Their analysis has been a by-product of looking at them through the power of radical decolonial awareness, what could perhaps be described as the kaleidoscopic lens of reflexive distanciation.32 For example, Arturo never had a chance (or took the chance) to interrogate these matters. Arturo never wondered how and to what extent his youth positionality as an educated brown blind individual placed him in the Venezuelan global south context of the 1980s in a privileged hierarchical relation (or even in a sort of unintended isolation/lack of interdependent relationality) with respect to other disabled folks, e.g., folks labeled with intellectual/neurodiversity disabilities.33 It is true that one of Arturo’s best friends as a child evolved into a catatonic state and there was a powerful relational bond between them even after the advent of this catatonic experience. However, Arturo spent his teen and early adulthood years being so busy struggling through his own normalcy-imposing challenges that he just could not yet at the time go beyond them in a meaningful fashion.34 Fortunately, there is a wonderful dynamicity that characterizes the unfolding of existential becoming throughout radical agency trajectories. Its contours are “multiversal.”35 This multiversality of existential becoming means that identity and identification can orient the ontology and epistemology of the self in multifaceted ways. In this sense, especially in their intersectional manifestations, both the self and identity categories are fragile and transitory. Here is a source of hope. This radical utopian hope is grounded on prospects to break away from isolationist modes and lack of interdependence among pandisability agents. It is therefore possible to subvert knowledge through action and vice versa. It is certainly possible to rescue spaces for radical agency trajectories that might eventually lead to emancipatory awakening and relational modes of embryonic radical solidarity with other oppressed agents and, why not, radical knowledge workers (e.g., researchers, teachers, attorneys, and other kinds of institutionally
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based change-making allies).36 This can happen even under exposure to total institutions,37 giving an unexpected emancipatory course to one’s life trajectory and formation. Such was the case with Arturo’s segregated boarding school education for the blind in Venezuela, and later with the positivistic epistemological impositions prevailing in the academic venues governing Arturo’s sociology doctoral and scholarly formation.
LatDisCrit and radical exteriority At this point in the introduction, it is paramount to touch on the linking and reflexive significance of a core concept. I am alluding to a notion that guides some of the most interesting theoretical innovations of the present book: the political philosophy exploration of radical exteriority. Here is the driving idea behind radical exteriority. The critical hermeneutic stance of intersectional and decolonial epistemologies and ethics is constantly in tension.38 In my intersectional agency paradigm, race and disability are core matrices of hierarchization. Through them, situated emancipation gets either hindered or enacted. The interplay of race and disability operates through unique subaltern spaces of possibility to create radical agency and radical solidarity avenues. Therefore, via the extreme sense of alterity derived from race and disability, radical exteriority becomes the core driving relational force in collective action. In particular, it gets enacted in the interdependent tension to make radical solidarity possible where decolonial barriers of difference and otherness have been erected, as happens so often in the many modes of transLatinidad that surrender their sense of self to Eurocentric conceptions of hierarchy, knowing, and being. Furthermore, radical exteriority does away with the subject/object ontology intrinsic to interiority-based conceptions of alterity (which artificially divide and separate material and immaterial things, mind and body, etc.).39 This is due to the fact that radical exteriority is an incommensurable space of difference. I am talking here of a difference so extreme that worldviews, ethical formulations, and aesthetic conceptions are incompatible, requiring what Chela Sandoval calls a metalanguage of love.40 This metalanguage must be such that it recognizes and transcends asymmetries. It builds on the fundamental interdependent need to avoid assimilatory modes of sameness. In other words, radical exteriority is decoloniality in the making. This means that radical solidarity can only operate where the self engages its own radical exteriority in the difference it observes (and often dislikes) in others as well as in its own inner modes of alterity. In this complex sense of the individual and collective self in constant flux, race and disability are represented by the multiple layers of identity that constitute their nonlinear dynamicity. These multiple modes of concurrent manifestations of selfhood are present in complex identity notions such as Latinidad, Chicanidad, impairment, disablement, and disability.41 As I discuss in depth in chapters 3 and 6, while exploring the decolonial solidarity power of “maroon knowledges,”42 radical exteriority is not a mere abstraction. It has enormous intersectional potential. It helps imagine ways to deal productively from an
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emancipatory standpoint with the complex underpinnings of otherness and difference inherent to spaces of subalternity in global north and global south alike. I hope it is clear by now that the intrinsically partial nature of Arturo’s lens as a brown blind Latinx male with a particular sense of radical exteriority is in itself an invitational metatheoretical stance. Its aim is to get other LatDisCrit and nonLatDisCrit agents to fill the void. Arturo’s reflexive counterstories are experiential parables. They are not end products. Their inner wisdom (if any) is interdependent with your wisdom as reader, with your sources of disagreement as you go on reading and co-authoring similar or analogous stories of your own experiencing of pandisability and racialization in decolonial spaces of hope and despair.43
A word on agency: The creative vitality of relational power in action Thus, the present interdisciplinary volume is deliberately at the crossroads of perspectives on intersectional agency. Rancière says that what “stultifies the common people is not the lack of instruction, but the belief in the inferiority of their intelligence … the only verified intelligence is the one that speaks to a fellow … capable of verifying the equality of their intelligence.”44 This is a key relational point. Equality and freedom as tap roots of emancipation processes are intrinsically relational. They need to be believed before they can be collectively pursued. Hence, for instance, my treatment of DisCrit-informed transLatinidades throughout the present volume gives preeminence to blackness studies.45 I pursue this strategy to avoid the supremacist legacy of ontological views on Latinx mestizaje.46 I also privilege new materialisms47and emancipatory posthuman48 agency conceptions. I do so to underscore the foundational relationality dimensions of embodied enactment and transgressive/emancipatory decisionmaking dynamics inherent to collective action and movement building. In practice this entails that, while I respect that the humanist roots of critical pedagogy in its liberation ethos originated from and widely diffused beyond Latin America since the 1960s and 1970s,49 I prefer to rely in the present volume on intersectional and decolonial disability views.50 These enrichingly transgressive views of disability facilitate its understanding/explanation in terms of radical relationality ontologies. I thus transcend single-actor (or traditional dualist/human-centered) conceptualizations of agency. I use the following example to clarify the profound implications associated with this point. If one thinks of the relational process of education purely in terms of either teacher-centered or student-centered ontologies, one is likely to preempt one’s understanding/explanation of educational processes either in the direction of teaching or by tipping knowledge paradigms toward one or various preconceived ideas about learning. Education becomes either teacher-centric or learner-centric. Simon Ceder poignantly warns us against getting too fixated on these ontological preconceptions: Relationality implies that no form exists before the constant flux of molecules; it is taking shape and dissolving at the same time. In a similar way, the
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Introducing Latinx identity world is in a constant state of change, and therefore new descriptions are always needed. To describe does not involve revealing the essence of a phenomenon; rather, it means to question such foundations and create more relational alternatives.51
Much more directly relevant to the relational materiality of intersectional disability as agency is the idea of critical materialism.52 In line with emancipatory posthuman epistemologies, critical materialism alludes to imaginative explorations of embodiment in terms of what Ahmed calls “lively materiality.”53 Applied to disability spheres of intersectional relationality and to the proactive carving of genuinely equity-centered ways of forging embodied social inclusivity, this mode of critical materialist disability studies and decolonial activism allows for the underscoring of what Mitchell and Snyder somewhat ironically call “lower-level agency.” I say ironically because this is precisely the kind of analysis and actionable strategic stance that can emphasize inter-agentic dimensions. As such, the critical materiality of LatDisCrit aligns with the relational ontology view defended throughout this interdisciplinary volume and with other decolonial, queer, blackness, Indigenous, and other subaltern studies, expressing the highest form of agency. This is due to critical materiality’s intrinsically transgressive congruency with emancipatory learning and radical solidarity.54 In other words, along with and beyond intersectional spheres of disability oppression, the critical materiality of LatDisCrit exposes alternative agency spaces of unexpected joy.55 Thus, it counteracts stereotypical myths of disability as tragedy.56 It also opens up a new constructive ethics and performativity toward enacting what queer theorist Lynn Huffer calls “maps for living” (which reminds me of the Latinx liberation theology/epistemology musings by Oto Maduro, which a few years ago were published posthumously under the title Maps for a Fiesta).57
The book’s thematic synopsis This introductory chapter has opened conversational spaces to share thoughts on the interdisciplinary agency power of intersectionality in critical disability studies. I have tried to familiarize readers with Arturo (the book’s main counterstory character). This introduces them to the experiential world of LatDisCrit. I underscore LatDisCrit’s value as a creative vitality space of critical materiality. In LatDisCrit, the othering power of radical exteriority simultaneously preempts and propels disability inter-agentic possibilities. In sum, the book’s core objectives are as follows: (1) to unpack and disrupt traditional ways of understanding radical and nonradical modes of agency; (2) to craft interdisciplinary spaces at the intersection of disability and trans-Latinx race, culture, and performative resistance in the face of material precarity; (3) to explore and interrogate actionable meanings of situated emancipation; (4) to look at disability activist-driven ideas of emancipation in conjunction with LatDisCrit’s possibilitarian modes of linked counterstories and innovative intersectional practices toward decolonial solidarity; (5) to combine blackness studies58 and emancipatory posthuman/new materialisms; (6) to use
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these frameworks as intersecting tools for understanding/explaining and transforming the practical political philosophy, biopolitically informed intersectional justice, and sociocultural uniqueness of LatDisCrit’s sense of agency as collaborative resistance; and (7) to find out how and under which conditions the emancipatory learning gained through intersectional agency enacts or precludes decolonial/radical modes of solidarity59 within and beyond LatDisCrit’s sense of diasporic citizenry and radical exteriority.60 Objectives 2–6 in particular make evident the book’s tangible efforts to link ongoing activism strands and metatheory. Through its focus on intersectional spaces of disabled subalternity in the enactment of material precarity’s everyday counterstories, the book sheds light on the “mundane” ends of the spectrum for what thinkers such as Loïc Wacquant call hyperincarceration,61 which in a global critical hermeneutics reading of the carceral archipelago encompasses the “systemic and lingering effects of the continuity of confinement in modern times … bringing in disability (psychiatric, developmental, physical etc.) as a focus in studies on incarceration, as well as working out questions of criminality and danger in studies of institutionalization and disablement.”62 A white blind American citizen acquaintance, a male individual not much older than Arturo, recently told me that in his state the boarding school for the blind was called the braille jail. He added that a lot of the staff members there were recruited among folks who, for one reason or another, had not been able to thrive in the state’s prison system. My point in bringing this at the end of the introduction is to emphasize one of the core arguments interwoven throughout the book. Rather than reading this sort of interorganizational transfer practice as a mere anecdotal feature, one should by all means see it within a critical carceral stance. The practice is a clear expression of the broad expansive tentacles of the institutionalization confinement apparatus. This apparatus is purposefully developed and maintained for the sake of controlling and containing specific types of intersectional subaltern groups. These groups are deemed as embodied threats, as populations dynamically and selectively placed beyond the boundaries of normality in the global north as much as in the global south. For me, the core question worth exploring at this point is possibilitarian in nature. In what ways can scholars and activists work together toward elevating the power of agency and the agentic power63 of resistance within, despite, and beyond these confinement spaces and oppressive logics of control? In tackling this question, the book demonstrates via a careful sense of counter-narrative interrogation disability’s liberating and radical solidarity ethos, identifying the key ingredients necessary to activate it and make it real within concrete situated emancipation boundaries. This is why in Chapter 2 I tell the story of Arturo’s encounter with lawyerly “inclusion” in the global south. I do so through the lens of his firsthand experiences with Napoleonic Code disability rights dynamics in his native Venezuela. Chapter 3 operates as a counterpoint to Chapter 2 by looking at the interplay of fantasy/mythology and material precarity in rehabilitation’s divisive and paradoxically debilitating64 benevolent prosperity notions, e.g., employability, social inclusion, and disability disclosure as they become engrained in LatDisCrit’s
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identity juggling. In Chapter 4, I invite readers once more to walk into the reality of LatDisCrit’s experiential struggles. This time I do so within global north contexts by telling the story of Arturo’s encounter with Fátima in the racialized contours of the ideology of rehabilitational betrayal at the root of material precarity’s divisive political economy and emancipatory potential. In Chapter 5, instead of jumping directly to a theoretical counterpoint to Chapter 4, I present a couple of bridging intersectional blackness stories toward the theoretical argument of Chapter 6. Chapter 6 encompasses the theorizing counterpoint to the counterstories developed in Chapter 4 and Chapter 5. Therefore, Chapter 6 builds my theoretical argument around the ontology and epistemology of creeping Latinx mestizaje. This is a way to link LatDisCrit’s agency possibilities with the emancipation ethos of decolonial blackness and Latinx thought studies as they intersect with embodied liberatory critical disability theorizing. Chapter 7 describes critically Arturo’s global south encounter and disencounter with radical solidarity spaces. Chapter 8 offers a similar, less optimistic description in a specific global north context. In Chapter 9 I summarize lessons from previous chapters, focusing on a targeted exploration of the actionable meaning of decolonial modes of radical agency, emancipatory learning, and radical solidarity for LatDisCrit actors in global north institutionalized identity politics. My Epilogue ends the volume by looking at the unique intersectional complexities of the global south’s geopolitics and epistemology. There, I make a case for the value of adopting a new materialist/transmodern, critical ambivalence stance toward dividing global north and global south disability actors of color in terms of their unique kinds of knowledges and activist frames of reference. This ambivalence can strategically serve both divisive and unifying roles. Thus, it should be used selectively and with a strong dose of cautionary optimism by disabled folks of color on both sides of the north-south material precarity divide. Perhaps, one of the best phrases to express this kind of possibilitarian ambivalence, this cautionary optimism, is what black theologian Joseph R. Winters uses as the title for one of the chapters in a recent volume of his: “unhopeful but not hopeless.”65
Notes 1 “The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) is a permanent, intergovernmental Organization, created at the Baghdad Conference on September 10–14, 1960, by Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela.” Brief historical account for OPEC, available online at www.opec.org/opec_web/en/about_us/24.htm. 2 For a historical treatment of the Non-Aligned Movement, see Miškovic´, FischerTiné, and Boškovska (2014). 3 See Bendix’s (2017) classical analysis where he pursues various macro-sociological comparisons of post-World War II nation-building and citizenship dynamics. 4 On postcoloniality, imperialism, and nationhood in terms of their impact on sociopolitical and sociocultural utopias for everyday practice and collective resistance theorizing, see, for example, Ashcroft (2017); Bewes (2011); Braidotti (2014); Diagne (2019); Gqola (2010); Lazarus (2011); Menozzi (2014); Ponzanesi (2014).
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5 See Du Bois (1920, 1924). See also the interesting intersectional applications of these ideas as formulated by Annamma and Morrison (2018) as well as Broderick and Leonardo (2016). 6 On this, see, for example, Ahmed (2012, 2019); Annamma and Morrison (2018); Goodley and Lawthom (2011); Meekosha (2011); Meyers (2019a, 2019b); Saldívar (2012); Wildeman (2015, 2016). For examples of works formulated within Latin American, Iberian, and comparative contexts, see Brogna (2009); Bustos García (2014); Diversi and Moreira (2016); Fernández Moreno and Acosta (2014); Ferrante (2015, 2018); Ferrante and Dukuen (2017); Ferrante and Ferreira (2011); Ferrante and Venturiello (2014); Ferreira, (2007a, 2007b, 2008a, 2008b, 2010); Grech (2015); Gutiérrez et al. (2016); Infante and Matus (2009); Joly and Venturiello (2013); Míguez (2013); Míguez, Piñato, and Machado (2013); Palacios and Romañach Cabrero (2007); Palacios et al. (2012); Pinilla-Roncancio (2015); Romañach Cabrero (2008); Rosato and Angelino (2009); Scribano (2014, 2020); Venturiello (2016). 7 As Dieuwertje (2020) points out, the very manner in which agency debates have been framed in the social sciences excludes the possibility that neurodivergent individuals and groups could have agency and enjoy a truly “fulfilled” sense of freedom as autonomous beings. Reinders (2008) and Yong (2007) raise similar criticisms of neurotypical conceptions of agency within the field of theology. See also Hillary’s (2019, 2020) creative approximations to these issues from an experientially grounded neurodivergent perspective. 8 For extensive discussions of solidarity in connection to social justice transformations and resistance to exclusionary dynamics, see Annamma and Morrison (2018); Diversi and Moreira (2016); Freire, Freire, and de Oliveira (2016); Gaztambide-Fernández (2012); hooks and West (1991); McNeilly (2017). 9 Freire (2013: p. 124). 10 On this, note the various modes of decolonial solidarity and pedagogical possibilities discussed and analyzed by Gaztambide-Fernández (2012). 11 See, for example, Valdés (1999, 2000). 12 See, for example, Annamma, Connor, and Ferri (2013, 2016). 13 See, for example, Alcoff (2000); Castro-Gómez (2002, 2005, 2007, 2008, 2011, 2017); Dussel (1995, 1996, 2012); Dussel and Apel (2005); Maldonado-Torres (2001, 2004, 2005a, 2005b, 2006a, 2006b, 2006c, 2007); Mariátegui (2010); Mendieta (2007); Mignolo (2000a, 2000b, 2010, 2016); Mignolo and Tlostanova (2006); Mignolo and Walsh (2018); Nuccetelli (2002); Quijano (1995, 2000a, 2000b, 2006); Schutte (1993, 2004); Wynter (2003); Zea (1971, 1986, 1991). 14 The interdisciplinary ethos of the present volume is conceptually connected on the one hand to the emerging DisCrit literature and to the LatCrit tradition on the other. Therefore, I try to respect these roots via my occasional use in various sections of the term disability, which appears in several DisCrit works. The term disability implies the desire to intentionally disrupt the disabling dimensions of normalcy-imposing tendencies present in institutional settings such as those of the education, criminal justice, and health systems (see, for example, its usage throughout the collection of essays contained in Annamma, Connor, and Ferri [2016]; see also Annamma, Connor, and Ferri [2013] for an explicit discussion of the theoretical basis of DisCrit). These are institutionalized tendencies certainly observable at a global scale, but they are especially reported as being prevalent in and intrinsic to global north societies. On this, see Annamma (2018); Ware, Ruzsa, and Dias (2014), as well as the comprehensive political economy ideas developed in Russell’s (1998) classic volume. 15 See Yosso (2006); see also Solórzano and Bernal (2001); Solórzano and Yosso (2002). 16 See, for example, Archer, Collier, and Porpora (2004); Bhaskar (1986, 1989, 1991, 2008, 2011, 2012, 2016). See also the (2016) volume edited by Bhaskar et al. They pursue an intentional metatheoretical dialogue between critical realism and integral theory.
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17 See note 8 above for outstanding illustrations of how counter-storytelling works in practice within global north Latinx and Chicanx experiential contexts of identity politics and collective resistance. Also, readers should be aware that counter-storytelling often appears articulated among Latinx engaged scholars as “testimonios” (e. g., Flores and García [2009]). 18 On this, see Archer (1988, 1995, 2000, 2007, 2012). 19 Obourn makes an important point on this with respect to the critical possibilitarian relationship between suffering/oppression for intersectionally subaltern subjects with disabilities and their emancipatory sense of agency and radical solidarity. “Disability studies provides … conceptual space for both the negative and positive experiences of our lived identities and relations to power. Holding those experiences and affective relations in the present provides a foundation for future imaginaries … in resistance to power … while … understanding that liberation is not freedom from all limitations, wounds, or pain” (2020: p. 9). The point is not that we should be thankful to our oppressors and the multifaceted dynamics of the coloniality of power, knowing, and being for the pain they engender in our lives. Instead, the point is about keeping in mind that even in hope-building/possibilitarian approaches there is an important need for keeping reflexive spaces of suffering in the present, rather than pretending to sweep them under the rug of hidden memories, which could deprive us of the creative enactment of disabled futurities such reflections could precipitate. 20 See Kierkegaard (1995, 2012a, 2012b, 2013, 2015); see also Davenport (2001); Ferreira (2001); Gouwens (1996); Tietjen (2010a, 2010b, 2013); Westphal (1992). 21 See Adorno (1940) and Marcuse (1948, 1955). 22 Latinidad is the Spanish noun that conveys the multifaceted menu of qualities involved in being/becoming Latinx. My usage of Latinidad mostly in its plural form throughout the book stresses that there are plural and ever-changing ways to be, feel, and perform one’s Latinxness in micro- and macro-dimensions. These operate in interplay with disability identity and disability rights issues in educational and noneducational contexts. On the one hand, I am particularly interested in exploring these interplays as they are experienced by disabled global south individuals of color who reside and struggle in global north settings (i.e., U.S., Canada, UK, major nations in the Euro currency region, and Scandinavia). On the other hand, because I am deeply concerned with the bridges and barriers that enact and/or hinder radical agency and radical solidarity possibilities within and across multiple intersectional Latinidades, I like to talk of trans-Latinidades. On this I apply Enrique Dussel’s (1995, 1996, 2012) transmodernity ideas as they pertain to the dynamic intersectional specificities inherent to LatDisCrit. For interesting intersectional connections with my emancipatory use of the concept of radical solidarity in both DisCrit and decolonial studies, see Annamma and Handy (2019) and Gaztambide-Fernández (2012). 23 For explicit emancipation-centered connections between existentialism and the radical agentic ethics of el Quixote, see Mendieta (2012); see also Valdés (2016), who links this tradition to cultural hermeneutics through the neo-vitalist work of Spanish writer and philosopher Miguel de Unamuno. 24 See Ricoeur (1981) for an extensive discussion of the hermeneutic implications of this idea as a mode of textual engagement and collective-action praxis. 25 See Ricoeur (1971, 1974). 26 See Moraga (2011). See also Stavro (2018), especially chs. 5–7, for an extensive discussion of the multilayered implications of embodying ideas in their everyday carnal/affective performativity, in close alignment with feminist political philosophy. For the complex metatheoretical and strategic perspectives/issues involved in changing social attitudes toward disability, see Bolt (2014a). 27 See especially Foucault (2014, 2016a, 2016b) for deep theoretical discussions and concrete historical applications of the notion of techniques of the self.
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28 See Valdez’s (2019) interesting analysis of Du Bois’s pan-African activism as an illustration of the transformative power of transnational cosmopolitanism, even before it was fashionable to engage in globalization theorizing. 29 See Fromm (1941, 1947, 1955, 1968, 1976, 1992, 1999, 2013). The essay by Leonardo and Porter (2010) gives an interesting Fanonian/pedagogical twist to this dynamic interplay between fear and freedom in antiracist and decolonial space forging as well as collective processes of emancipatory learning; see also Fanon (1965, 1967, 2004). 30 In Venezuela, the oil nationalization process of the 1970s allowed resources to be substantially transferred into education and health. This precipitated a snowball effect that permitted nonwhite disabled people from working-class families like Arturo and others to go to university and graduate with professional degrees. However, in all fairness, it must also be said that this process of shifting public investments was at the time indirect and half-hearted, very much driven by a colonialist rhetoric of developmentalist modernism. Plaza Azuaje (2019) has formulated the only study that links oil investment with cultural materiality within Venezuela and global south contexts. Unfortunately, her study lacks any reference to disability issues and disabled agency considerations. 31 For a global south perspective that defends to some extent the revolutionary impetus of the disability developments taking place in Venezuela earlier in the twenty-first century through a critical assessment of the social model of disability, see Aramayo, Burton, and Kagan (2017); see also Aramayo (2005a, 2005b, 2008). 32 For valuable theorizing on these transformational processes both at the macro- and the microlevel of analysis, see Archer’s (2013, 2014a, 2014b, 2016a, 2016b, 2017) works on social morphogenesis. 33 As an engaged scholar and activist, Arturo remained for many years oblivious to developments in critical disability studies and even disability rights scholarship. These were crucial matters for Arturo. Yet, he naively thought he could achieve an academic career under normalcy parameters without having to face too many insurmountable ableism/ racism-related challenges. Thus, Arturo kept his disability and race-based activism outside his scholarship. Arturo’s first disciplinary adventure was associated with law, investigating the discursive links between legality and morality in corruption cases. Arturo focused on cases that had reached national notoriety in Venezuelan newspapers during the early 1980s, finding a paradoxical demand for ethical conduct from political figures along with signs of admiration for those who succeeded in “getting away” in an overarching climate of impunity that maintained their status relatively intact. This led Arturo to pay attention to the theoretical and historical basis underlying the notion of structural autonomy in the Venezuelan judiciary. Arturo’s comparison of foundational social contract and Marxian legal philosophy works shows that the autonomy of the judiciary is typically seen in structural terms, whether works are inspired by an understanding of the separation of power throughout the branches of the state or simply in terms of the superstructure role that the judiciary is assumed to play in enhancing the control of the state by the ruling classes in the capitalist mode of production. None of these works links the analysis of autonomy to agency, my core theme in the present interdisciplinary analysis. They all leave judges and magistrates at the mercy of external forces, preempting the structural independence of the judicial branch, particularly in peripheral societies within the layers of domination that world-system and dependency theorists had underscored at the time. 34 For a comparison with neurodiverse Latinx narratives framed through the lens of emotionality as a unifying epistemological approach, see Hernández-Saca (2016). 35 To use Mignolo’s powerful critical multicultural and decolonial descriptor; see Mignolo (2000a, 2000b); Mignolo and Tlostanova (2006). 36 On this, see Hunter, Emerald, and Martin (2013). 37 For racialized, LatCrit analytical accounts of this kind of resistance in contemporary U.S. contexts, see Prieto (2018).
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38 My dynamic identity tensions formulation of radical exteriority builds on Levinas (1969, 1996, 1998); see also the political treatment of Levinas in conjunction to the ethics of performativity by Nealon (1998) and many decolonial Latin American philosophers, e.g., Dussel (2008, 2012); Vallega (2009, 2010, 2014). 39 See, for example, Ahmed (2006, 2010, 2012); de Freitas and Sinclair (2014); Marková (2003, 2016). 40 See Matias and Allen (2013, 2016); see also Sandoval (2000). For extensive analyses of the role of affect and emotion in the bridging of solidarity possibilities in diverse/conflicted social contexts, see Bekerman and Zembylas (2012, 2018); McGlynn, Zembylas, and Bekerman (2013); Schutz and Zembylas (2009); Zembylas (2008, 2012, 2013); Zembylas, Charalambous, and Charalambous (2016). 41 Since it is most relevant to these kinds of radical exteriority explorations, see the excellent analysis formulated by Obourn (2020), especially her introductory chapter where she masterfully links the intersectional strands that seek to theorize the relationship between race and disability on the one hand, and gender and disability on the other. Hence, Obourn proposes the term “racialized dis/gender” to conceptualize the emerging sense of subaltern complexity. 42 To employ the intersectional epistemology concept coined by Ben-Moshe (2020: pp. 14–15; see also Chapter 3 in this book). 43 For recent illustrations of what I have in mind when I talk of possibilitarian, actionoriented instances of hope vis-à-vis despair in the terrain of disability-relevant domains of intersectional agency, see Malhotra (2017) and Piepzna-Samarasinha (2018). 44 Rancière (1991: p. 66). 45 For an excellent set of overarching, decolonially grounded metatheory illustrations of intersectional blackness studies, see Dei (1999, 2000, 2008, 2012, 2014, 2017); see also Dei and Hilowle (2018) as well as Dei and McDermott (2014). 46 The most classic example of this supremacist ontology of mestizaje is Vasconcelos (1997); yet, even crucial Latin American independence figures such as Simón Bolívar (2004) are influenced in their hierarchical and cosmological race positioning by views of this sort. For contemporary, empirically grounded sociological critiques of the embedded naturalizing contours of this supremacist ontology, see Bonilla-Silva (2003); Bonilla-Silva, Baiocchi, and Horton (2008); Bonilla-Silva, Jung, and Vargas (2011). 47 See, for example, Barad (2003, 2007, 2008, 2010, 2011); Braidotti (2002); Coole (2005, 2006, 2007, 2015); Coole and Frost (2010); Frost (2008). Once one engages the ethical and practical enactments of these perspectives, it is not difficult to realize that the germ of many of new materialism’s foundational ideas are not so new, as evident in the powerful neovitalist ethos of Bergson (1921, 1946, 1988, 1998). 48 See especially Cudworth and Hobden (2018). See also Banerji and Paranjape (2016); Bauman (2016); Hall (2016); Virilio (2005, 2013); and Wolfe (2010). 49 See, for example, Darder (2017); Freire (1997, 1998, 1999, 2002); Lake and Dagostino (2013); Morrow (2013); Straubhaar (2019); Wynter (2003). 50 Anesia (2019) offers an outstanding recent illustration of what it means to apply decolonial/postcolonial conceptions of disability to specific global south contexts at the periphery of global north empires. In terms of intersecting domains of dis/ability and race, I am heavily influenced by Erevelles (2011, 2014, 2017). As will become evident in the next couple of paragraphs, the third leg of my intersectional disability paradigm rests on creative formulations of critical materiality frameworks on agency such as Mitchell and Snyder’s (2019). These are highly compatible with the last kind of disability framing discussed by David Bolt (2015, 2019) in his tripartite happiness model; see also Cuppers (2009). Finally, for recent critical disability works that reflect the influence of Latinx epistemologies, see Hernández-Sácá and Cannon (2019) as well as the interesting Anzaldúan analysis developed by Bost (2019). 51 See Ceder (2019: p. 2).
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52 Critical materialism is a dynamic concept that Mitchell and Snyder (2019) attribute to Ahmed (2010). 53 See Ahmed (2010: p. 234) 54 On this, Wildeman’s (2020) analysis of solitary confinement litigation within Canadian contexts is tremendously illustrative. Wildeman poignantly demonstrates that by focusing exclusively on mental health rights-based argumentation and legal remedies, the resulting changes and resolutions end up being much more oppressive and medicalized by elevating purely behavioral and discipline-based considerations. At the same time, the situation of many other intersectional categories of inmates gets worsened, which stifles radical solidarity prospects among them and exacerbates the most recalcitrant kinds of oppressive mechanisms. 55 See Mitchell and Snyder (2019: pp. 90–91). 56 See Chapter 3 in this volume; see also the discussion of so-called dis/ability “dark funds of knowledge” in the forthcoming book I am co-authoring, which will be published by NCTM. 57 See Huffer (2010: p. 48). See also Maduro (2015). 58 Particularly through the comprehensive decolonial work of Dei (1999, 2000, 2008, 2012, 2014, 2017). See also Dei and Hilowle (2018) as well as Dei and McDermott (2014). 59 See, for example, Annamma and Morrison (2018); Escobar (2020); GaztambideFernández (2012); Hernández-Saca (2016); Hernández-Sácá and Cannon (2019); McNeilly (2017); McRuer (2018); and Obourn (2020). 60 See Vallega’s (2010, 2014) extensive philosophical and hermeneutical engagement with this concept of radical exteriority within Latin American thought. 61 Wacquant (2010); see also Wacquant (2009). 62 Ben-Moshe (2013b: p. 134). See also Ben-Moshe (2011, 2013a), as well as the confessional autocritical interrogations of current psychiatry’s colonialist, racially charged, and marginalizing agendas formulated by Burstow, LeFrançois, and Diamond (2014, especially chs 1 and 2). 63 Despite Campbell’s (2009) call to distinguish sharply between these two perspectives on the conceptualization of personal agency, I prefer to regard them as complementary. Furthermore, I consider them as being imbued within a profound sense of collectivistic and relational interdependence, instead of concentrating exclusively on individualistic conceptions of personal autonomy. 64 In the profoundly radical sense used by Puar (2017) and Ben-Moshe (2020, especially the Introduction). See also Ben-Moshe and Stewart (2017) as well as Stewart and Russell (2001) for extensive, well-articulated discussions of the enduring historical links between political economy, disability, disablement, and mass imprisonment in the U.S. and Canada. 65 See Winters (2016, ch. 2). See also López González (2007, 2008, 2009); Rodriguez Diaz and Ferreira (2008); Scribano (2014, 2020); Smith and Erevelles (2004); Tamura (2018); Teklu (2007); Wilderson (2003); Wolfensberger (1989, 2013) as concrete eclectic examples of hopefulness spaces of possibilitarian critique in global south as well as both advanced post-industrialized and semi-peripheral global north contexts.
2
The normalizing fantasies of Habilitación and mundane rehabilitation dynamics A global south metanarrative exploration
Introduction: Brief context notes “Elimination and/or correction have been the primary social response to disabled people in modernity. The primary form of experience (of disability), during the same period, has been one of invalidation.”1 Keeping these alerting words in mind as we continue this relational reflection journey is indispensable. While the narrative context in this chapter remains tied to the emancipatory confines of the global south atmosphere, experientially, these words serve as a fundamental part of the background to the counterstory that constitutes its focus. The chapter context is situated in the provincial, university-town environment that characterized Arturo’s 1980s LatDisCrit experiences. This is the Andean region of Venezuela. The capital city in this state had in this period around 200,000 inhabitants. At least a third of these folks were in some fashion linked to the university. Even those blind folks in the informal economy who sold lottery tickets and horse racing pre-assigned cards (what they call in Venezuelan colloquial Spanish “cuadros sellados”)2 depended on this university-employed population for their survival. Hence, for instance, prolonged university strikes often meant a substantial population reduction, which impacted the local economy. Its only alternative source of income was tourism.3
Hermeneutic notes: Broad counterstory background strokes The aesthetic realm of axiological reality is a wonderful microcosm. When it comes to freedom it both forges and expresses creative spatiality. It also allows for the momentary realization of utopian realities of interdependent relationality. However, for many intersectional disability folks in the global south as in the global north, the ludic qualities of art and collective utopian dreams are incompatible with the harsh realities of, say, bureaucratic disability policy implementation. This is the front-line, street-level agentic set of struggles of order that face them on an everyday basis. In truth, their conservative rehabilitation stance merely showcases a broader problem: the fear of freedom. I single out freedom here as the enactment of lifechanging possibilities for radical solidarity and emancipatory learning. In the case of blind Latinx organizing, this fear stems from a profound sense of powerlessness. This is a fear that traps blind Latinx leaders more DOI: 10.4324/9781003084150-2
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than anybody else in the blind conglomerate of potential change-making agents due to their entanglement as leaders with the existing status quo. For them, change would entail giving up a lot of their positional material and symbolic privileges.4 These leaders know that their tenuous privileges come with strings attached. Above all, they entail the adoption of a public agenda that makes less visible their Latinx radical solidarity identities and propensities (if there are any) beyond purely cosmetic expressions of diversity and taming assimilation moves. In this sense, blind Latinx leaders epitomize the powerlessness that in principle preempts inaction on the part of the bulk of blind Latinx populations in global north and global south contexts alike. This is the kind of powerlessness that often gets enacted as learned hopelessness and passive acquiescence. Under these conditions, resistance and change by and for blind Latinx must come from below. Yet, for this to be possible, radical solidarity networks will need to stretch out both toward pandisability and trans-Latinidad alliances. Furthermore, the role of Latinx knowledge workers,5 at least in an initial stage, will need to mark the political philosophy and actionable horizons of what is possible, desirable, and necessary to shape blind Latinx unique freedom utopias. This is a process that must start within the blind movement itself, in a recognition of its own emancipation challenges. Ultimately, it must move toward an honest, collectively grounded exploration of ways to transcend the underlying fear to be free, that is, to experience the messiness of collective action trial-and-error dynamics. Well, here is where one finds Arturo in the 1980s. Arturo has been playing up to this point what he thinks is an active part in a small, rather tiny organization (by global north standards) of the blind in this part of the Andean region of Venezuela.6 Despite having attended many leadership meetings in this organization over a period of five years or so, Arturo does not remember having real blind folks from the streets in those meetings. Arturo has been told in rather vague terms that they are active members of the organization, but their activity is not even evident in a symbolic sense. Some of these blind individuals work in very precarious conditions in street contexts of informal economy. Many of them are portrayed as heavy-drinking people. As a matter of fact, some are the relatives of prominent blind leaders of the organization. So far, all the meetings have taken place in office spaces. No efforts are made to get close to those living and working environments of the blind who are really struggling (and having the most to teach concerning material and symbolic modes of precarity). Of course, now that Arturo has the chance to look back at all this, he feels the shame of not having dared to cross those imaginary (yet terribly real) lines of hierarchization. Was he fearful of threatening his own status within and outside blind circles? Was this a matter of radical exteriority? Was it a way of placing the non-blind alliances ahead of blind and other pandisability radical solidarity circles? Was it the certainty that, for purposes of quasi-fictional solidarity, Arturo himself knew that these links could be broken as soon as he defied in excess the limits of normality “allowances” within the vulnerability of able-bodied bystanders?
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Zooming in: Habilitación’s unique situational aura The afternoon is cold and rainy, as Mérida’s late afternoons tend to get by this time of the year. Arturo is sitting at Juan Luis’s law office, a small room located in the front portion of an old house. The open window overlooks the narrow street and lets the noise of cars and people’s voices come through. They are indifferent witnesses7 to the landmark occasion. A few months ago, Arturo celebrated his graduation as attorney of law. However, unlike those hundreds of able-bodied folks who graduated the same day with him, Arturo has not been able to practice. He had to wait for Juan Luis to finish processing in Civil District Court his “Habilitación.” Habilitación is a crucial ceremonial prerequisite prescribed in the Venezuelan (as well as other European and Latin American) Civil Code since the nineteenth century for blind individuals and other categories of persons with disabilities. The reason is that, as disabled individuals, these folks are presumed by the legislature since the times of the Napoleonic Code to be incapable,8 something that the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) has not really changed.9 Like Arturo, Juan Luis is blind since birth. Both graduated from the same law school.10 Juan Luis has been in practice about a decade or so by the time this meeting takes place. Could it be that, like in the gospel phrasing attributed to Jesus of Nazareth, “the blind was guiding the blind” through the intricacies of mythical legal fictions? Nothing substantial or even peripheral has changed about Juan Luis’s or Arturo’s visual impairment because of Habilitación. Despite the formal importance of the requirement, it is difficult to argue that it creates any essential way to dismantle disablement social barriers faced by blind professionals. Hence, it is worth asking (and this is certainly not a rhetorical question) which one, the pre- or post-state of affairs, should be considered fictional? Despite its direct meaning in Spanish, “Habilitación” has nothing to do with enabling. It is a mere rite, a kind of “first communion” into the technicality vacuum of a defaced myth worshiping lawyerly religion. In a purely ontological sense, nothing has happened. As Arturo would find out years later the hard way, this ritual held the magical power to safeguard his professional lawyerly status (although not his professorial career in Venezuela). When the law school tried to attack his legitimate status as university professor in Venezuela during the late 1990s, the “Habilitación” prerequisite was invoked, under the assumption that Arturo would have overlooked such a crucial step. New legislation was in place. Yet, unfamiliar with it (shame on these ableist lawyers), they preferred to stick to the old stuff. Why so? Could it be because these Roman-time fictions were more attuned with their embodiment of “normal” supremacy?11 At a deeper level, the level much more linked to issues of radical exteriority, new dynamics were being enacted. Arturo had finally had his own unavoidable encounter with the “self of blindness.” Arturo was experiencing his own multilayered constellation of evolving selves through the realities that Michael Oliver12 has masterfully theorized since the 1990s as disablement.13 Yes, Arturo had been
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born with a visual impairment in the 1960s in Paraguaná Peninsula, in the extreme northern part of Venezuela. Despite this (or perhaps precisely because of the social weight attached to this impairment and the relational submission to ableist supremacy), he grew up believing/dreaming/wishing that a miracle operation would cure him. Thus, Arturo spent several of his teenage years waiting to “return”14 to a “normal” status. It almost sounds laughable, but it is as real as it is cruel. This is the sad power of alienation.15 Thus, existentially, the myth of blindness as tragedy is not a radical exteriority event exclusive to “newly blind” individuals like Edwina as discussed in Chapter 5’s counterstory. Juan Luis, Asdrúbal, Ezequiel, Guillermina, so many blind folks in the global south (whose stories I will be unearthing and analyzing in upcoming chapters), as well as those in the global north, corroborate this existential pattern with their own stories, their own joys and tragedies, their own radical exteriority confrontations. What about the implications of this reflexive counterstory for rehabilitation processes in the global north? What about their aura of pseudoscientificity and legal formalism, which mirrors so much the modernity trends underscored by Boaventura de Sousa Santos?16 To what extent can they be deemed as ontologically real? To what extent are they about independence or “normalizing” myths? What sort of embodiment do they represent? In terms of posthumanist and materialist epistemologies in the micropolitics of disablement, what sort of materiality do they create? How are these modes of materiality maintained? What are the institutional and colonialist infrastructures that feed from the perpetuation of precarity conditions of underemployment, unemployment, and subaltern marginalization of so many millions of blind and other kinds of disability folks at a global scale?
Closing reflexive testimonial musings These questions are crucial. They show that there is a real drama. They show that indeed there are core axiological implications that demand focusing on the intersectional decoloniality possibilities of radical agency, radical solidarity, and emancipatory learning. One of these implications is the need to expose hierarchies intrinsic to the world of blindness itself. This is articulated within the ideology of what David Bolt calls “ocularcentrism.”17 So often, seeing is equated with knowing. The implication is that not seeing must amount to ignorance. Apart from issues of “political correctness,” the discursive implications of this epistemological hierarchy justify directly and indirectly the sort of exclusion being denounced here. Boaventura de Sousa Santos himself falls prey to this when he talks demeaningly of “epistemologies of blindness.”18 He contrasts them to “seeing” epistemologies, which, not surprisingly, are superior in their internal logic and their ability to encompass and articulate multiple knowledges. This clearly translates into tangible issues of power in the materiality of justificatory strategies for exclusion. Here is another interesting example. I am not aware of an English equivalent for the popular adage in Spanish that says: “entre los ciegos el tuerto
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suele mandar,” which roughly translates as follows: “among the blind, the partially sighted is often in command,” although the rendering of “partially sighted” here takes away the heavy pejorative load intrinsic to the word “tuerto” in Spanish. The tuerto qualifier is commonly associated with other negative nouns such as “entuertos,” i.e., things that are not straight (even in the moral sense of this qualifier) and which need fixing. Aesthetically, the word tuerto carries negative/freaking connotations as well. It is the word in Spanish that would describe the famous trope of the pirate with only one eye, the sinister one who so often brings about disastrous destruction in adventure works of literature. When one tries unpacking the intersectional connections of this hierarchy with respect to racialized and geopolitical dimensions of knowledge legitimacy and “moral worth,” one realizes how there are numerous axiological layers at work. The complexity is extraordinary. Therefore, a mere dichotomy of global north and south does not honor even the most basic manifestations of the phenomenon. For instance, comparing the geopolitical materiality of being a Japanese versus a South Asian blind individual who resides in the United States, one would find few components that are uniquely Asian. By the same token, Chicanx and Latinx identities, which in theory should be similar in their ethnic/ racial manifestations, might be extremely different (especially, at least in certain U.S. community and institutional settings, if the Latinx identity in question has its origins in the geopolitics of certain South American or Andean contexts).19 This often transpires in the materiality of their existential becoming and in the tangible unfolding of their emancipatory learning trajectory dynamics/available opportunities, e.g., in terms of their acceptance within leadership positions in major organizations and so forth. This ethical picture is complicated by the non-monolithic manifestations of blindness itself. I have opted to use the word blindness to highlight the contrast with ocularcentric paradigms. However, authors such as David Bolt20 recommend using the expression “visually impaired” to capture the many degrees of meaning and levels of sight encompassed under the blindness blanket nomenclature. Beth Omansky,21 on the other hand, talks of “borderlines of blindness” to highlight the invisibility of so-called legally blind categories of individuals under a world discursively dominated by the material and perceptual contours of not seeing. It is also helpful here to touch on another thorny phenomenon. It is one that goes together with radical agency trajectories of struggle. I am alluding to the notion of betrayal as a fundamentally relational/ethical, not merely moral, phenomenon. Betrayal can be defined as an act or progressive process of breaking away from what Margalit calls “thick relationships,” i.e., relationships framed by love as a substantive linking force. Where “there is no love there is no betrayal,” says a famous aphorism. My way of rendering it is: “Where there is no thick relation there is no betrayal.”22 Another critical existential element tied to betrayal is belonging.23 Belonging as well as identification are particularly relevant in terms of the ethics of radical exteriority. They expose the elusive nature of relationality. Thus, they call to mind the fragility of emancipatory processes of
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learning in resistance and their real impact on radical agency trajectories’ propensity for continuity or diverging pathways. Here is a common yet dramatic example. In terms of the materiality and complex relational implications of this elusiveness, in the case of blindness it is not uncommon for individuals to undergo long (often multiyear) processes of “becoming blind.” This certainly challenges the stability of relational paradigms both at the inner and the outer radical exteriority manifestations of one’s self-concept and sense of being. Rod Michalko, for example, is keen in his ability to dive into the complex phenomenological evolution of this process of becoming blind.24 Tanya Titchkosky, Michalko’s wife, also a renowned author with disabilities who cultivates a phenomenological metatheory of the body, has accompanied this process of examination from her unique vantage point.25 Under this extreme ambiguity of the self, it is common for individuals to undergo periods of self-rejection. This could lead to acts that fall under the relational rubric of betrayal. But how can one betray a membership category to which one has not yet subscribed any genuine allegiance? On the other hand, if the process of becoming blind makes belonging so precarious, would it not be true that the kind of emancipatory allegiance that takes place under such circumstances should also be regarded as transitory and fragile? Even more, given the added complexities inherent in the racial contradictions pertaining to Latinx identity evolutions, on top of the existential becoming of blindness per se, would it not be feasible that other, hard-topinpoint modes of fractured self-manifestations could plague the radical exteriority configurations inherent in the intersectional emancipation of blind Latinx? How would this becoming be different in global south contexts versus the becoming contours of those blind Latinx who reside and try to resist oppression within global north contexts? The following chapter starts exploring some of these questions.
Notes 1 Hughes (2012: p. 18). In his chapter, Hughes uses Norbert Elias (2000) to demonstrate that the civilizing process of modernity has also involved a generalized drive toward the erasing/invalidation/extermination of those who fit into abnormal categories, e.g., intellectual and other kinds of disabilities. 2 This activity by blind subaltern categories of individuals in its global historical origins is itself tied to pseudo-rehabilitative practices that seem to profit from a superstitious metanarrative that blind folks would transmit good fortune (apart from embodying an embedded traditionalist conception of “charity,” the kind of charity that aims to help the so-called “deserving poor” of society). See, for example, Garvía (1997, 2007, 2017) for non-Venezuelan analyses. See also Ferrante and Joly (2017) for a broader analysis of begging and informal economy dimensions in global south Latin American contexts. Finally, interested readers should consult the extensive work by Shawn Grech (2009, 2011, 2015, 2017) for analytical links between disability, poverty, development, and colonizing dynamics in the global south. 3 Which, over the years, has become a much stronger economic sector, particularly in light of the dramatic weakening of higher education investments and budget cuts observed in the Venezuelan autonomous public universities during the past couple of decades.
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4 This is true in the north more than in the south, at least in terms of the size of the financial and other kinds of resources at stake. 5 By which I mean, as indicated in Chapter 1, researchers, teachers, attorneys, and other kinds of institutionally based change-making allies who can potentially facilitate the critical mass of conditions to subvert status quo modes of exclusion, oppression, exploitation, and marginalization. For interesting intra-agency modalities of knowledge work issues, see Kwon (2017); Hopwood (2017). 6 This was an organization extremely disconnected from other small organizations of the same kind in the Andean region. In part this responded to logistical challenges. One must remember that this was the pre-internet era. One must also admit that the translocal networking desire was not a strong element in their overall organizing ethos. Yet, as I point out elsewhere (Padilla, forthcoming, 2021b), there is in this kind of small disability organization a sense of grassroots authenticity that, according to Meyers (2014, 2016, 2019a, 2019b), is increasingly absent in the post-CRPD era due to the homogenizing tendency imposed by human rights NGO modes of organizing throughout the developing world. 7 This indifferent witnessing atmosphere is a crucial barrier for radical solidarity processes involving global north and global south contexts. On this, Gaztambide-Fernández’s (2012) decolonial solidarity recommendations are emphatic and categorical. For Gaztambide-Fernández it is imperative to go far beyond the practical bias of cultural multiculturalism that merely “locates processes of identification and identity construction within a social/legal framework that addresses the role that power dynamics play in what comes to be seen as culturally specific or relevant” (p. 44). In other words, he invites transgressive decolonial agents to interrogate other kinds of power dynamics, engaging proactively with those identity categories most foreign to one’s comfort zone. Only by doing so does radical decolonial solidarity start being possible, although by no means easy. 8 As such, they are deliberately deprived of personhood in a crucial sense: they are categorically forbidden from exercising full ownership rights of their patrimony, give consent, etc. without the formal tutelage of an able-bodied individual or (and this is ontologically paramount for our radical agency possibilities as well as radical solidarity discussions) a person with disabilities. This must be one who has “successfully” undergone the ritual processing of Habilitación. Readers should also notice in terms of this ontological analysis that the literal English translation of Habilitación is enablement (which dialectically contrasts with the idea of disablement espoused by thinkers like Michael Oliver [1990, 2009]). However, nothing gets really enabled. It is all a matter of so-called juridical fictions. On the historical, onto-epistemological and socio-legal implications of this juridical notion, see Esmeir (2012); Felman (2002); Frändberg (2018); van der Kaaij (2019). 9 Technically, states that ratify CRPD should derogate these legal dispositions since they contradict the spirit of the Convention. The fact that they remain in place throughout the Latin American region and in other parts of the world reveals the underlying ideological power of ableism and disableism in action. See Goodley (2014). However, it is also striking that no disability organization to my knowledge has tackled this issue, developing the necessary political campaigns and mobilization processes that would get civil society forces behind the determination to pressure legislative or judiciary actors to move toward derogating these incompatible/anachronistic pre-CRPD rules and practices. 10 From the information gathered by Arturo, it turns out that Juan Luis was only the second blind person who had graduated from this bicentennial university. So far, even at the time of Arturo’s graduation, all graduates from this institution are attorneys. For some reason, this is the higher education institution, among the few autonomous public universities in Venezuela (the ones with greater prestige, even in the current governance and socioeconomic crisis), with the highest rate of graduation success for disabled
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11 12 13
14
15 16 17 18 19 20 21
22 23 24 25
23
persons per capita in the nation. This is an ironic statistical indicator considering what later transpired in Arturo’s counterstory as unfolded in this chapter. On this, see Garland-Thomson (1997); see also Bolt (2015) for an interesting theorizing and a typology of resistance modes toward these normalizing ideological mechanisms. See Oliver (1990, 1992, 1997, 2004, 2009). Puar (2017) is also extremely relevant on this front. Puar’s idea of “debility,” which goes beyond disabling dynamics, is helpful to underscore how in global south and global north contexts alike, disabled people’s sense of material precarity and debilitating modes of stress get exacerbated. Teklu’s (2007) dissertation provides a wonderful comparison case for how this happens in global north contexts. Notice the irony embedded in the word game corresponding to the notion of “rehabilitation.” Rehabilitation implies coming back to some kind of “able” state. Also, it could easily be expressed simply by coming back to a normal/normalizing set of conditions. Interestingly, rehabilitation is a word that in his youth, at least as far as Spanish is concerned, Arturo only heard in conjunction with criminals, whom social control “restores” to law-abiding citizen status. As Ben-Moshe (2013b) argues, this is not a mere coincidence: “the imperative to understand incarceration through both the prism of the prison but also that of the institution … is crucial to unveiling the underlying relations that legitimate confinement in a variety of settings. Such analysis also underscores the relation between penal and medical notions of danger, as they relate to both criminalization and medicalization” (p. 135). For an interesting relational treatment of alienation from the tradition of critical theory, see Jaeggi (2014), as well as Santos and Meneses (2020). See Santos (2015, 2016, 2018). See Bolt (2014b) in terms of his broader discussion of the metanarratives of blindness. See Santos (2016), particularly ch. 5. See, for example, Wallerstein (2016) for a detailed discussion of some of these exclusionary issues. See Bolt (2014b). See Omansky (2011). The discussion in Titchkosky, Healey, and Michalko (2019) is also relevant here, as it underscores the phenomenological complexities involved in blind identitarian dynamics as well as the limits of perceptual border-crossing experiments for sighted individuals (with the caveat that blindness simulations are absolutely uncommon and perhaps organizationally counterproductive in global south Latin American contexts). Margalit (2017: p. 11). Ibid. (p. xii). See Michalko (1998, 1999, 2001). See especially Titchkosky (2002); see also Titchkosky, Healey, and Michalko (2019) for a different take on the ocularcentric “culture of site” issue.
3
LatDisCrit as radical exteriority and new materialisms Bridging the decolonial power of global south and global epistemologies
Introduction: The intersectional poetics of disability Poet Rabindranath Tagore said that The … word “consciousness” has not yet outgrown the cocoon stage of its scholastic inertia, therefore it is seldom used in poetry; whereas its Indian synonym “chetana” is a vital word and is of constant poetical use … “feeling” is fluid with life, but its Bengali synonym “anu-bhuti” is refused in poetry, because it merely has a meaning and no flavour.1 So, what is the flavor or the plurality of flavors inherent in disability consciousness? The word consciousness, and particularly the idea of double consciousness, is widely used in race-based analyses. For some reason, it does not have as much currency in critical disability studies.2 Apart from the poetic reasons invoked by Tagore, I have a feeling that there are epistemological and value-driven reasons as well. These other kinds of reasons are linked to mythologies and fantasies created within the world of rehabilitation science and mundane identitarian disability practices. In this chapter, I explore some of these mythologies and ideological/benevolence practices that move one’s individual and collective modes of knowing and believing toward false consciousness.3 Therefore, the purpose of the present chapter is twofold. First, centering on the structural and agency contours of disability justice, it conflates intersectional disability linguistic and discourse-based epistemologies (such as those of Barthes and Foucault) with new materialist and Latinx/ Chicanx decolonial epistemologies such as those proposed by Castro-Gómez, Maldonado-Torres, and Sandoval. Second, it interrogates global south epistemologies. So far, as developed by Boaventura de Sousa Santos, this epistemological approach has not engaged disability matters. Thus, it could not be said that global south epistemologies are by definition centered on disability knowledges born within struggles of disability justice in global south and global north contexts (except for tangential references imported from gender, race/cultural dimensions, and class). Thus, this chapter bridges global south
DOI: 10.4324/9781003084150-3
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and global north epistemologies on consciousness formation. My bridging approach privileges the decolonial spaces afforded by material precarity.4 Along with this, I interrogate common ideological false consciousness and its consequences5 as they derive from supremacist6 mythologies of normalcy within global north and global south contexts. Undeniably, the word disability itself is charged with ableist affective connotations as it emphasizes deficits in ability, capacity, or the like. Conversely, as discussed in the previous chapter, words like re/habilitation imply that as a disabled human being or as part of a disabled collectivity one somehow gets fixed, brought back to normal through re/habilitative processes (which, of course, have clear normalizing goals, free from postmodern musings). Hence, the identitarian contours of resistance tied to disability are queer in nature. They require a particular sense of self-affirmation. At the same time, disability self-affirmation is not divorced from serious considerations of suffering as a powerful identitarian source of epistemological richness. Thus, the identitarian roots of disability self-affirmation link to existential realities of disability social enactments in the global north and in the global south, exposing their intersectional modes of subaltern resistance within emotionally and materially oppressive and systemic deprivations.7 There is yet another sense in which one can approach and ascertain the poetic justice of disability. To touch on this kind of emotionally charged poetic justice, I should mention that there is one of Arturo’s disabled friends from childhood, whom I will call in this volume Ezequiel as a symbolic and exilic reference to intersectional disability theology.8 Ezequiel started his disability journey as a blind, progressively becoming catatonic. One day Ezequiel simply disappeared from the boarding school for the blind. Despite several attempts by Arturo over the years to get specific information about what happened with Ezequiel and how everything went about, the various actors Arturo has approached simply evade the subject or provide vague references. Most likely, Ezequiel ended up becoming yet another victim in the 1970s’ prevailing institutionalizing views for people with mental or “serious” neurodivergent disabilities. Somehow, those imprisoning views took over. He was no longer a blind, despite the fact that his visual impairments never left him. As blind, although still in the confines of a boarding school, which for all intents and purposes is what Goffman calls a total institution,9 he could still enjoy a small degree of pseudo-freedom, like certain kinds of minimumsecurity inmates. At a given point, somebody with power to do so decided that Ezequiel was beyond the threshold of sanity.10 Ezequiel’s freedom, his limited sense of disabled humanity was then gone; Ezequiel’s embodiment of fragile freedom and relational agency/subjectivity was gone as well. The COVID pandemic has given able-body folks an opportunity to taste the sadness of this kind of abrupt disappearance. There are abundant testimonies of how people’s family members were simply taken away and gone forever without a chance for farewell. In that regard, there is a poetic justice flavor of consciousness that
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can be seen as analogous to the sort of disability consciousness in Arturo’s emotional intelligence processing of these childhood events. I nevertheless wonder about the extent to which these experiences are qualitatively similar. For Arturo, as for many disabled folks in the global north and in the global south, the experience of total institutionality in the strict sense has never gone away. It follows them into adulthood. It chases them through constant instances of under- and unemployment, tangible forms of material precarity whose origin always traces back to disability, to perceptual mythologies of deficit and abnormality that perpetually see their identity through the hegemonic lens of that which needs fixing, correcting, rehabilitating.
Intersectional disability agency and normalizing mythologies: Linking Barthes and Foucault When I think of Foucault’s epistemology, I always try to be careful in linking him to my epistemic analysis of global south thinkers such as Boaventura de Sousa Santos. I do so in the realization that, at least geopolitically, Foucault still represents the ethos of a white organic intellectual and is thus vulnerable to Eurocentric and settler ideological pollution. With respect to postcolonial thinkers like Fanon11 and innovative epistemologies such as those of Deleuze,12 the Foucaultian contribution acquires even further richness. Combining them allows for a tripartite model of power. It is a practical metatheory really helpful for critical disability studies because it infuses the analysis of intersectional disability agency with decolonial, posthumanist/materialist, and discursive dimensions. Applying this tripartite model to the intersection of race and disability, I see a great deal of potential, particularly as it pertains to the consolidation of LatDisCrit as a subdiscipline and a sphere for targeted intersectional activism. For example, in theorizing and implementing new modalities of relational leadership, one can bring in difference-centered conceptions of interdependence that build upon decolonial modes of solidarity. One can then incorporate vitalist/posthumanist/neo-materialist views of situated embodiment13 into the mix. The resulting blend brings about an ethical aesthetic approach toward the fluid consolidation and distribution of power and multiple knowledges. My conception of power throughout this interdisciplinary volume rests in significant respects on a dialectical encounter between Foucault and Santos. Through these authors’ dialogue and disagreements,14 I am puzzled by the possibility that power holds the chains of the regulatory boundaries that make the modern self and, simultaneously, the keys for this self to emancipate its own ethos in the engagement with radical exteriority.15 Therefore, power and knowledge not only become one; in the multivocality of modes of knowing, they engender an infinite realm of possibilities for both oppression and relational efforts to concretize freedom through radical solidarity.
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Thus, conceptually separating power and domination accentuates power’s autonomous potential for undoing domination. Also, this differentiation allows oppressed agents and knowledge workers alike to remember that there are still power spaces available for them to use as wisely as possible within oppressive contexts. It is true that there is a wide spectrum of modes of domination. Many of them are more hegemonic in nature, while others rely on violent mechanisms of repression. Still, we are not necessarily in the presence of an absolute binary confrontation of power against powerlessness. This would do away with agency (radical and otherwise) altogether.16 Remembering Ezequiel, thinking of him, thinking of his forced disappearance and that of so many folks like him all over the globe, I feel compelled to proclaim that the intrinsic intersectional disability agency logic of the present interdisciplinary volume demands that one must depart from a core, nonnegotiable, axiomatic principle: everyone is capable of emancipatory agency. As Abraham Heschel poignantly indicated almost six decades ago, any “attempt to derive an image from human nature can only result in extracting the image originally injected in it.”17 People with schizophrenia, autism, severe brain injuries, etc. all embody the potentiality of emancipation. Emancipation is intrinsic to one’s personhood.18 Denying it for certain categories of individuals would amount to denying their personhood. Therefore, I treat emancipation primarily as a process, not a fixed, reified outcome. For some, something as “simple” as smiling, an authentically liberatory embodiment of the relational materiality of interdependence, can be a milestone in their conception of a dynamic, truly agentic sense of emancipation as a living process. For others, only complex revolutionary processes at the political, cultural, or socio-economic levels can satisfy. The very definition and redefinition of this emancipatory process should be part of the essence of emancipation. In its critical existentialism, i.e., its everyday modes of relational becoming, emancipation is always a work in progress. On the other hand, a broad, genuinely flexible tutelage implementation should not be necessarily incompatible with the process of emancipation. However, by its very nature, the why, the how, and for whom of tutelage must remain under the control of subaltern, intersectionally oppressed agents with disabilities.19 To be sure, this condition of tutelage in its most detailed specificity should be continuously reexamined and adjusted. The aim is to make sure that it does not contribute to duplicating modes of oppression or even hegemonic, i.e., soft, consensus-based, forms of manipulation. It should not serve to keep subaltern, oppressed people busy in the tireless pursuit of change conditions without materializing them. Those in dominant positions must make sure that this kind of false tutelage manipulation never happens. When it comes to tutelage, a concomitant principle should be at work. The greater the expertise, organizational capacity, and power of knowledge workers involved, the greater should be the need for tutelage mechanisms of control on the part of oppressed agents. Power boundaries must be arranged and kept in check so as to remain in a state of real accountability to those who
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should be benefited by the emancipation process. So many times, an exacerbated sense of deference or respect by radical agents leads to duplication of domination structures. Being on guard against this danger should be paramount; no precaution should be deemed as excessive. Knowledge workers’ mission must be enacted as humble cooperation with oppressed radical agents. In their mutual search for resistance, this mission sensitizes knowledge workers to cultivate a critical yet open imagination, enabling them to identify the spheres of residual power that remain in the hands of oppressed agents and articulating them into realistic alliance building and sustainable strategic change-making mechanisms. Ben-Moshe demonstrates how Foucault’s20 genealogical analysis of discourses on danger reveals a conflation of regulatory tendencies coming from medical and penal claims: Its hybridity lies not just in the sense of amalgamation of several discourses (legal, medical) but also in the creation of a new power/knowledge structure in which “doctors laying claim to judicial power and judges laying claim to medical power” … lay down an intertwined system of surveillance, which includes psychiatric progress reports of the incarcerated, examination in court of the accused, and surveillance of “at risk” groups. According to Foucault … this medico-judicial discourse does not originate from medicine or law or in between, but from another external discourse—that of abnormality. The power of normalization is cloaked by medical notions of illness and legal notions of recidivism. The history of treatment and categorization of those labeled as feebleminded, and later “mentally retarded,” is also paved on cobblestones of notions of social danger, as prominent eugenicists tried to “scientifically” establish that those whom they characterized as feebleminded had a tendency to commit violent crimes.21 Like Foucault, semiologist Roland Barthes emphasizes the discursive. Nevertheless, in Barthes,22 this emphasis involves the undoing of mythologies. Barthes’ emancipatory mode of semiology aims at achieving (1) the recognition of differences in their ineluctable consequences for the subjugation and homogenizing supremacist identity of “well-behaved” patriotic citizens of western nation-states; (2) the reconnection of history to objects that have undergone mythological speculation/defacement; (3) the “disallowal of pure identification” to engender a self-conscious relocation and reexamination of knowledge workers, i.e., what he calls practitioners of “emancipatory semiology,” as they move through processes of transformation with a critical eye toward issues of meaning and power; (4) the deliberate undermining of authority, objectivity, facticity, and science to reconnect with their true, premythological origins via the unearthing of the history, power impositions, and systems of meaning that made them possible; and (5) the constant reconstruction of the consciousness of emancipatory knowledge workers and the
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method for their critical analysis of myths, as both of them interact to produce a non-mythological kind of reality with all the force of its liberating potential for colonized/oppressed people.23
Intersectional disability agency, power, and freedom In linking Foucault and Barthes, one needs to understand that myths do not stand by themselves as mere discursive phantoms. The supremacist force of normalizing myths for people of color with disabilities has embodied very much materially relevant existential consequences. Ezequiel’s disappearance story is a powerful testimony of this, but in more “mundane” ways the materiality of precarious living and dignity-stealing realities permeates disability struggles in global north as much as in global south contexts.24 Hence, in their pursuit of freedom from the bondage imposed by these tangible modes of materiality, one also needs to invoke a paradigm like that of Gilles Deleuze,25 which gives preeminence to how these embodiments translate into agency faculties and in turn transformational enactments. Deleuze, for instance, devotes a great deal of attention to demonstrate how Spinoza’s unique treatment of the concept of expression in finite bodies becomes an enactment of their divine/i.e., creative/transformational essence. “Expression in Nature is never a final symbolization, but always, and everywhere, a causal explication.”26 The intrinsic materiality of this performative relationality between expression and creativity among concrete embodied people of color with disabilities who struggle against the bondage of material precarity makes clear that radical agency possibilities are grounded on the love of freedom versus the fear of freedom, the love of life-giving things versus death-enslaved modes of domination.27 This is why the work of freedom is and should always remain undefined. Concretizing it is a project that fuses learning and action, individuality, and collective concerns. Oppressed agents drive through these concerns in multiple ways for them to bring about change. Only in this open sense, freedom and love are one. Their unity expresses mutual reinforcement. The unity of freedom and love in action operates at the concrete material level of experiential difference in the everyday manifestations of situated resistance that make up radical agency. Therefore, this is a process intrinsically axiological and subversive. It embodies the values and utopian desires of those who seek change from below. Hence, it becomes meaningful to wonder, to interrogate. How does one find out what are the values guiding the learning journey to get somewhere? Why fight? How should the fight make sense as a collective endeavor while remaining an original and authentic mode of intersectional authoring? How do dimensions such as utopia, ideology, meaning making, identity, performativity, and power struggles play into the creative authoring equation of emancipatory/radical agency? To be sure, having an open-ended, undefined conception of freedom and resistance allows the examination of situated emancipation in unlikely places
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and actors. The oppressed must drive dialogical processes of situated emancipation and liberation. In qualifying the process as dialogical, I underscore its relationality. Likewise, I stress the careful incorporation of oppressors through strategic alliances that can help move the emancipatory learning process along quantitative and qualitative transformations. In turn, this requires a rigorous understanding of the limits of ideology and utopia, along with relevant meaning making and performativity.
Power, intersectional agency, and decolonial Latinx ways of knowing At this point, it helps to come back to Boaventura de Sousa Santos. Through Santos’s understanding/explanation of enacted epistemologies in the global south one starts to realize the power of the powerless to undo what various Latinx/Chicanx thinkers call the coloniality of power.28 The interesting and paradoxical thing is that Santos achieves this by tackling in a critical manner the same discursive spheres addressed by Foucault, i.e., regulatory frameworks of various sorts. In the 1970s, Santos studied extensively Rio’s marginalized favela contexts in terms of their regulatory communal ethos. This research and the theorizing that emerged from it revealed a powerful sense in which communally driven regulatory frameworks could be emancipatory in their alternative sense of rationality.29 Rather than being understood merely as chaotic environments where crime and self-destruction reign while dehumanizing dynamics prevail everywhere, these contexts displayed a coherent internal logic governed by principles and axiological hierarchies of distributive justice in action.30 The problem is that, despite the revolutionary potential of seeing emancipation in action through communal exercises of justice, one still gets a disembodied sense of agency and relationality. No wonder Santos has traditionally remained disconnected from disability analyses altogether, as if the epistemologies of the global south do not include disability experiential realms. There is therefore an urgent need to bring body and corporalities into the picture of justice-driven models of subaltern parallel rationalities in global south as well as in global north contexts of interaction. This emphasis on corporal materiality and agentic dynamicity brings us back to Deleuze. “For Deleuze, sensation is vibration, and thus rhythm is the foundation of perception … Deleuze suggests that perception is not individualized, but rather comprises the rising amplitude of a wave or rhythm, with frequencies momentarily in phase and resonant.”31 Reading this passage, I think of the rhythmic unfolding of a cane walk through unchartered territories. The synchronization of this rhythm is always a moving target. One gets a sense of the spatial and sonic, even the smelling contours of the new territory perceive it and massage it, so to speak. One does not conquer it, in the sense of transforming everything in the newly known territory into a fixed document for cartography.32
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One can think of it as a collective wave of walking folks with canes. All of them are contributing rhythmic layers of synchrony. None of them constitutes the ultimate individuation of its perceptual status. None of them is the ordering king, the tribunal of last resort. To me, this must become the organizing metaphor for blind and pandisability movements yet to come, particularly those uniquely relevant to and constructed by people of color and Latinx folks with disabilities in the global north and the global south alike. In this sense, it becomes clear that LatDisCrit is a utopian, multi-knowledge border-crossing expression of their emerging cane tip. As an aspirational movement of enacted utopias and performative spaces for change, LatDisCrit embodies their polyphonic arrangement and rearrangement of disability justice dreams. It incubates new and constantly renewing pandisability modes of cultural materialities. LatDisCrit’s decolonial project takes shape as a plethora of identitarian exaltations. They embody the resistance reign of radical exteriority through efforts, often painful, to achieve radical solidarity across crucial identitarian differences. Compared to race matrices of hierarchy, in intersectional disability contexts, decolonial epistemologies might be less evident in their operational modes of domination. One needs to look at the scope and limits of this kind of decolonial epistemology to explore how helpful it might be in understanding and enriching contextual emancipation strategies in intersectional Latinx/subaltern agency and domination dynamics. On this, it is useful to engage a bit with Alejandro Vallega’s epistemology of radical exteriority. His approach rests on Enrique Dussel’s treatment of Levinas. Levinas focuses on otherness as a quest for trans-ontology. His is an axiology of the human.33 As Dussel puts it, “to be human is to have a distinct ethical call that results from finding one’s subjectivity by being in proximity to others who remain always beyond our decisions, control, and total comprehension … thought arises in alterity and toward the engagement with alterity.”34 It is in this space of absolute alterity that the meaning of radical exteriority resides. Therefore, radical exteriority is not, in the strict sense, equivalent to or exclusively found in spaces of intersectionality. It is a radical axiology and epistemology of otherness from the experiential vantage point of the excluded.35 Radical exteriority alludes to “a thinking and existence beyond Western comprehension, control, and determination; to the living, articulate configurations of lives previously excluded, oppressed, exploited and silenced, from which a sound philosophical thought arises.”36 By western, in this context, Vallega means Eurocentric universalism. Hence, Latin American thought (particularly in its liberation and decolonial manifestations) is uniquely permeated by radical exteriority. That uniqueness stems from Latin America’s ambivalent interdependence and reliance on European epistemology. In this ambivalence, it simultaneously praises what is “civilized” and different about its inherently “mestizx” identity.37 This is especially so since
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Latinx identity is reluctantly forced38 to engage with ideologies of “negritud.”39
Intersectional agency and the problem of mestizaje as coloniality of power in action: A look at the contours of supremacist identitarian hierarchy This section deals with the framing of Latinidad as a venue for examining intersectional disability agency/solidarity possibilities. As such, what matters is not so much one’s multiple knowledges and perspectives about what Latinidad means, but rather the intersectional practices that constitute its continued sense of becoming and performativity in everyday life. Likewise, one should look at how Latinidad gets intersectionally represented in literature, law, the arts, ethics, pandisability culture, Latinx modes of spirituality, and so on. Although it may seem a truism, the living of Chicanidad is very different to the experiences of Latinx negritude within U.S. and other global north and global south contexts throughout the Americas.40 For some, categories such as indigenismo transcend the scope of Latinidad. They conceive indigenismo as a uniquely global identity.41 Yet, at the same time, approaching the study of trans-Latinidades as a relatively unified phenomenon is by no means a futile effort, especially thinking of pandisability and other opportunities for radical/subaltern/decolonizing solidarity. Moreover, exploring Latinidad’s hierarchical contours is extremely fruitful. It helps a great deal to examine radical exteriority’s implications for identity and relationality. Valdes’s LatCrit42 serves for me to problematize the relevance of “Hispanismo” in the shaping of Latinidad’s decolonial and emancipatory potential. It is paramount to analyze Latinx, LatCrit, and other theorists in a way that considers multiple modalities of internal diversity, e.g., those stemming from nationality, ethnicity, race, immigration background and status, class, religion, gender, sexual orientation, disability, and other categories of identity and identification that “have been rendered relevant to antisubordination analysis.”43 Since antisubordination is the crucial dimension here,44 the case of Hispanismo must be singled out critically. Hispanismo links at once with issues of Eurocentric white supremacy and with the postcolonial/inter-imperial uniqueness of Latinx of all races north and south of the Río Grande. Hispanismo epitomizes a mixture of nativism and racism, manifesting itself in slightly different ways throughout the entire Latin American continent. As such, it invites strategic alliance building and broad metatheoretical approaches aimed at decolonial and emancipatory resistance.45 Hispanismo or hispanidad is an ideology that builds on exaggerating the grounding of Latinidades on ties to Spain and white European ontologies, epistemologies, and ways of viewing the world.46 Apart from its geopolitical and socio-historical implications of erasure of other trends, Hispanismo is fundamentally a racial ideology. It embodies white supremacy and appropriates nonwhite sources of Latinidades. It is set up to perpetuate a colonial
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and imperialistic heritage that often connects with inter- and trans-imperial everyday practices. Arturo, for example, was asked in one of his research experiences in New Mexico why was it that being Hispanic his skin color was so dark. The question came from a Hispanic research participant. This was a person from northern New Mexico who had opted to cling to a proud self-perception as somebody of pure lineage with direct links to Spanish conquistadores, which symbolically serves to evoke the power embedded in ego conquiro47 even long after the imperial hegemony of Spain has faded away. Typically, these individuals are not white. However, (perhaps unknowingly) they rely on the enslavement heritage of bearing the last names of conquistadores for having been part of their encomienda (i.e., land grant) subjects, mere property, not so different from cattle and other reified items for exchange.48 There are thinkers who stress the need to avoid looking at Latinx race issues as a black and white binary.49 At the same time, it is fruitful to inscribe the study of Latinidades within the broad umbrella of decolonial blackness studies.50 The conflation of race and ethnicity generally serves to mask the ideological nature of Hispanismo. Latinidades are made up of racial, ethnic, geopolitical, linguistic, and exilic elements. This exilic dimension is relevant even for those Latinx communities that have not experienced physical migration since the times of the conquista, whose identity ethos has nonetheless been forced to adapt to new imperialist contexts. In the U.S., this happens in ways that are in practice as diasporic as those experienced by migrating Latinx groups. Despite this complex factual truth, both analytically and at the level of identitarian radical exteriority, the unique intersectionality of Latinidades is governed by race and decolonial resistance. This is true not only in the U.S. but also throughout the Americas, Spain, and wherever Latinx enclaves get established. Ian Haney López51 elaborates on the significance of this analytical point. Using the famous Hernández v Texas case, he points out that while that particular Supreme Court decision granted legal protection to Mexican Americans and by extension to Latinx in the U.S., it did so by avoiding/erasing their racial uniqueness through a social constructivist pattern grounded on legal fictions. Nonetheless, these mythical legal fictions acquire the force of “reality.”52 In Hernández v Texas the paradox is that the Supreme Court was following a biological conception of race, finding factual evidence of discrimination typical of race-related cases but without being able to attribute these facts to a biologically recognized racial category within the U.S. legal system. López contends that this paradox dissolves when one treats race as a socially constructed dimension that pertains to Mexican Americans as much as any other Latinx communities. López’s argumentation brings the discussion back to the relevance of materialist epistemologies. While race, like disability, is socially constructed, its consequences are ontologically undeniable. They create a relational materiality that in many cases is oppressive, although it can also serve to unite
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subaltern actors who are subject to racialized and intersectional disability modes of domination. Black Latinx and Chicanx differences might make their ethnic links unlikely. Yet, the common racial/intersectional sources of their material precarity and domination make decolonial resistance and radical solidarity worth exploring not only within U.S. legal contexts but across the hemisphere and globally as well. Ethnicity, diasporic/exilic identities, and other modes of radical exteriority can and should complement this racebased/intersectional approach to building decolonial radical agency and solidarity. That way one makes sure that internal sources of hierarchization among Latinx/intersectional disability communities are also critically exposed and addressed at the level of joint collective action.
Concluding preliminary thoughts on normalizing mythologies, intersectional agency, and the undoing of the coloniality of power, knowledge, and being Talking about the parallels between lynching and the cross, theologian Kelly Brown Douglas says that lynching “is about power standing its ground against anyone it deems a threat. It is meant to be a deadly reminder to a suspect community of its ‘proper’ place in society.”53 In turn, this mode of governmentality, to use Foucault’s famous terminology,54 requires a close coordination of power, epistemological means to justify supremacist ways to secure collective acquiescence, and internalized legitimacy on the part of those governed. Most importantly, it requires colonizing the very being of those subaltern subjects objectified by the exclusionary, dehumanizing logic of lynching-like annihilation, which, incredible as it may seem to some, for people with disabilities is often perpetrated by their own family.55 This is where the intersection of race, gender, and disability proves to be most helpful as an analytical/existential space for understanding/explaining radical agency and resistance. Hence, it makes sense at this point to come back to a slightly modified version of the question I posed at the start of this chapter: what is the flavor or the plurality of flavors in intersectional disability consciousness? Well, a word that would most likely come up as an answer is personhood. However, traditional human rights and justice models with their individualized emphasis on personhood are not always helpful in this radical decolonizing quest. Radical jurist scholar Costas Douzinas56 makes quite clear that, taking a close look at the history of the concept of person, one realizes how much it reflects a radical disconnect with what modern thinkers consider essential to one’s personhood, i.e., one’s intrinsic sense of humanity. In ancient Rome, the meaning of person had much more to do with the mask (persona), that is, the role played by somebody through their power investiture. This is what ancient Romans called dignitates: pater familiae, proconsul, etc.57 To get an idea of how far this gets from the individualized sense of personhood used in modern times, often fusing the ontology of humans and things, consider that “father
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35
and son … are a single person when representing the estate. After marriage, a man may acquire two personalities and can be shared or represent both the estates of his father and his father-in-law. On the death of the master, an estate forms a single person for the purposes of succession.”58 Most importantly, for the sake of dealing with matters of agency, one needs to understand that the legal purpose of the concept of person was precisely to separate, to abstract, in other words, to exclude: “law used the category of the person in order to separate between humans and others and develop abstract and general concepts and strategies of inclusion and exclusion. What was important was the drawing of lines and the separating action.”59 Similarly, one also needs to understand the unique contours of epistemological injustice associated with the intersectional subalternity of disability spheres in the global north as well as in the global south. Social epistemologist Miranda Fricker, for instance, develops a framework that links ethics and epistemology.60 Fricker is right about the fact that certain postmodern treatments of power end up being counterproductive when it comes to issues of social justice generally conceived. Suspicion, at all cost, of categories of reason and reduction of reasoning dynamics to an operation of power actually preempt the very questions one needs to ask about how power is affecting our functioning as rational subjects; for it eradicates, or at least obscures, the distinction between what we have a reason to think and what mere relations of power are doing to our thinking.61 However, Fricker’s solution is not entirely satisfactory either. Her argument is that, both in terms of testimonial credibility and in terms of interpretation, powerless groups experience a dual epistemic injustice. The problem is that for Fricker the matter is addressed through an ethical stance, that is, through the practice of hearing virtues. In turn, these virtues have truth-seeking epistemic consequences when one discriminates without prejudice at the interpretative level various forms of knowledge presented to each of us as discerning hearers.62 Yet, when it comes to intersectional disability justice under the hegemonic parameters of epistemic injustice imposed by supremacist normalizing mythologies,63 it matters little how the hearer hears and/or discerns. Knowledges produced or discussed in dealing with these dynamics by virtue of the people who produce them or who raise the issues at hand are, a priori, judged as worthless. In this case, both subjects and objects of knowledge are deemed as epistemologically irrelevant. Thus, both are excluded from the canon of knowable things and from the discussion arena where people of color with disabilities could in theory participate as knowers worthy of an equal share of the hearing floor.64 This is why I have emphasized so much the value of keeping in mind decolonial theories, particularly those targeting the coloniality of knowledge, power, and being.65 The latter of these three modes of coloniality is extremely important for the agentic discussions of intersectionality in the present book. Maldonado-Torres credits Walter Mignolo for having come up with the idea
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of the coloniality of being. While the coloniality of power and the coloniality of knowledge are much more closely related to the heritage of Cartesian suspicion/skepticism about the humanity of the other, the ontological dimensions of the heritage associated with the coloniality of being are fundamentally linked with Heidegger’s philosophical system. Under Heidegger’s framework, being means a sort of “Being of beings, that is, something like the general horizon of understanding for all beings … He refers to the distinction between Being and beings as the ontological difference.”66 The coloniality of being occupies the bulk of the existential meaning in the counterstories contained in the next two chapters. Both of them take place in global north contexts. Through these upcoming counterstories one can appreciate two main things: (1) issues of intersectional relationality among people of color with disabilities who should in theory be collaborative resistance/situated emancipation partners; and (2) identitarian radical exteriority struggles as the disabled go through the painful process of deciding whether or not to embrace disability as a mode of being, especially as they are bound to make these determinations under the existential weight of the mythology of disability as tragedy.67
Notes 1 Radice (2009: n.p.). See Du Bois (1920, 1924). 2 The essays by Annamma and Morrison (2018) as well as Annamma and Handy (2019) are noteworthy exceptions. Both of these essays link double consciousness with intersectional solidarity dimensions derived from the interplay of race and disability oppressions and the specific strategic and emotional intelligence kinds of knowledges reflecting on this dual oppression affords. 3 Here I am deliberately using this expression in its traditional Marxian sense, i.e., as succumbing to ideological misconstructions of reality. On this, see, e.g., Geuss (1981); Marx (2008a, 2008b). 4 On this, see Oliviero (2018); Seki (2020); Tamura (2018). 5 The implication here is not that there is a single monolithic true consciousness to which all people with or without dis/abilities must adhere. However, in a sort of neo-Marxian sense, traditional neo-Marxian works that explore race and intersectional collective action dimensions, such as Robinson’s (1983) treatise or Scribano’s (2014) essay within a Latin American context, combine very nicely with disabilitycentered pieces such as those formulated by Ben-Moshe, Chapman, and Carey (2014); Ben-Moshe and Stewart (2017); Malhotra (2017); Romañach Cabrero (2008); Rosato and Angelino (2009); Russell (1998); and Stewart and Russell (2001) to show the various ways in which false consciousness manifests and gets portrayed in global north and global south contexts alike. 6 Especially these days when so much racial violence in the U.S. displays openly supremacist gestures, discourse, and symbolism, it is easy to associate this word exclusively with a narrow conception of white supremacy, as documented and explored in detail through scholarly analysis such as Evelyn A. Schlatter’s (2006) book. Nonetheless, I am much more interested in this interdisciplinary volume in elevating the intersectional disability contours of supremacy, particularly as it dovetails ideologically, corporally, socially, and materially with its twin oppressing hegemonic force: that of normalcy (not forgetting that white supremacy itself as a
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7 8
9 10 11 12 13
14 15
16 17 18 19
20 21 22
37
phenomenological praxis normalizes things that seem strange once that ideological mask gets removed or thoroughly interrogated). On this intersectional set of contours, see, for instance, Davis (1995); Erevelles (2017); Garland-Thomson (1996, 1997); Plessini (2014); Serban (2014); Taylor (2014); Thomas and Sakellariou (2018); Thorius and Tan (2016); and Titchkosky (2002, 2008, 2011), among others. See Obourn (2020, ch. 1); Piepzna-Samarasinha (2018), as well as the structural/ political economy analysis developed a couple of decades ago by Russell (1998). In my doctoral dissertation, I called this dear friend of Arturo’s Emeterio (Padilla 2018, e.g., pp. 230, 231). With the Ezequiel (Spanish for Ezekiel) name change in this volume I symbolize several things. First, there is a prophetic outcry, a sense of dis/abled performative denunciation that I want to underscore. Second, there is something deeply scatological about the book of Ezekiel that links this name with creative configurations, many of which transgress traditional religious and spiritual constructs; see, for example, Lieb (1998). Third, and perhaps most importantly for the purposes of the present interdisciplinary volume, the name change symbolizes a radical solidarity pandisability aspiration. Ezequiel’s conflation of neurodiverse, mental, and sensory disability categories and the evolution of his “impairments” are such that he becomes an embodiment of pandisability. Also, the way he literally disappeared without ever truly leaving Arturo’s life is analogous to the thousands of “desaparecidos” of the right and left Latin American dictatorships, and much more recently, to the way so many dis/abled people disappeared within the COVID pandemic worldwide, often as selective disposable bodies in instances where ventilators were scarce. See Goffman (1961). On this, see the essay by Perlin (1993). See especially Fanon (1965, 1967, 2004). I particularly have in mind here Deleuze (1984, 1990) as well as Deleuze and Guattari (1987). Here I have in mind disability studies in education works such as de Freitas and Sinclair (2014) or Reddington and Price (2018), as well as broader metatheoretical works by authors like Braidotti (2002, 2014), which have been incorporated into critical disability studies so far with substantially fruitful results, especially in enhancing our understanding of the materiality and relationality of disability agency dynamics. See, for example, Santos (2014), especially his direct and indirect dialogue with Foucault in chs. 4–5. Here I invite the reader to revisit my preliminary discussion of radical exteriority in Chapter 1. Please consider especially radical exteriority’s underscoring of issues associated with identitarian otherness. Look at how radical exteriority builds into one’s becoming through the dynamic engagement with whatever one considers to be the nature of one’s very conception of the intersectionality of selfhood. On this, see especially Dieuwertje’s (2020) discussion of agency in conjunction with neurodiversity. Heschel (1965: p. 8). See below the discussion of Costas Douzinas’s (2019) history of the persona/personhood concept, in terms of its implications for intersectional disability agency dimensions. On this, see Erevelles and Minear (2010); Ferri and Connor (2006); Forman (2012); Gilmore (2000); Harcourt (2011); Haritaworn (2014); Hernández-Saca (2016); James (2005); Metzl (2003, 2010, 2020); Oparah (2009); Perlin (1993); Price (2011); Szasz (1974); Taylor (2014); Wolfensberger (2013). See especially Foucault (2003). Ben-Moshe (2013b: pp. 123–124). See especially Barthes (1972).
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23 See Sandoval (2017). 24 On this, the political economy analysis by Marta Russell (1998) and the powerful connections between disability and slavery underscored by Erevelles (2011, 2014, 2017) remain outstanding, emblematic illustrations. Of course, one should also add to this mix Stewart and Russell’s (2001) paradigmatic linking of imprisonment, disability, and racial segregation in Canada and the U.S. 25 See especially Deleuze (1984, 1990) as well as Deleuze and Guattari (1987). 26 Deleuze (1990: p. 232). 27 See Fromm (1941, 1947, 1955, 1968, 1976, 1992, 1999, 2013). 28 E.g., Castro-Gómez (2008); Maldonado-Torres (2006b, 2007); Mendieta (2007); Mignolo and Walsh (2018); Quijano (1995, 2000a, 2000b); Quijano and Wallerstein (1992); Saldívar (2012); Sandoval (2000). 29 See, for example, Santos (1995, 1998, 2002, 2003, 2006). 30 See Santos (1974, 2014); Santos and Exeni Rodríguez (2015). 31 de Freitas and Sinclair (2014: pp. 157–158). 32 I am writing here in oppositional reference to Jorge Luis Borges’s (1970) story of the conquering king who transformed everything into a rigid territorial map, a fixed knowledge code for referential purposes. 33 See, for example, Levinas (1969). 34 Vallega (2014: p. 7). 35 See Dussel (2008, 2012); Vallega (2009). 36 Vallega (2014: pp. 221–222). 37 On this, see especially Miller (2004). 38 In the complex sense that thinkers like Agustín Lao-Montes (2016) manage to interrogate Africanity as part of the identitarian make-up of Latinxness in the U.S. and beyond. 39 This word negritud corresponds to negritude in Spanish. I use it throughout the volume as interchangeable with blackness. Something similar occurs with “indigenismo”/indigeneity. See, for example, Zea (1971, 1986, 1991); Vallega (2014, especially notes 11 and 14 in ch. 1, pp. 225–226). 40 See Gordon (2016, 2020); Lao-Montes (2016). 41 E.g., Fenelon and Hall (2016). 42 See Valdés (2000). 43 Valdés (2000: p. 307, note 1). 44 Sandrino-Glasser (1998). 45 See Chang and Aoki (1997); López (1997); Valdés (1999). 46 Valdés (2000). 47 To use Dussel’s (1995, 2012) terminology. 48 On this, see Nieto-Phillips (2004); see also Roberts (2004). 49 See, e.g., Morán (1997); Perea (1997). 50 It might seem that the same could also be said of whiteness studies; although, for the sake of my emphasis on radical agency, radical solidarity, and emancipatory learning, I am convinced that a broad application of decolonial blackness can be much more congruent, particularly when one takes into account the concomitant ideological contours of normalizing hierarchies and the need for pandisability actors to resist feelings of inferiority and embodied alienation. 51 See López (1997). 52 López (1997: pp. 1152 and following). 53 Brown Douglas (2015: p. 174). 54 E.g., Lemke (2016). 55 The extreme example of Guillermina, Arturo’s piano teacher back in the 1980s, which, as it turned out ended up being deadly, comes to mind here. See Padilla (2018: p. 416). 56 Douzinas (2019: pp. 1 and following).
Radical exteriority and new materialisms 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64
39
See, e.g., Esposito (2012: p. 79). Douzinas (2019: p. 2). Esposito (2012: p. 79). See Fricker (2010). Fricker (2010: p. 4); see also Fricker (2000). On this, see Fricker (1991, 1998, 2003, 2006). See Piepzna-Samarasinha (2018). Which reminds me of a powerful quote from Jacques Rancière (1991: p. 67): “Essentially, what an emancipated person can do is be an emancipator: to give, not the key to knowledge, but the consciousness of what an intelligence can do when it considers itself equal to any other and considers any other equal to itself. Emancipation is the consciousness of that equality, of that reciprocity that alone permits intelligence to be realized by verification.” 65 In my view, Nelson Maldonado-Torres’ (2007) conceptualization, especially for the latter of these three modes of coloniality in its connection to radical exteriority, remains one of the best I have come across so far. 66 Maldonado-Torres (2007: p. 249). 67 On this, see Dossa (2009); Nguyen (2015) for interesting globally grounded intersectional subalternity perspectives/narratives of disability justice struggles.
4
The betraying power of postcolonial rehabilitation Beyond Fátima and Arturo
Introduction: The counterstory’s scenario: On the situational micropolitics of global north rehabilitation This April morning was not so cold. Arturo got to the appointment punctually, as was customary for him. The receptionist announced his presence. The wait time involved a good number of minutes, but Arturo did not want to be nervous. Yet, the urgency of his situation was becoming overwhelming. He was a newcomer to this strange Deep South town. Arturo was now realizing the hard way that his job arrangements, which were the only thing that brought him and his family to live here, looked now much shakier than how they had been sold to him. At last, Thom, the rehab counselor, came out and greeted him in a manner that felt colder than usual. At once, Arturo got the feeling that something was not quite right. Arturo feels tired. He cannot endure any longer the feeling of being pushed around. Conflating rehabilitation and immigration systems work in his case and that of so many diasporic people of color with disabilities as micro- and macropolitical straightjackets. Both of these systems put Arturo and his family through experiences of pseudo-choice. Yet, these are false choice instances that take them nowhere. Because of this, Arturo and his family have often wondered if it would be worth trying Canada. That would allow them to leave behind their decadeslong U.S. ordeal. A couple of times they have taken active steps in that direction, but nothing positive has transpired. The Canadian immigration system would allow them to work. Nevertheless, Canadian immigration consultants have repeatedly told them that Canadian immigration officers have the discretion to deny Arturo entry, even if his visa documentation is perfectly in order and approved. Within the Canadian legal context, Arturo’s blindness links him, as well as all persons with disabilities, regardless of their unique circumstances, to an overarching and untested assumption: that their “impairments” will constitute a “burden” to the provincial or federal systems.1 In one of Arturo’s exploratory interactions, one of these Canadian consultants, ignoring everything about Arturo’s individual achievements or specific circumstances, went on and on about the medical and “guide dog keeping” expenses that the Canadian system would have to take into consideration while deciding on Arturo’s visa request (notwithstanding Arturo’s lack of a guide dog or his lack of DOI: 10.4324/9781003084150-4
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medical expenses). This set of practices is widespread throughout global north nations. They are certainly impregnated with a surrealist aura where injustice transgresses the most unbelievable limits of the absurd. In Australia they went as far as to deny permanent residency status to a legally blind female from India. The denial was justified on the grounds of a putative disability pension she does not want to procure or have the need to request. The victimized person with disabilities was already working full time at that moment. She had a stable job in Australia and several of her family members were Australian citizens.2 All seems to indicate that the ontology of disability exclusionary misperceptions has long ago transcended the legal sphere. It is now part of everyday Canadian, Australian, British, U.S., and other global north policy contexts. In terms of decisional predispositions, these global north contexts are more and more likely to be the embodiment of common actors who conduct their affairs within atrocious, often unconscious, exclusionary assumptions.3
Intersectional disability agency and the irony of choice ideologies I only choose reluctantly to talk about choice in this reflexive counterstory. I feel that the idea of choice introduces a strong sense of irony to the mix. The ideology of choice underscores several paradoxes. It surfaces the ambiguities inherent to radical agency in situated instances of intersectional subalternity. Many such subaltern statuses converge in Arturo’s personhood and in his disabled life-course trajectory as a diasporic representative of the global south in a global north context. Nonetheless, by all accounts, it should be beyond doubt that no one chooses misery. No one, having real choice flexibility, opts for oppressive regulatory frameworks that impose long-term under-/unemployment. In other words, the emphasis on choice highlights the deceitful nature of autonomous decision making in the face of oppression and systemic discrimination. Switching gears, in search for a better understanding of the layers of complexity beneath this deceiving metanarrative of choice, it helps a great deal to introduce Fátima and her own global south disabled plight at this point. Fátima has indeed chosen to become the villain in Arturo’s situation. Like Arturo, Fátima is blind and foreign born. Fátima is not a brown Latinx. She does not come across as white at all either.4 Like many foreign-born women (and men for that matter) in the U.S. regulatory context, Fátima married an American, obtaining easier access to the citizenship pathways allowed/tolerated by the U.S. immigration regulatory system. So, it is likely that Fátima has faced intersectional discrimination as a nonwhite, blind female. However, as Ignatiev and Garvey5 suggest in their discussion of the constitutive and collateral aspects of what makes a “race traitor,” executioners of systemic discriminatory practices are often recruited among the rank and file of the oppressed. To be sure, these authors portray a positive image of race traitors. In accepting this label, race traitors embrace a badge of honor, a sort of Quixote trope of one who stands for humanity at all cost before consenting to the oppression of other groups or condoning injustices. This trope would probably
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coincide more with Arturo’s deliberate departure from the dominant “pack” of blind oppressors, knowing that this will engender for him and his family a lot of undeserved suffering.6
Further reflections on the coloniality of disabled intersectional subalternity and rehabilitative betrayal as an alienated mode of agency I am interjecting Ignatiev and Garvey’s analysis as being intrinsically connected to a broader treatment of betrayal in its ethical relationality. At the level of microethics, the work of Margalit functions in similar fashion, except that in Margalit race is completely downplayed.7 If one accepts Margalit’s principle that betrayal presupposes thick relations of love,8 it would follow that emancipation processes presuppose a clear delimitation of who is the enemy. In other words, it would involve a careful strategy aimed at finding out who or what is stifling the concretization of freedom in a given situated emancipation context. Even if one chooses to “love the enemy,” one should know who that enemy is and what it does or has been doing to stifle freedom. In terms of qualitative relationality, that kind of love should be differentiated from the metalanguage of love9 that keeps radical agency and radical solidarity in motion. Otherwise, it would get confusing. This is particularly true since emancipation is relationally grounded. It is driven by utopian desires that give meaning to collective action. In addition, it is always surrounded by categories of individuals or groups whose interests could be threatened (even if it is merely at the perceptual level) by the possibility that a given transformational utopia might be materialized. The mapping of these interests and counter-interests is part of the role of an emancipatory coalition’s critical hermeneutics. Thus, it should be dialogically worked out by radical agents and knowledge workers within the coalition. In terms of intersectional disability agency, it is paramount to understand that rehabilitation as a macro-coloniality of power constitutes the real enemy. Arturo’s and Fátima’s plight in all their micro-relational thickness are nothing but an expression of that macro-coloniality, that divide-and-conquer dance that perpetuates the status quo in global north as well as global south contexts.10 Back to micro-dimensions, there is a great deal of multivocality in the notion of race traitors.11 This raises interesting dimensions in the examination of unique aspects pertaining to intersectional spaces for radical agency, radical solidarity, and emancipatory learning in terms of race and disability identity conflations. Does Arturo’s departure from the “vocational rehabilitation pack” represent a unique radical agency trajectory? Is this unique trajectory such that it forces folks like Arturo to be at odds with the submissive organizational profile displayed by other persons of color with disabilities in the global north such as Fátima? If so, what triggers the specific kind of predisposition displayed by each of them? What are the barriers, apart from the existential materiality of deprivation, for radical agency to flourish in these intersectional situations? Perhaps there is a specific need to develop a dual/dialectical treatment of the notion of race traitor as it intersects with the realities of “vocational rehabilitation” in the U.S. and other global north settings. It is possible that, in certain
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instances, like the one experienced by Arturo in this reflexive counterstory, radical agency and radical solidarity do not go together. For the most part, I have always thought of radical agency as a trajectory that gets potentially strengthened through both emancipatory learning and radical solidarity relational supports and networking dynamics. These are the dynamics that allow emancipatory resistance to go from the micro- to the macro-movement level of interaction. They might or might not be sustainable over time. I also wonder if, on the contrary, it might be possible that Arturo’s instance of Quixote-like departure from the pack illustrates a sort of trial stage of “existential purification” in this trajectory toward other, less submissive, modes of radical solidarity. It is too early to tell. Still, it would be helpful to keep these questions in mind.
The plot’s critical unfolding What seems clear at this juncture is that traitors like Fátima not only consent but understand their crucial legitimizing role in perfecting and perpetuating stratified domination. Hence, it is not surprising that, by the time Thom, the rehab counselor met with Arturo that April morning, it was clear that everything was going to be in Fátima’s hands. It was also clear that she was adopting a micromanagement approach toward the matter. Thom urged Arturo to meet with Fátima. Yet, he implied that there was little hope. Suspiciously, Thom indicated that Fátima was available and ready at that moment to meet and discuss his case. Arturo was then invited to come into a larger room where Thom sat in silence and let Fátima run the show. Fátima’s demeanor toward Arturo was harsh and rushed. Without preamble, she hurried to say: “I’ve been reading your case; I haven’t met a blind person with so much education.” This, inexplicably, seemed to bother her to a superlative degree. Was it because Arturo was a Latino blind and, like her, was not born in the U.S.? Fátima had made similar remarks to Arturo in other contexts at the agency, but now she wanted to make clear that she held the power to prevent Arturo from thriving in terms of the benefits outlined by the Rehabilitation Act and other federal and state legal bodies.12 Thus, she made sure to add with an air of self-sufficiency: “If it’s up to me, you wouldn’t get any benefits.” She went on to point out that her department had nothing to offer Arturo because he was beyond any kind of training they could offer him. It was as if training and education are incompatible in the world of vocational rehabilitation for the blind. This is an idea that, of course, has no grounding. It merely served to mask Fátima’s power trip against this fellow blind individual of color. Indeed, within less than a year, Fátima had succeeded in getting Arturo’s case closed. Since that April morning, Fátima made every effort to ensure that Arturo’s life was as miserable as possible. Arguably, under a frame of tangible manifestations of empowerment for the radical agency of blind individuals, the issue of proper training might have some legitimate dimensions.13 In practice, however, training resource allocation in individualized plans in this and other U.S. state jurisdictions has become the source of numerous clientelist mechanisms of control for ‘dis’ablism functionaries like
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Fátima. As many other species of traitors, Fátima profiles herself prominently in employment committees for the blind. Fátima loves to make herself appear as an outstanding advocate for their cause. There is a paradox here. Fátima herself has recognized that the investment of thousands of dollars to “properly train” blind individuals outside the state through a network of Orientation Centers typically controlled by one of the national blind organizations does not pay off. Upon returning, these blind individuals are not placed in jobs and thus they fail to put into practice whatever “independence” skills they may have mastered. On the other hand, it is not uncommon for loyal adepts to these traitors to get generous benefit combinations: training, multiyear graduate-level education, along with a multiplicity of other intangible components, all in exchange for their undefiant loyal enslavement. About a year prior to this terrible April morning, Fátima had offered Arturo permanent employment at the agency for a long-standing vacancy under the condition that he would subject himself to out-of-state training. This seems to indicate borderline conflict of interests. Fátima is the only surviving administrator who remains from people affiliated with this kind of trainingcentered approach. As I previously mentioned in this chapter, the state where Arturo resides is a battleground for the two main organizations for the blind at the national level. One of them sees that state as its territory, while the other sees it as an area for expansion. Hence, in the past, the media witnessed scandals that resulted from the confrontation between these organizations. Fátima has mastered these rocky times. She has kept an alignment with the current administration, despite having been brought into the state by their opponents. In terms of intersectional disability agency, one must wonder what are the societal effects of such media coverage? How can a conflating dialectics of critical decoloniality make sense of radical agency under such muddy waters of rehabilitative betrayal ideologies? In concluding this chapter, it is worth reflecting about the divide-and-conquer role of work/productivity discourses as applied and absorbed by disabled people themselves. Kathi Weeks, coming at this issue from an intersectional feminist Marxian standpoint, wonders why do “we work so long and so hard? The mystery here is not that we are required to work or that we are expected to devote so much time and energy to its pursuit, but rather that there is not more active resistance to this state of affairs.”14
Notes 1 On this, see the extensive narrative phenomenology work undertaken by Teklu (2007), which provides firsthand experience/voice-centered discussions from the perspective of blind African immigrants and their families in British Columbia. Importantly, despite the fact that in theory the regulatory framework has been softened since 2019, there is no evidence that a fundamental ethical/epistemological shift has yet occurred at the policy and perceptual level when it comes to non-Canadian persons with dis/abilities trying to settle in Canada. For overall reflexive evaluations of the situation for persons with dis/abilities in Canada concerning various spheres, e.g., access dimensions, see Pothier (1992); Titchkosky (2002, 2008, 2011).
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2 Nader (2010); see also Capurri (2018) for a recent scholarly analysis that ties these exclusionary dynamics to neoliberalism in the Canadian “Medical Inadmissibility” policy context. 3 On this, see Calabrese Barton and Tan’s (2020) reconceptualization of inclusive equity in light of the notion of “rightful presence.” The notion of rightful presence was not originally formulated and has not yet been explored in relation to persons with dis/ abilities. However, it is a very fruitful construct for studying institutional exclusion and global north instances of organizational culture that persistently opt not to listen to messages articulated by persons with dis/abilities and their families. 4 See Matias (2012); see also Martinot and Sexton (2003); Matias and Allen (2013). 5 See Ignatiev and Garvey (1996). 6 I realize that this last sentence runs the risk of conveying an aura of self-righteousness. Thus, it is important to add two important pieces of information from Arturo’s experiencing of the world around Fátima that may help give a bit more background to the reader. First, as somebody who had worked as an insider within the state agency where Fátima worked, Arturo knew that most rehabilitation counselors held a prejudicial attitude toward persons with disabilities, those whom they called “consumers.” In many trainings, Arturo had had to confront young and experienced counselors about these views, which presumed a constant bad-faith tendency from consumers aimed at “taking advantage” of the rehabilitative systems put “generously” in place by government to give them a hand in their misfortunes. Second, and this was much more directly tied to Fátima’s mode of entry into the agency, when Fátima retired at another state, it seems that the supervisory position given to her should have been, in the context of meritocracy, given to a different blind woman with 30 years of experience and much greater familiarity with the area. The decision to hire Fátima, therefore, may have been inscribed in an organizational battle for the control of the agency. 7 See Margalit (2017). 8 Ibid. (p. 11). 9 To use Sandoval’s (2000) terminology. 10 On this, see, for example, Anesia (2019); Meekosha (2002, 2011); Meekosha and Soldatic (2011). 11 See, for example, Collins (2000, especially ch. 1). 12 Incidentally, Arturo’s education, up to that point, had been funded by sources completely unconnected to vocational rehabilitation. Fátima knew this quite well, which seemed to exasperate her even more at that crucial power display moment. 13 As espoused by vocational rehabilitation expert practitioners such as Omvig (2014). 14 Weeks (2011: p. 1).
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LatDisCrit and blackness studies Intersectional solidarity lessons from Edwina’s and Lidia’s counterstories
Introduction: Two counterstory scenarios: Reflecting on blackness studies and fugitive disability knowledges of subaltern intersectionality It is that time of the day when the smell of fresh coffee resumes its morning force. The noise in the communal kitchen in front of his office starts getting distracting. Arturo is sitting at his desk. His hands are now moving from left to right through thick pages. Karen, one of the most consistent coffee drinkers among the staff, comes out of the kitchen and stands at the threshold of Arturo’s office: “Hi Arturo,” she says. “What are you doing?” “I’m reading the braille materials we’ll be sharing with the students tomorrow,” he replies. “Ha, those dots are neat!” Karen gets closer to stare at the pages. “Yes, they’re very handy. What’s amazing is that so many blind folks these days don’t want to use braille,” Arturo comments, lifting his hands from the thick pages resting on top of his lap. “Why is that?” asks Karen. “Well, for one thing, kids think that it’s not cool to be singled out as blind and braille is such a visible marker, thick and heavy books and so forth.” There’s a pause in his voice as if he’s pondering the significance of what he just said. Then he goes on, “The other thing is cell phones. Nowadays, cell phones and other devices talk words from websites and text messages. Blind folks, young and old, think that somehow by listening to those words they’ll know how to spell well, which they don’t (and they don’t even know that they don’t know). It’s a literacy tragedy.” “What about their teachers?” Karen asks, starting to gesture to express her incredulity. “Don’t they realize what’s happening?” “That’s another long story,” Arturo says, softly shaking his head to give emphasis to his next comment. “Many school districts in this state, for example, don’t even have a single teacher certified to work with the blind. There’s not any program in the state’s higher education institutions set up to that end. I’ve even heard that some rural districts have gotten a waiver from the state Department of Ed not to provide teacher services for the blind and other folks with disabilities. The rationale is that they lack resources … It’s such a mess because the blind movement in this and other states is often divided on key issues.” “Wow!” exclaims Karen, “It sounds rough. I’ll let you keep reading. I have to go prepare for the meeting at 3:00.” This chapter’s reflexive counterstories center on the political philosophy of knowledge production via truth telling. They show how the confessional DOI: 10.4324/9781003084150-5
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performativity of disability merges with the ethics and aesthetics of resistance in intersectional situatedness as experienced by people of color with visual impairments. I call them blind in the present chapter. I do so despite the existence of a wide spectrum of sight levels among those legally recognized as blind in the U.S. and elsewhere.1 Neither of the two protagonists in these counterstories was totally blind. However, both of them were black female American citizens. Edwina and Lidia are their names for the sake of the agentic discussions contained in this chapter. As in the rest of the book, I target in this chapter intersectional groups of black, brown, red, and yellow blind and other categories of individuals with disabilities. They suffer unique disablement processes and sociocultural/sociohistorical disability barriers and exclusionary practices. In this sense, they are decolonial fugitives who, like the maroon of all ages, struggle against the coloniality of power, knowledge, and being. Epistemologically speaking, I have chosen the examination of the practices of truth telling because, as connected with intersectional disability agency dimensions, they ring ontological and relational bells that align this study with queer identitarian literatures, especially as they dovetail with decolonial/global south and even posthuman studies.2
Intersectional disability agency, truth telling, and techniques of the self I have made this choice in response to Foucault’s assertion that the hermeneutics of the self came about because of the practice of confession imposed by Christianity on western subjects,3 which suggests that there was not a sense of the self in antiquity. In two of his lectures delivered at the University of California, Berkley, on October 20 and 21, 1980, Foucault argued that truth telling and long-term obedience/submission were not a requirement under the ancient philosophical model of discipleship that prevailed in Greece and Rome. This long-term set of practices came about because of the monastic penitential rules of the middle ages. Foucault does not make clear which of the monastic orders initiated this process. Neither does he provide clues as to why these monastic orders were most inclined to impose such a confessional sense of long-term vertical obedience. Nevertheless, one can speculate that this came about in a slow process of axiological and epistemological acculturation after the Christian church got polluted by Constantinian imperialism.4 My focus is on radical agency as a trajectory with the potential to lead to emancipatory collective action. Thus, in thinking of a “fugitive/maroon”5 ethos of subaltern intersectional agency and relationality, I find it interesting that Foucault restricts his examination to the discursive. For instance, Foucault does not talk about the structural requirements of monasteries as “total institutions.”6 Doing so would have enriched the understanding of discursive mediations between agency and structure in the configuration of techniques of the self.7 There is yet another feature that strikes me in reading Foucault’s hermeneutic method in these two lectures. He treats as universal discursive contexts that involve disciples who, judging by many indicators, were privileged subjects.
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Monasteries were indeed not open to everybody. However, in Greco-Roman antiquity, philosophy disciples were privileged, free males who were presumed by their masters to possess everything necessary to be philosophers in the first place, which might explain some of the practical agentic features Foucault underscores. Despite my apprehensiveness about the interpretative path followed by Foucault, I still feel compelled to borrow Foucault’s ideas concerning truth telling as an agentic exercise nested in the intersectionality of disability and race. Through these ideas, I frame my epistemological and axiological observations in the present reflexive counterstory. As director of a program set up to teach “employability” skills to adult persons with visual impairments or disabilities, in 2016 Arturo had the opportunity to observe and converse extensively with folks who, by their disability status, often under overt discrimination, have remained unemployed or underemployed for years. The cohort involved a large proportion of black women. In their experiences, these women voice the portrait of intersectional subaltern realities, looking (often unknowingly) for resistance pathways.8
A critical look at employability as fugitive knowledges of disablement Arturo understood that the focus on employment “skills” often tends to (1) blame people with disabilities for the skills they do not possess9 and (2) perpetuate a deficit/independence-centered model of disability that disdains its intersectional relationality dimensions.10 In the case of people of color with disabilities, this model entails a complex and destructive conflation of oppression patterns that translate into multiple modes of micro-aggression and marginalization.11 The ideological frame behind employability assumes a lot about the productive apparatus. For businesses to thrive, senior managers must move beyond strategy, structure, and systems to a framework built on purpose, process, and people.12 To this end, business strategies must retain control over the process while supporting a broader organizational purpose. In other words, a successful organization will provide ways for its members to identify with other employees, share a sense of pride, and be willing to commit. It is thus the senior manager’s responsibility to create committed members of a purposeful organization. We are now talking of organizational employees who are no longer confined to a defined objective. The employees must now be able to see the needs and opportunities available, while operating in a creative and innovative way to meet those needs. Thus, in theory, within the employability paradigm, fulfilling purpose means tapping into the reservoir of knowledge and expertise distributed throughout the workforce.13 But, of course, the big question is to whose benefit does this transformational ethos work? What about intersectional power dynamics that dovetail with this multifaceted reservoir of diverse knowledges? What about disability justice dimensions? Currently, there is a prevalence of service-centered multifaceted global dynamics of domination in capitalism.14 This means that nonstandard employment and work arrangements are part of an emergent labor world. In theory, especially after the COVID pandemic, this is a world where the workplace in its various relational connotations is no longer circumscribed to places or office buildings. Most
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importantly, remunerated work with its concomitant sense of “productive” positionality has become one of the primary means for personal fulfillment and personhhood’s sense of self-realization.15 Therefore, employees feel that they need to belong to an organization where their personal sense of identity, affiliation, meaning, and support are realized (should I say reified?). The employability concept developed by Sumantra Ghoshal16 emerges from a management philosophy that responds from a business perspective to this relational reification predicament. Its key premise asserts that the initiative, creativity, and competencies of the market dictate performance, rather than the wisdom of senior management. This is certainly a very conservative stance. It is very much compatible with the neoliberal ethos. However, in practice, under a justice-driven mode of relationality, for the employer with or without disabilities, this transformational context of organizational life could very well involve an intentional determination to create environments that would provide tangible opportunities for personal and professional growth. For the employee, this would involve greater commitment to continuous learning and development as an edge against the constant change and uncertainty in business today, particularly in the post-COVID era, which has certainly become an ideal context to test the practical authenticity of these premises. Hence, in theory, employability has the potential to translate into a counter-intuitive proto-emancipation space. Through its enactment, skills, understandings, and personal attributes could lead to relational interdependence for successful employment in a chosen occupation, even beyond the confines of a single organization. This could create an environment that benefits the employee, employer, workforce, community, and local and global economies,17 although it is unclear how it would incentivize critical spaces for oppressed agents to interrogate the hierarchy arrangements behind this kind of relationality. The notion of employability was not developed in association with disability or intersectional identity issues. Bringing its implications into the world of people of color with disabilities takes collaborative agency. It requires dialogue and imaginative work. Ultimately, under that kind of dialogue and actionable imagination the many skills training courses available at colleges, technological schools, high schools, career readiness agencies, and job placement organizations would not only reduce the unemployment rate across all sub-populations of persons with disabilities but would open tangible empowerment spaces for them.
Disability disclosure as truth telling: Agentic space or obedience duty? Indeed, the power of the transformation propelled by a justice-driven enactment of employability could go much further. It could in theory bring about social responsibility in businesses, not because of mere risk management/compliance reasons. It could foster access and inclusion dynamics that would end up serving comprehensively the interests of businesses, workers in general, persons with and
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without disabilities, communities, etc. The truth-telling requirement of disability under racialized environments of white supremacy would not be something to fear under such an ideal context. However, for the ideal to become real, one faces a societal paradox: disclosure must be a universal duty, which, of course, pertains exclusively to a category of individuals who are already the object of exclusion, marginalization, and material precarity. How else would the dialogue start? Who would drive it and make it safe, or at least worth the risk? Here is an interesting thing. Treating disability disclosure as a duty of the self in its assertion of specific intersectional identities bridges radical exteriority boundaries. It also links the discussion to the realms of axiology and political strategy. Reflecting on the dynamics that brought about the funding and shortterm life of this employability program in a satellite campus context, Arturo himself has also wondered whether it could be that the absence of a generalized awareness about the potential emancipatory power of disability disclosure might have to do with a vacuum in leadership on the part of blind and other kinds of disability organizations, especially those with some sort of intersectional subalternity ethos. Their mission statements claim to tackle employment issues, but they are not concerned with emancipation spaces. At another level, it might reflect a lack of radical agency maturity. The context has not yet acquired genuine organizing traction for collective resistance in this unique intersectional space for radical solidarity. The point is that subaltern folks involved in this particular employability program expressed strong consensus around the idea that disability disclosure is very risky. Many of the members of the employability cohort had a residual level of sight. Because of this, they made every effort to hide their visual impairment when going to job interviews. Hence, the ceremonial rite of disclosure has for them similarities to the notion of confession highlighted by Foucault. This is so particularly in the way disclosure shapes the unique interpretation of one’s self in a radical process of existential becoming.
Disability disclosure and radical exteriority: Identity surrender or subaltern identitarian rebirth? In this sense, disclosure is a sort of identity surrender. At the same time, this reinterpretation of the self has the potential to engender emancipation spaces of resistance. There is tremendous power in that existential ambiguity. One can use disclosure to link with radical disability leaders and/or grassroots movements. One can also develop a critical experiential reinterpretation of racialized dimensions ignored in the past. The intersectional mix of these tendencies could catalyze radical solidarity and emancipatory learning. Understanding in depth the epistemology, axiology, and even the aesthetics of such transformations is paramount. Conversely, deconstructing the ways by which the intersectional domination of employability through disclosure as submission operates is also crucial to denounce and resist its underlying premises.
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Edwina’s emancipatory learning predicament In terms of its confessional dynamics, something like the ritual of truth telling present in disability disclosure also happens with braille. Arturo is now in his fifties. He has been using braille since he was four. For him, there is nothing intimidating in the literacy-based spatial justice and identity experiences that braille affords to blind folks. However, Arturo is also very mindful of the contrast with other people’s experiences. Arturo vividly remembers how Edwina came to the point of tears when she had to talk with the employability class. That day she talked about her realization that she was undergoing the pain of facing the realities of embracing blindness. She said that day most categorically that she was not blind. She acknowledged having visual impairments that should be cured. Cure would allow her to go back to normal. Edwina had been for decades a successful black (most likely the race-neutral kind) HR representative. She was the type of individual who would reject blind black folks when they applied to her company. Now she was excluded under the same parameters she had been using. She realized how painful and unfair the experience could be. There was for Edwina an existential point when the reality of work as usual could not be sustained any longer. Edwina had not learned braille. Why should she do that? She even suggested that day to the class that she would have changed doctors simply to hear hints of possibilities that her evolution toward blindness was not irreversible. Socially speaking, Edwina was already enduring the barriers that define blindness. Edwina was blind. Nevertheless, she could not cope with the radical exteriority pains of accepting that portion of her identity. Things like braille, cane usage, and so on (which, much more than mere addenda, are progressively becoming intrinsic to each blind person’s identity and which can even trigger relational modes of collective belonging) were out of the question for Edwina up to that point. Therefore, Edwina’s journey shows how braille rejection is not merely a matter of adolescent immaturity. As far as an identity marker, braille represents a crucial component. It transcends the purely functional and linguistic dimensions. Its implications are closely linked to the existential phenomenology of being.18 Braille’s phenomenological ontology implications are qualitatively different. This difference acquires special relevance in the materiality of its intersectional complexity when one considers parallel alterity/identity issues such as racial hierarchies and decoloniality. What surprises me is how little attention relevant literatures pay to these issues in braille literacy scholarly circles.19
Lidia’s predicament: From disability disclosure to relational power dynamics Back in 2016, when Arturo first experienced his journey along with Lidia’s social justice predicament of subaltern intersectionality, it did not seem as relevant to issues of power or disability disclosure. After all, unlike Edwina, Lidia did not seem to be in defiance or openly resisting her emerging identity
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as blind. Nevertheless, Arturo’s subsequent exposure to intersectional disability theology made him much more aware of the relational power implications of Lidia’s testimonial counterstory as a black female pastor with disabilities in the U.S. Deep South. At the time, Lidia was a 76-year-old female pastor. Aging had deepened Lidia’s visual impairment experiences to the point that it was no longer possible for her to rely on her granddaughter to help her with sermon notes. Of course, Lidia could have said that she was retired, and it was time to let those issues rest. Rather than doing so, Lidia took up the challenge. She tried to convene other pastors from several denominations in her area of influence to put together a ministerial approach that would target visually impaired individuals in a concerted, inclusive, and transversal fashion. However, Lidia soon learned that her efforts were being nullified by a broad lack of understanding on the part of pastors about disability issues, particularly in terms of their theological connotations. Arturo decided to accompany Lidia’s journey. Not knowing where it would go, he was convinced that its ministerial fate was tied to racial justice. Thus, the intersection of race with theologically infused disability-centered dynamics made the experience appealing to him. Who knows, perhaps Lidia’s inter-pastoral experiences, which expanded for decades in this particular urban area, would make a difference when it came to tackling the extreme material precarity faced by folks with visual impairments across the board, but especially among black segments that remained essentially segregated from their white counterparts. Arturo could not help but think of the common fate that linked Lidia and him. Lidia was black; Arturo was a brown Latinx engaged scholar. Like Lidia, Arturo was blind, and was no longer young. In Arturo’s case, blindness had been with him since birth (like the blind man about whom the disciples were asking Jesus in the passage described in John 9:1–5). In Lidia’s case, blindness was becoming an emergent identity. What difference did it make to their indispensable, mutual paths toward radical decolonial solidarity? No matter how hard or how many times Lidia tried, nobody responded to her calls. How many of these pastors had perhaps been mentored or helped by Lidia in their formative years? It did not make a difference. Lidia’s new status as a blind person represented the embodiment of something othered, something nonhuman, something alien and unconnected with their common pastoral past. As an identitarian feature this differential experiencing of blindness made a big difference in Lidia’s case. Through the ambivalent nature of aging’s phenomenology, Lidia could have chosen not to consider herself blind. Lidia’s theological sense of mission said otherwise. It at once helped her to embody her own sense of self and her heart’s yearning. It fueled her soul to help others whose social and Christian experiences of blindness and subsequent sources of alienation could have a chance to be completely unlike her own. Her firsthand experience of blindness helped her to open the receptivity of her soul to undo the “monster” to which thinkers such as Margrit Shildrick refer when it comes to understanding/explaining the critical hermeneutics of disability embodiment. The “monster” of disability scares because it invokes something that we
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unconsciously know can be part of our very being any moment. No person is exempt (not even people with disabilities themselves) from this latent, unconscious fear, from the ideological and existential power of this overwhelming longing for normalizing features of superficial access and inclusion whose sole presence reminds them of the perpetual nature of their exclusion and marginalization.
Other relevant layers of reflection Here it is important to touch on another analytical layer at the converging axis of the two reflexive counterstories that make up this chapter. It is an aspect that helps understand the complex relational and institutional culture implications of disability disclosure and braille-literacy activism for black female folks like Edwina and Lidia as well as brown Latinx folks like Arturo. It is a key aspect that goes beyond microlevel considerations of radical agency. Since arriving in this Deep South portion of the U.S., Arturo has worked to ground a solid movement toward the expansion of braille literacy. Arturo has targeted Latinx blind individuals of all ages. The reception from blind organizations was at first favorable. However, given the history of divisions that characterizes their interorganizational dealings in this state, carrying out this quest for meaningful braille learning and usage soon started to show its most challenging shadows. Behind the scenes, leaders in these organizations admitted to Arturo that they had an ineffective outreach framework toward Latinx blind folks. Yet, a clear determination to address internally the concrete mechanisms that could alter this course did not become apparent. On the other hand, there is the issue of state waivers for small rural districts. These waivers not only affect braille teaching. They impact many other educational initiatives that could benefit children with different kinds of disabilities, from autism to learning disabilities and so forth.20 In retrospect, there is one emancipatory learning lesson that Arturo extrapolates from this activism excursion. He now feels that it would probably have made better sense to approach the issue of the waivers through a transversal pandisability alliance-building approach, rather than concentrating on mobilizing the main blind organizations. The power of a broader alliance to impact the state legislature and policy leaders was potentially greater. It was easier to sell in terms of the number of children affected and the qualitative long-term implications of routinely granting these waivers. Of course, there would be challenging dialogical implications of bridging the radical exteriority of so many disability identities. The lack of similar broad alliance-building precedents could also have made the road somewhat bumpy. One possible advantage is that in this state, unlike other vocational rehabilitation contexts throughout the U.S., blind and non-blind disability divisions were under the same department. This had the potential of facilitating a pandisability strategy, at least for transition-age and adult categories of individuals, not so much among families with younger children with disabilities.
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The way things have turned out in Arturo’s activist experience in the global north for the past five years or so demonstrates that the greatest practical caveat, regardless of purely strategic considerations, is associated with the person-specific nature of leadership styles prevailing in many agencies. For example, the main administrator in charge when Arturo got to the state was blind and a braille user. As soon as he was removed from the department, the scenario became adversarial. At that point, Arturo himself became the direct target of attacks. In some ways, Edwina’s and Lidia’s counterstories of intersectional disability disclosure share key counter-narrative components after all.
Notes 1 On this, see Omansky (2011); Titchkosky, Healey, and Michalko (2019). 2 E.g., Ahmed (2006); Bustos García (2014); Castro Varela, Dhawan, and Engel (2016); Giffney and Hird (2016); Haritaworn (2014); Haritaworn, Moussa, and Ware (2018); Haschemi Yekani, Kilian, and Michaelis (2016); McRuer (2018); Outer and Killacky (2004); Pausé, Wykes, and Murray (2016). 3 See Foucault (2016a, 2016b). 4 For an interesting contrast in the epistemological reading of these dynamics through the eyes of the church “fathers of the desert,” see Palmer (2010). See also Hopkins and Davaney (2014) for a collection of essays that examine some of these issues from multidisciplinary perspectives grounded on cultural studies. 5 See, e.g., Chopra (2018); Gilmore (2000); Gilmore (2007); Gonzalez (2019); Price (2013). 6 In the complex oppressive sense of hegemonic control that Goffman (1961) uses this notion. 7 Following Habermas (1971); Foucault (2016a) distinguishes three types of techniques: techniques of reproduction, signification, and domination. To these Foucault adds a fourth subcategory called techniques of the self, which he uses to criticize his own early work as being too centered exclusively on overt techniques of domination, i.e., discipline and punishment (Foucault, 1977). Foucault defines techniques generically as “regulated procedures, thought-out ways of doing things that are intended to carry out a certain number of transformations on a determinate object. These transformations are organized by reference to certain ends to be attained through these transformations” (quoted in Cremonesi et al., 2016, note 6). On the other hand, compare, for example, what Sandoval (2000, p. 17) says about the “technology of love,” which turns out to have analogous echoes to Foucault’s conceptualization of techniques, this time embedded in global, twenty-first-century, and decolonizing contexts: “a methodology of emancipation comprised of five skills: semiotics, deconstruction, metaideologizing, democratics, and differential consciousness … these different methods, when utilized together, constitute a singular apparatus that is necessary for forging twenty-first-century modes of decolonizing globalization. That apparatus is ‘love,’ understood as a technology for social transformation.” Furthermore, compare what Foucault (2016a) says in trying to define techniques of the self: These are “techniques which permit individuals to effect, by their own means, certain number of operations on their own bodies, on their own souls, on their own thoughts, on their own conduct, and this in a manner so as to transform themselves, modify themselves, or to attain a certain state of perfection, of happiness, of purity, of supernatural power, and so on.” In note 17, the editors of Foucault’s (2016a, 2016b) lectures also reproduce a third definition for techniques of the self: “procedures [that are] suggested or prescribed to individuals in order to determine their identity, maintain it, or transform it in terms of a certain number of ends, through relations of self-mastery or self-knowledge.” In the
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latter of these definitions, Foucault seems to give preeminence to the prescribing/suggestive process and thus the relational power that gives birth to these techniques at a given point in time. This, of course, is a great way to remind the reader about the theme of problematizing agency that is intrinsic to the interactional subalternity of dis/ability and race as theorized throughout the present volume. See, for example, Kerschbaum, Eisenman, and Jones (2017) for a collection of essays devoted to the examination of issues of disclosure for persons with disabilities in higher education contexts. See McDonnall, O’Mally, and Crudden (2014). Four pieces that come to my mind as examples of how to counteract this kind of solipsistic, blame/deficit-centered conception of productivity and personhood in the world of disability studies are Bolt (2015); Cuppers (2009); Mingus (2011); and Mitchell and Snyder (2019). See the essays in Connor, Ferri, and Annamma (2016). See also Connor and Gable (2013) for examples of curricular activism in academic contexts that may be relevant to these intersectional populations, as well as Obourn (2020) and Piepzna-Samarasinha (2018) for imaginative ways to think through the power of dis/ability justice to prevent or undo many of these instances of micro-aggression, exclusionary material precarity, and marginalization. See Bartlett and Ghoshal (2016). Ibid. See Hardt and Negri (2000, 2005, 2009). See also Castro-Gómez (2007) as well as Mitchell and Snyder (2010) for critical adaptations of their work. See Chari (2015); Jaeggi (2014); Jütten (2010, 2015); Robinson (2014); Sayers (2011). Bartlett and Ghoshal (2016). See, e.g., Yorke (2016). As Armendinger (2009) shows with regard to the ethics of confession in the world of HIV witness bearing. See, for example, Amato (2002); Hehir (2002); Johnson (1996); Lorimer (2000); Mason, McNerney, and McNear (2000); Miller (2002); Riccobono (2006); Ryles (1996); Schroeder (1989, 1996); Spungin (1996, 2003); Stratton (1996); Wittenstein and Pardee (1996); Wormsley (1996). See, for example, the essays in Kauffman and Hallahan (1995).
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LatDisCrit as an intersectional creeping decoloniality of blackness and indigeneity Embodiment and subaltern transmodernities
Introduction: The intersectional subalternity of embodiment The embodied counterstories of chapters 4 and 5 teach a great deal about the open-ended and nonlinear nature of identity and alterity. There is no doubt that identity and alterity conflate as two faces of the same coin in the relational materiality of being.1 In this metatheoretical chapter, I venture into creeping Latinx mestizajes as epistemological and axiological spaces. My purpose is to link LatDisCrit’s agency possibilities with the emancipation ethos of decolonial blackness and Latinx thought studies. To explore this interdependent mode of critical enactment in theory and practice, I depart from Dussel’s idea of transmodernities.2 I use this broad idea as a way to interrogate how Latinxness, blackness, Indigenous, and Asian modes of subalternities intersect with embodied liberatory critical disability theorizing in global north and global south contexts. Transmodernity is the parallel unfolding of multiple civilizations and destructive imperialistic modes of hegemony. For Enrique Dussel, an intellectual such as Emmanuel Levinas in his disabling experience of what Puar3 calls debility is, if you will, an embodiment4 of transmodernity: Lithuanian Jewish origin, his mother tongues were Russian and Lithuanian, but he was educated in French Strasbourg and German Freiburg. Levinas endured five traumatic years in a Nazi concentration camp, whose imprint was left on his real, vulnerable corporeality. He was a victim of Jewish Holocaust in the very heart of Modernity.5 Towards the end of the chapter, I dive into Dei’s decolonial blackness studies contributions. I thus anchor LatDisCrit’s specific sense of alterity as radical exteriority in action. Ultimately, I aim to bring everything together into a practical model. The model I have in mind is one that has useful situated emancipation value for purposes of decolonial radical solidarity. It is sufficiently specific, yet able to link meaningfully across intersectional modes of subalternity relevant to folks of color with disabilities in global north and global south contexts. Before going much further, however, I start by taking a rather circumscribed look at embodied critical disability studies applications developed within Latin DOI: 10.4324/9781003084150-6
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America and Spain. This provides a general, although necessarily limited, sense of Latinx identity as theorized within the scope of embodiment analytics and practices.
The habitus of embodied disability studies in Latin America and Spain: A critical look at functional diversity and “transductivity” Within the Anglo-Saxon context, embodiment studies of disability have emphasized views generally associated with phenomenology and second-wave feminism.6 At the metatheoretical and political philosophy levels, Tom Shakespeare,7 who was at first an ardent supporter of the social model as a movement, developed one of its most comprehensive and devastating critiques. Several of Shakespeare’s claims are developed by Tom Siebers.8 Siebers grounds his metatheory of disability in the phenomenology of the body. However, his is a critical disability positionality aimed at branding minority identity politics for people who experience disability marginalization. As such, Siebers’ embodiment considerations might also encompass family members who “lack” physical or mental impairments that make them “legally” classifiable as people with disabilities. Siebers’ metatheory combines discursive as well as material dimensions.9 It is thus an open transgression of the radical epistemological prescriptions of the social model of disability orthodoxy. Some of the points listed by Siebers under the frame of the ideology of ability include the following. First, ability is the ideological baseline by which one’s level of humanness is determined. The lesser the ability (or so-called severity of impairments), the lesser one’s entitlement to be seen and treated as a human being. This is something that gets exacerbated by intersectional dimensions such as Latinx identitarian allegiance or global south immigrant origins. Second, the ideology of ability simultaneously banishes disability and turns it into a principle of exclusion. This means that so-called inclusivity is nothing but an excuse to formalize and legitimize this exclusion as part of the status quo. Therefore, it operates as a naturalizing sense of “law and order” that aims to take control of whatever deviates from the “norm,” preserving its normative inalterability. Third, ability is the supreme indicator of value when judging human actions, conditions, thoughts, goals, intentions, and desires. In this regard, it operates similarly to white supremacy. However, in the case of what Siebers calls ‘dis’ablism, the ideological power stems from values that are thought as having metahistorical origins. In other words, they are values that embody an ideal. This ideal does not depend on geopolitical and other types of relational domination. Hence, it is no longer necessary to invoke the ego conquiro rationale as a justification for ‘dis’ablism. It is an axiomatic given. It constitutes a truth that transcends argumentation. It has an intrinsic kind of ontological immutability from which epistemological, transcendental ethics, and aesthetics consequences are automatically derived.
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Fourth, if one is able-bodied, one is not aware of the body. One feels the body only when something goes wrong with it. Therefore, the radical sense of embodiment is tied to subversive conceptions of trans-ontology typically cultivated by people with disabilities or folks who care for and about them in horizontal modes of interdependence. Fifth, the able body has a great capacity for self-transformation. It can be trained to do almost anything. The disabled body, on the contrary, is limited in what it can do and what it can be trained to do. This, in turn, presumes unproductivity and lack of creativity on the part of people with disabilities and those who opt to relate with them under conditions of horizontal interdependence. Sixth, disability is always individual, a property of one body, not a feature common to all human beings. Ability, in contrast, defines a feature essential to the human species. Therefore, disability is not only intrinsically abnormal but also fundamentally nonhuman. One could even argue that it is threatening to the stability of the human condition, namely, the able-bodied collectivity of truly humans. My purpose in this section is to contrast this Anglo-American embodiment perspective on disability with theoretical frameworks endogenous to Latin America and Spain. Due to reasons of space, instead of providing a comprehensive survey, I will focus on a couple of essays developed by Argentinian scholar Carolina Ferrante and Gallegan sociologist Miguel Angel Ferreira.10 Their intellectual trajectory shows theoretical creativity. They share Siebers’ sociopolitical stance toward disability as a contested identitarian terrain, as well as a strong critical positionality toward both the social and medical models of disability embodiment. They often cite Siebers and phenomenologically inspired works. However, Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault are their main conceptual sources, which they combine with Latin American theorists and sociological anchoring frameworks such as ethnomethodology, particularly in terms of its exploration of reflexivity as a constitutive dimension of social life.11 Within Bourdieu’s theory of action, the concept of habitus specifies the possibilitarian conditions on which actors’ practical strategies get configured … Habitus is a structure of predispositions that grants persons their “competence” to get around in the world. This structure, inherited from each person’s group of allegiance/belonging, sets objective boundaries to the possible options available to a given actor. It incorporates their cognitive, perceptive, interpretative, etc. predispositions, which define beforehand the capacities inherent to their selves. Notwithstanding, as a structural conditioning that serves as a point of departure, habitus only makes sense in its practice. In it, as a result, precisely because of the practical effects it generates, actors go about modifying it and appropriating it. Habit is, in Bourdieu’s words, a structure at once structured and structuring. Habitus indicates, to some extent, the reflexive condition of everyday practices. To make more manifest habitus’s creative capacity and to do away with excessively determinist interpretations of the concept, one could allude to its transductive condition … Being a person with disabilities involves belonging
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to a reference group that provides a specific habitus, a very concrete one. The predispositions that can be acquired through this concrete habitus are preempted by the senses associated with the fact that one has a disability and by the practices reasonably attached to such a condition (as well as one’s feelings with regard to these affairs).12 I find the creative emphasis on the idea of transductivity as conceived by Ferreira most valuable for purposes of intersectional disability agency explorations. In it, habitus acquires a much more theoretically flexible stance. This, in turn, links its ethos to emancipatory learning and resistance, which make intersectional disability activisms most powerful, elevating them and treating them as inherently tied to situated emancipation, to ambiguous, mutable realities and responses. Activisms acquire living yet structured unpredictability within both global north and global south parameters of transductive creativity. Using nomenclature more familiar to readers in the Anglo-American sociological world, Ferreira’s ideas on transductive creativity combine something like Robert Merton’s famous13 articulation of a “self-fulfilling prophecy” with Garfinkel’s14 classical ethnomethodology formulations.15 Activism itself acquires expansive connotations. Under this transductive creativity ethos, every single person with disabilities becomes an activist in their own right. They do not have to be part of an organization or trained under this or that organizing framework. Their creative responses, their imaginative dynamics of survival, all of that becomes the agentic expression of their creative transductivity of decolonial intersectional disability in action, or as Ferrante and Ferreira call it, the embodiment of their disability habitus.16 Thus, for example, with a heavy emphasis on class dimensions, Ferrante and Ferreira17 stress that a few years before the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) came into effect and was ratified by Argentina, a significant majority of Argentinians with mobility disabilities acquired during their life span did not have and often could not afford to get a certification that formalized their state recognition for being disabled. This meant that they were not eligible for the few benefits offered through state mechanisms for these types of individual citizens and their families. In turn, it brought to their sense of embodied habitus a radical sense of material precarity in an environment that was already endowed with numerous features of contextual limitation. All of this brought about multiple survival efforts that illustrate the multilayered natured of creative transductivity as applied to the embodied habitus of intersectional disability. In the articles I examined, one does not get a complexified picture of this sense of intersectionality as applied to say, Indigenous, migrating non-Argentinian citizens with disabilities, etc. The advent of CRPD’s implementation did not change this in substantial ways. Most likely, in the post-COVID era, the situation has only become much more dramatic, as many of the informal economy activities18 through which these people’s survival was made possible are no longer viable or are subject to strict state controls.
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Another core concept that emerges from the literature engaged within Ferrante and Ferreira’s contributions is that of functional diversity. Functional diversity is offered as an alternative to traditional disability constructs imported from the global north. Perhaps the best rendition of the concept, particularly in terms of its links to bioethics, is the one formulated by Palacios et al.19 Ferreira adopts a cautiously critical position toward the concept.20 He assesses its value in the following manner: The concept of functional diversity is not a theoretically well-founded or sociologically consistent notion. As a matter of fact, its foundational analysis is complicated at best. It is an ideological tool. Disabled people collectivities have opted to avail themselves of it to affirm their identitarian ethos against external, alienating impositions, against their sources of discrimination. One must situate it within that aspiration to, departing from it, determine what are the key axis/matrices on which we can resituate our understanding of disability. Subsequently, we can develop adequate practices. The transition handicap, disability, functional diversity indicates the pathway to follow. There is an element, always implicit, that remains. All three definitions ultimately refer to the ontological condition of a human being’s body. This is a body catalogued first as of lesser value than other bodies, afterwards as lacking abilities, and finally as singular in its functioning. In other words, functional diversity does overlook negative bodily designations. Nevertheless, it still indicates something that pertains to folks who have certain kinds of bodies, with a given organic ethos in relation to other bodies. Hence, despite the rhetorical presence of bodily considerations in an elusively and implicit manner, it indicates another core assumption that remains in place: the reference to a certain normalcy condition (whether it is worth, ability, or functioning) from which a given body deviates. That is to say, in accordance with this analysis, medical imperialism remains entangled via health understood as a standard of human organisms. Therefore, while that implicitly named body is not subject to explicit reflexivity, one will not go beyond that imperialism.21
The role of intersectional agency as social-movement building in Latin America and beyond These days anger seems to steer collective action in so many global south contexts. This seems especially palpable within the material precarity aftermath of inequalities already visible in conjunction with multilayered COVID dimensions. Thus, it is important to interrogate critically this kind of collective impetus Beyond its role as a purely catalyzing trigger, I am extremely doubtful that a “great anger” approach can be helpful as a corrective social change mode of collective radical agency. Its outcome may seem like the shadow of one’s hope, but it is not a hopeful path.
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Even Fanon, one of the forefathers of race-based postcolonial studies, warns about the danger of relying on anger or indifference to guide interpretations of racial/colonial oppression. The populist devastation currently prevailing in Latin American countries such as Venezuela and Nicaragua (or even Bolivia and Perú) confirms Fanon’s warning. There is often an intimate relationship between the exercise of liberal democracy and the corrective role that populism attempts to play.23 Populist excesses can bring about terrible spirals of violence and institutional vacuums that harm especially those subaltern groups that allow it to come into existence. Thinking of ways of being and conceptual spheres useful for comparative global north and global south collective action and social-movement-building dimensions relevant to radical agency and emancipatory learning, especially as they pertain to Latinx sociopolitical contexts, the cultural sociology work of Jeffrey C. Alexander,24 particularly as it connects with what Jacobsen and Aljovin de Losada conceptualize as political cultures,25 is extremely helpful. Alexander’s cultural sociology paradigm helps understand the ambiguities inherent in what the Marxian tradition has treated as the sphere of civil society. This encompasses an area for civic action completely separate from the hegemonic purview of the state. For Alexander, the picture of this relationship is much more fluid. The value of his conceptualization is key since it concerns symbolic dimensions of politics. These are dimensions where collective action expresses its meanings through performative approximations, as in the populist cases of Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia, and Perú mentioned above. What is peculiar about Latin America, and highly relevant for the interdisciplinary purposes of the present volume, is that in many such cases (most notably in Venezuela and Nicaragua, but even in nations closely aligned with the global north such as México), many of the agendas set out at the state level are carried out by popular militias or folks who seem to be part of civil society. These groups blur the boundaries. They seem at once grounded in the “civil” sphere and are still dependent on the state for the conception and execution of their collective-action agendas.26 What seems odder still, especially in terms of the explorations of the current chapter, is that, despite having its grounding in cultural sociology, Alexander’s framework avoids paying attention to issues of race and decoloniality. Another feature very prevalent these days, although still unclear how much it involves unique modes of organizing with and for people of color with disabilities,27 is online activism.28 Budd Hall,29 for example, examines the collective emancipatory learning experiences that emerged within the “Occupy movement.” Occupy movement experiments proliferated throughout major global north cities. A few years after the global crisis of 2008, they targeted more than 1,500 sites simultaneously. These experiments were spatially situated protests where subaltern grassroots as well as progressive adult segments of multiple political affiliations coexisted. Their aim was to educate citizens about the real origins of the crisis. Hall30 demonstrates how the global outreach of the movement was possible due to its sophisticated virtual modalities of innovative emancipatory learning. For 47 days, more than 200 activists worked together to prepare the occupation of Zucotti Park in New York,31 although Hall also recognizes the learning germ for the
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occupy movement in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol. There, a group of “indignados” had already put into effect, starting in May 2011, a similar kind of sustained spatial protest site. Hall’s insights show a multifaceted convergence of elements. First, there was a very clear call and set of diffusion mechanisms. What galvanized these mechanisms was the clarity of the call for justice in a world where 1% of the world’s rich dominate and exploit 99% of world’s people; the spark of the Occupy movement caught fire and spread throughout the rich countries of the world. The Occupy movement had a speed and a unity of both purpose and process that set it apart from most social movements of the twentieth century. It is a quintessentially twenty-first-century movement. Its birth has to do with the realization that global capitalism has widened the gap between the rich and the poor, robbing the working and middle classes of their dreams, making the rhetoric of democracy even in wealthy countries seem empty and unlinked from real popular power.32 Taking an initial look at Hall’s description one can start interrogating the unique ethos of this strategy. Why limit the movement primarily to rich countries? If inspired formally in the mechanisms of diffusion of the Arab Spring, why not build on the substantive democratizing hunger that fueled that other movement? Why operate in protest waves that appear to have distinctive, separating/fragmentary modes of discursive unity? To what extent should one attribute this wave-like ethos to the social media tools employed as virtual learning contexts? Or rather, should one attribute the phenomenon to more substantially differentiating elements such as the apparently nonracial, universalizing class-based performativity of a “transversal” consensus that might not possess self-sustaining energy toward long-term engagements? The second emancipatory learning element for the movement underscored by Hall aligns with the defining concepts used to organize it. Notions like “consensus-based, decentralised leadership, collective thinking, direct democracy, nonviolence, nonideological, anarchist, creating replicas of the society we want, creating new knowledge”33 were consistently invoked.34 The enactment of a unique brand of “collective thinking” was especially important for the movement: Collective thinking is in contrast to a more traditional sense of political discussion where persons with diverse points of view argue their positions until a majority of persons are with them. Consensus is rare in this form of political discourse. Collective thinking calls for persons with diverse perspectives to listen to each other and come up with not a winning or losing idea, but a new idea which represents consensus. People’s assemblies are participatory decisionmaking bodies which work towards consensus. They must be pacific, respecting all opinions: prejudice and ideology must be left at home. An assembly should not be centred on an ideological discourse: instead it should deal with practical questions: What do we need? How can we get it?35
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Yet, once again, interrogating this line of pragmatic thinking might be of value, particularly in terms of intersectional disability agency considerations. Why deny the presence of ideological elements? Was it not true that the protest constituted a political statement inspired by strong ideological concerns? How much depth and lasting unifying force could achieving pragmatic points of consensus have, when for some or perhaps many of the participants there was a real thirst for deep dialogue and even debate? Could that dialogue take place without breaking the artificial unity obtained via pragmatic modes of consensus building? Could it be that this fear of dialogue/debate was an anticipation for the breaking of the shaky basis of the experimental movement, one that symbolized much more than a mere strategic set of considerations? Was this really pointing to deep ideological divides solidly grounded in the incommensurability of radical exteriority, of othering feelings and desires that remained masked under popular assembly techniques? Malone, on the other hand, provides an analytical essay centered on movement-building virtual interactions that took place in the global south in the context of Egypt’s 2011 Arab Spring “revolution.” A decade away from that now distant sociohistorical context, we know that this has been seen by many as the “least successful” of the various Arab Spring collective action initiatives. However, here lies one of the broad themes I highlight throughout the present interdisciplinary volume: the idea that it is precisely within this seeming aura of defeat that some of the best emancipatory learning lessons are likely to emerge. As in the Occupy movement, the diffusion process was swift. However, in the case of Egypt, ideological debates were at the heart of everything from the start. Many of them involved mythical and mystifying representations of the movement, of martyrdom, and so forth. As Malone puts it: Mainstream media coverage presented these manifestations of popular revolt as the result of technological determinism. Facebook and Twitter were singled out for particular note as being instrumental in the revolutions. That narrative remains a reductive mainstream media/popular discourse that clouds a critical understanding of the human agency at the heart of these uprisings. It is also contradictory, in the sense that the same social platforms lauded—and the culture of sharing information freely they engender—are considered disruptive technologies, particularly to the newspapers of those same media corporations. This polarised debate ignores how activists purposefully use social media to create counter-power.36 Now, what does constitute a tangible expression of collective subalternity’s counter power? Is it unique to virtual collective-action modes of activism? How does one know the extent to which it can or cannot be replicated in other situated emancipation contexts? Malone claims that agency is at the core of the Egyptian revolution. Thus, he criticizes most of its narratives for removing that crucial element from the picture, ignoring what he calls “history from below.” The idea of history from below is certainly interesting. Nevertheless, thinking critically of it from the
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multilayered perspectives and intrinsic tensions of intersectional disability agency, particularly in conjunction with the plight of people of color with disabilities in both global south and global north contexts, one needs to go deeper and ask a few crucial questions. For instance, how can one go about disrupting the assumption that every mode of history told from below is necessarily emancipatory? How can one differentiate those aspects that involve emancipatory intersectional agency genuinely grounded on subalternity versus those that play with this appearance of alternative historicity for the purposes of giving a stronger anchor to conservative ideological movement building?37 As a very striking example, I am thinking very specifically of the U.S. post-election discursive and performative spectacle that has tried to delegitimize democratic values for the sake of narrow, explicitly conservative and pseudo-populist agendas.38 Overall, there is a core emancipatory learning lesson that one can extrapolate from Malone’s work. This is a lesson that pertains to both activism and crucial epistemological dimensions. Despite Malone’s talk about history from below and his critical stance toward the treatment of the Egyptian revolution by “mainstream media,” there is no sign of subaltern studies or decolonial intersectionality treatment of the phenomenon in Malone’s piece. One should read this as a broader sign, as an urgent invitation to ground the intersectional agency of online activism on explicitly decolonial, subaltern intersectionality and global south epistemologies. Its absence opens once more the door for exogenous and hegemonic appropriations not only of the history but, more damaging still, the future and the sense of authentically subaltern hope that should drive the energy of these movements.
Activism and interdependence: On the legitimation of multiple agentic knowledges What is the relation between knowledge and orientation? How does being disoriented lead one to new knowledge or/and to being humbled (tenderized) about not knowing? How can not knowing aid in liberatory struggles, in alleviating oppression or even in being in community with like-minded people in an ethical manner? These are some of the questions that Ami Harbin’s Disorientation and Moral Life brought up for me … it is important to understand Harbin’s specific definition of disorientation, as “temporarily extended, major life experiences that make it difficult for individuals to know how to go on” … In other words, it is about experiencing serious (prolonged and major) disruption to one’s life so that one does not know what to do. The hope generated by Harbin’s analysis, or my interpretation of it, is that these experiences of disorientation, although often unpleasant and jarring, can also be productive. In essence, these unpredictable experiences of not knowing how to go on have the capacity (not always realized and certainly not romanticized by Harbin) to teach us about how to live responsibly in changing circumstances. It is this connection between epistemology and disorientation (or knowing and not knowing how to go on) that offers a rich point of analysis, one which I believe can aid in conceptualizing activism in our current unpredictable and disorienting times.39
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Although this passage by Ben-Moshe is written in the first person, I think of these activism processes of enactment of intersectional agency as a collective confluence of dis/oriented explorations. Each one of us as an individual owns one’s disorientation. The sense of existential phenomenology flows through one’s ways of making sense of radical exteriority. However, the reality of its collective enactment is axiologically and epistemologically interdependent. Furthermore, my view of an activist involves many layers of intersectional agency knowledge and action. It is not limited to a specific kind of orthodox expression of what amounts to activism versus what is seen as heretical or usurping. How should one go about understanding the depth of relational interdependence? How should one assess its significance for the sake of intersectional disability agency as it pertains to various kinds of subalternity and decoloniality spaces around the world? At the same time, how should one look at it thinking specifically of the unique constraints and affordances of Latin America as a geopolitical and utopian imaginary? How should one think critically of trans-Latinxness as multimodal identitarian expressions? In doing so, it helps to dive into the multilayered meanings of ideology. There is a first functional meaning of ideology. It consists of legitimizing, supporting, stabilizing, and/or justifying domination, hegemony, or so-called “surplus repression.” Geuss40 introduces this concept of surplus repression in connection to ideology within emancipation spaces. It is an interesting concept for this volume’s focus on the possibilities of intersectional agency. Geuss distinguishes between how Habermas and Marcuse look at this notion of surplus repression. For Habermas, there is surplus repression only if “Herrschaft,” illegitimate repression, is exercised. Many egalitarian societies, Habermas argues, are highly repressive, as was the case in Egypt’s political context prior to the 2011 revolutionary efforts. However, if this repression is distributed equally, one would not be in the presence of illegitimate repression. In contrast, this conceptualization does not match Marcuse’s more radical, wholesale rejection of repression mechanisms. However, the distinction concerning the legitimacy of surplus repression should not be developed in abstract terms. Its justification should be scrutinized in terms of whether it is historically necessary for a given society to maintain and reproduce itself.41 In terms of radical agency and emancipatory learning, this discussion takes us back to considerations as to who should make this kind of historical determination and how. Most likely, this determination power would place knowledge workers (teachers, translators, lawyers, researchers, professional artists, and so on) in a quasi-priestly role. They would be above all other members of that society. Furthermore, this would happen without securing a dialogical sense of accountability to oppressed agents. For example, the kind of critical hermeneutics embedded in Freire’s version of critical pedagogy emphasizes historicity and “dialogical action.”42 Nevertheless, Freire’s fusion of historically relevant dialogue and action, particularly when it comes to emancipatory/revolutionary practices that honor and expand on knowledges produced by students43 versus those to which teachers opt to guide them, does not go beyond brief desiderata or even platitude statements. This
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dovetails with the kind of functionalist legitimizing ideology that Geuss discusses in this first meaning of the term. If teachers’ own thirst for continuous learning is important, how is this necessarily connected to an emancipatory/revolutionary use of Freire’s concepts for students? The issue for students is that their positionality is interdependent with that of their teachers who, in turn, have a strong sense of interdependence with their corresponding educational leaders/administrators. That is the nature of the educational hierarchy. It has many contours associated with alterity/radical exteriority. Freire never addresses these dimensions in significant ways throughout his analytical contributions. I keep wondering how revolutionary practice44 really works with respect to everyday classroom dynamics concerned with knowledge production and distribution. Darder45 claims that for Freire “revolutionary practice is concerned with the underlying intent and purpose of the knowledge that is being presented and the quality of dialogical opportunities by which students can appropriate the material to affirm, challenge, and reinvent its meaning in the process of knowledge production.” What is the conceptual scope being used here to allude to revolutionary practice? What are its aims? Who drives it beyond initiatives carried out by isolated teachers who dream of impacting the concretization of freedom and knowledge production capacities of their students via learning? Is revolutionary practice simply to be equated with transformational learning in any of its multifaceted dimensions? Does it require consensus work along with oppressed actors beyond schooling contexts? If so, how do they become involved and empowered? Is that something that students undertake? This is my conviction. Oppressed agents such as students in banking education contexts, e.g., people of color with disabilities subject to discriminatory practices in vocational rehabilitation settings throughout the global north and throughout global south contexts such as those described earlier in the chapter by Ferrante and Ferreira in Argentina are the only ones truly entitled to examine and adjudicate. In other words, the legitimacy and appropriateness of specific emancipatory ways of knowing and doing should be linked to a careful collective assessment of the amount and quality of suffering they, in their subaltern alterity, opt to endure to concretize their situated sense of freedom. This is the sense of situated emancipation I espouse throughout the book.46 For the sake of issues of intersectional disability agency, for example, it is precisely this kind of outsider expert adjudication of legitimacy of repression mechanisms that has kept persons of color and global south migrants with disabilities perpetually marginalized within the current exclusionary system. The system decides in advance who is worthy of support and who is disposable. There is a second functional meaning of ideology.47 It consists of forms of consciousness that operate to hinder or obstruct the full development of the forces of material production. Many thinkers used to see this as the key goal for humanity in the context of Marxian revolutionary perspectives. But just by linking this functional meaning of ideology with issues of full employment for people with disabilities, one can see how problematic a materialist perspective of productivity in abstract functionalist terms could become. The core of ableism
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resides in presuming the inability of broad groups of individuals to perform at the same level due to physical or intellectual impairments. Their “tutelage” becomes a burden for able body individuals. Thus, their potential and actual contribution to the societal forces of production is a priori limited or nullified. The third functional meaning of ideology aims to reject forms of consciousness that mask social contradictions. Geuss recognizes that the notion of social contradiction is too complex or vague. Yet, one needs to realize that ableism as an ideology exists to mask the exclusion of masses of individuals who, under basic principles of justice, should be entitled to enjoy the same benefits and opportunities granted to able body categories of individuals. Moreover, they should be able to do so without having to succumb to normalizing ideology’s hegemonic modes of domination. In sum, what is needed is a critical hermeneutics for knowledge legitimation that can (1) fuse understanding and explanation of ideology and utopian knowledges as they are experienced by agentic interdependent intersectional decoloniality groups in ways that unify the complementarity of their role as change makers and the role of critical hermeneutics knowledge workers; (2) build on the ideological red flags highlighted in this section concerning emancipation as a search for genuineness and mutuality in collective action endeavors; and (3) give real meaning to historically relevant dialogical action. This dialogical enactment should operate in ways that oppressed actors who are emerging as radical agents can work hand in hand with knowledge workers. They should also have a sense of how the existential materiality of their knowledges as oppressed actors counts toward their mutual resistance and emancipation work. Pursuing these three components allows for both oppressed actors and knowledge workers to be reading together in dialectical collaboration. This collaboration means being transformed by the ongoing manifestations of collective action as it plays out in real time. Thus, collective action becomes a text being jointly read. The social action text gets readjusted to feed their mutual sense of continuous creativity and self-examination. The ultimate advantage of this kind of relationally grounded critical hermeneutics is as follows. It does not allow either of them, activists and knowledge workers, through a process of mutual observation in continuous co-authoring of the social text, to get trapped in monotony. This avoids for them either triumphalist selfcomplacency or defeatist/paralyzing pessimism/hopelessness.
Revisiting new materialisms and relational epistemologies: Emerging race-based decolonial modes of intersectional disability agency practice and theorizing Sticking to new materialisms in the way I discussed them in Chapter 3 has potential. However, one must also recognize that many of their applications could easily go on without representing any real sense of situated emancipation.48 This is especially so in terms of ways of dealing transformationally with issues of material precarity and symbolic as well as many other forms of violence49 as they affect people with disabilities in both the global south and the
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global north.50 As I mentioned in the second section of the chapter, Ferrante and Ferreira’s unique formulations of habitus and transductivity in conjunction with disability are also very helpful in linking materialist and cultural studies modes of theorizing.51 Yet, in their silence regarding race and decoloniality, I find core problems, which the remaining sections in the chapter try to address. Starting with Bourdieu, it helps to clarify a couple things. In terms of his theory of resistance, Henri Giroux criticizes Bourdieu’s unwillingness or inability to give preeminence to reflexivity as the source of resistance when there is a mismatch between habitat and habitus. This was already palpable in Ferrante and Ferreira’s class-based considerations of disability embodiment within the semi-peripheral context of Argentina.52 Bourdieu’s model focuses on the need to develop an alternative. It tries to offer corrective perspectives in opposition to both those who see educational entities (schools and universities along with bureaucratic rehabilitation/welfare institutions of social control of the sort discussed by Ferrante and Ferreira in the second section of the chapter) as reproductive mirrors of society’s stratification and those who see them as an idealized terrain isolated from external forces. Educational/rehabilitation entities are conceived in Bourdieu’s model as relatively autonomous. However, they are infused with a fundamental role in the exercise of what he calls “symbolic violence,” i.e., the symbolic power that the ruling classes perpetuate via cultural capital and cultural artifacts.53 These artifacts and ideas inculcate and legitimate a worldview coherent with their processes of domination. They do so under an aura of knowledge-based neutrality and objectivity.54 Curricular bodies of knowledge are presented and organized so that they “not only legitimate the interests and values of the dominant classes, they also have the effect of marginalizing or disconfirming other kinds of knowledge, particularly knowledge important to feminists, the working class, and minority groups.”55 Giroux explains this complex cultural process of legitimation and internalization by oppressed individuals and groups through a very perceptive distinction between habitat and habitus.56 These are two of the concepts most often disputed and perhaps misinterpreted among Bourdieu’s agency formulations. Habitat is objective history in terms of the materiality of time passage through things and how this makes one’s position possible in its specific shape and relationality.57 Habitus is more concerned with one’s dispositions, which point “to a set of internalized competencies and structured needs, an internalized style of knowing and relating to the world that is grounded in the body itself”58 Let us stop for a moment to consider within this definition of the habitus some of its comprehensive emotional, sensory, axiological, political, and intellectual connotations. The only kinds of contradictions Bourdieu considers are structural in nature. They are guided by a pure logic of social control. This means that they suffer from unidirectional conceptions of dominant culture and ideology. They also deny any role for economic or other modes of ontological materiality.59 One could perhaps think of an example like the one analyzed and theorized by Zembylas in the semi-peripheral educational context of Cyprus.60 Zembylas analyzes collective agents’ indirect resistance through curricular efforts. These
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efforts are aimed at highlighting the shame of oppressors and shameful oppressive techniques in nation building with the vicarious implication of possible complacency by many who have not raised their voice against such oppression. Contrary to the emphasis on pride (perhaps disability pride could be critically invoked in the context of these reflections from Zembylas), this type of resistance exacerbates the ambiguity mediating shame, pride, and alterity in the collective imagination of nationhood and identity politics. It deals directly with polarization. It does so in ways that invite critical thinking and reflection. It also has prospects for exploring alliance building. It accomplishes this through processes of reflexivity at the level of alterity learning in general.61 To some extent, therefore, Zembylas’s analysis illustrates the critical hermeneutics metatheoretical work on recognition, meaning making, collective action ideology framing, and performativity.62 Also, “emotions are as key to political life as ideologies.”63 Therefore, intersectional agency thinkers and activists should engage seminal and contemporary psychoanalytical64 and other metatheoretical approaches focused on love as a humanizing source for relationality.65 In terms of the epistemology of emotions, here resides one of Zembylas’s key hermeneutic lessons. A priori, there is nothing intrinsically positive or negative in shame as an emotion. Shame is relational in ways that emotions such as pride or guilt are not. The typical assumption is that guilt belongs exclusively to the microlevel realm. Meanwhile, pride’s sense of collective ethos tends to underscore only what unites a group for purposes of nation building and patriotic modes of monolithic, often acritical, solidarity. It is true that shame creates, at least temporarily, a hierarchy of groups: the shamed or the shameless, which evoke different reactions. As for this book’s concern with intersectional disability agency, which is at once embodied, affective, and relational, it is important to stress that shame requires a loss of indifference toward others. Actions that shame us or bring shame upon others do so because they involve, perhaps remotely, interest on our part, an unfulfilled expectation with respect to an ideal behavior of relationality: “shame does more than sensitizing us … the appropriate reaction to one’s own shame is a type of self-transformation.”66 Here I would like to briefly contrast Zembylas’s work with Fanon’s. Think, for example, of what Fanon says in the following passage: In every country of the world there are climbers, “the ones who forget who they are,” and, in contrast to them, “the ones who remember where they came from.” The Antilles Negro who goes home from France expresses himself in dialect if he wants to make it plain that nothing has changed. One can feel this at the dock where his family and his friends are waiting for him. Waiting for him not only because he is physically arriving, but in the sense of waiting for the chance to strike back. They need a minute or two in order to make their diagnosis. If the voyager tells his acquaintances, “I am so happy to be back with you. Good Lord, it is hot in this country, I shall certainly not be able to endure it very long,” they know: A European has got off the ship.67
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It seems that Fanon insists in the preceding passage on highlighting an internal kind of shame. It is the kind of internal alienation that forces people of color (particularly blacks in colonized settings) to reject their original sense of being. As colonized people who could resist coloniality, they are foregoing that possibility. This, in turn, leads them to embrace the identity of the colonizer. Importantly, this is an existential betrayal not so different to the one I described with respect to Fátima’s counterstory in Chapter 4. Hence, one could by way of analogy extend Fanon’s mode of interpretation to the world of people with disabilities, especially in intersectional contexts of domination. The decoding of this kind of shaming seems similar to or fully inscribed in psychoanalysis. It is not clear if Fanon would equate it with guilt. However, it is possible that the betraying individual may need to protect the self from guilt manifestations through processes like the famous mechanisms of defense of the ego in the Freudian tradition.68 These processes would probably lead to a deepening spiral of self-alienation from possible modes of resistance where one could willingly engage in alliance modes of relationship with fellow people of color or disabled citizens.69 Using a Frommian epistemological lens (which has great similarities to Freud’s70), would it be possible to identify psychoanalytical tools to break the spiral? How congruent would these tools be with other critical hermeneutics perspectives such as Ricoeur’s or Barthes’ mythology concerns as I discussed them in Chapter 3? For example, would they involve the protection from guilt via ideologies of “sublimation”71 or perhaps much more utilitarian mechanisms centered on mundane convenience considerations? These questions should also serve as a springboard to link the conversation with another important element, the notion of white privilege embedded in global racialities of blackness, Latinxness, and beyond. Since the publication of Peggy McIntosh’s72 seminal work on white privilege, this concept has had an immense impact on American race studies. The concept of white privilege is relational.73 One cannot merely analyze racism in terms of discrimination and disadvantage based on race without simultaneously understanding the specific positionality of those white folks who benefit, as well as the processes by which they remain oblivious to the injustice intrinsic to their privileged positionality. Looking at this phenomenon purely in terms of radical solidarity, it is clear that decoding white privilege dynamics has the potential for enhancing antiracist alliance building. Nevertheless, thinking of subaltern radical agency trajectories, I would also like to call attention to the need to go still deeper. It is not uncommon for white privilege facilitation to turn into collective energy spent in “white washing.” I am alluding to guilt and shame dynamics similar to the complex psychoanalytical and decolonial issues exposed by Fanon. Hence, I am in favor of a Fanonian trans-ontology approach anchored in blackness studies where white privilege is truly subsidiary to the broad cause of anticolonial and antiracist collective action.74 Invoking a concrete example may be helpful here. As part of Arturo’s chronic underemployment experiences for the past few years, he attended a school board
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meeting in a southern town of the U.S. There, the material ambiguities of the discourse of white privilege became quite evident. One of the spokespersons that day was a Latinx individual. The core of the discussion was the renaming of a school for which Dolores Huerta’s name75 was suggested. The Latinx individual whose last name was Garcia, along with another white male, spoke against this proposal. What was most interesting is that the grounds invoked by the Latinx individual were linked to the need to have a “neutral” naming for the school. Only a few minutes before this incident, there had been a celebratory presentation about a teacher institute. In the institute, the district had been teaching teachers about a black massacre that took place in the same town at a safely distant amount of time from the present. Several school administrators used their white privilege in public. They openly related how, having grown up and having been educated in town, they had never been taught about the massacre until they were elsewhere in the nation and they had been ashamed of their selective ignorance. Could this perhaps give interesting grounds for transposing Zembylas’s metatheoretical discussions of shame to the global north context of the U.S. Deep South? There was something rather symbolic that most people probably failed to notice. A sequence of three “H” words were used in the presentation to highlight the dialogical learning purportedly explored in the institute: hostility, humiliation, and hope. As soon as the renaming incident took place, Arturo thought sarcastically to himself that the sequence had so many missing links. Where would the hope come from? What would be its foundational ground? It would have been easy to add many more “H” words. They would make evident that the history kept repeating right in front of everybody right there at the meeting: horror, hysteria, hypocrisy. What about something like a surrealist type of racialized hypnosis?
Subaltern transmodernities and trans-Latinidades: On mestizaje and intersectional disability agency contours In Latin America, ontological conceptions of mestizaje have very practical, often devastating connotations. It is not a mere matter for philosophical or metatheoretical speculation. Moreover, for diasporic Latinx populations, these fixed ontological mestizaje considerations are also imported into and further complexified as they move into global north contexts. After all, they are, in an almost literal sense, “transitional subjects.”76 In the contemporary fluidity of twenty-first-century Latinx transmodernities, when I say ontological mestizaje, I mean the fixed allocation of a given status and identity to an Indigenous, Afro-descendant, or Asian-Latinx individual or group. This happens because this person or target group has for whatever reason left their home community, or because a given person is perceived by their very community of origin as non-belonging, as ineluctably excluded. Therefore, mestizaje is in every respect a constitutive category of identity/alterity. If one pursues a genealogical/archeological tracing, in the sense that Foucault uses these
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terms,77 most of the time one finds out that this categorization has its origins in either visible or latent/invisible disabilities present in the family, or in some form of queerness that emerges from a demeaning collective designation of some sort. All of this conflates with race and class, creating a kaleidoscopic sense of intersectional subalternity: However one may choose to define the term “racial”, it concerns the historian only as it relates to a pattern of oppression (subordination, subjugation, exploitation) of one set of human beings by another. Orlando Patterson, in his Slavery and Social Death, takes “the racial factor to mean the assumption of innate differences based on real or imagined physical or other differences.” … such an assumption does not an oppressor make; presumably the objects of racial oppression (however the term is defined) are capable of the same sorts of assumptions. David Brion Davis, explaining slavery in the United States, says, “racial dissimilarity [was] offered as an excuse” for it … That is true enough and consistent with Patterson’s definition of “the racial factor.” But again, excuses are not an automatic promotion to oppressor; before racial oppression is excused, it must first be imposed and sustained. That is what needs to be explained. Unfortunately, “racial dissimilarity” in the conventional phenotypical sense proves to be more banana peel than stepping stone. Historically, “racial dissimilarities” have not only been artificially used, they are themselves artificial. In colonial Hispanic America, it was possible for a person, regardless of phenotype (physical appearance), to become “white” by purchasing a royal certificate of “whiteness.” … one may move from one “racial category” to another in today’s Brazil where, it is said, “money whitens.” … in the United States the organizing principle of society is that no such “whitening” be recognized—whether “whitening” by genetic variation or by simple wealth.78 To be sure, there are crucial dynamics in the complex caste-like contours prevailing in Latin American global south contexts that are often missed by the most perceptive global north scholarly observers. These contours are intrinsically intersectional. For instance, no matter how much money is involved, in Brazil, as it is certainly true in Venezuela, people of color with disabilities cannot genuinely “buy” their whiteness status. Of course, there are symbolic violence dimensions that can be avoided through the possession of money by people with disabilities in the global south. There is no question about this, since a lot of what is at stake concerns material precarity. Here is a tangible illustration. I have observed media video interviews of a migrating blind Latinx colleague of Arturo’s when he visits his home country. This person, to whom I refer in Chapter 8 under the name of Cirilo, resides in the global north. Cirilo has been fully employed and is well-grounded within a major blind organization in the U.S. Journalists treat Cirilo in the interview with deference, expressing their “admiration” for the “exceptional” accomplishments he has meritocratically mastered “despite” being disabled.79 No doubt, however,
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within the “exceptionality” of the grounds for their admiration one must also recognize the ambivalence of normalizing ideologies. The process in question operates in a manner that resembles my discussions around blindness as giftedness in a forthcoming book chapter.80 I also discuss some of the ambiguous global north contours of these transLatinx mestizo exchanges in another forthcoming chapter.81 There, I describe relational experiences that took place while I was conducting research in the U.S. context of northern New Mexico. This is a geopolitical and sociocultural space where former ruling-class Hispanics are still nostalgic about their imperial past at the top of racial hierarchies. As qualitative researcher, I had prolonged interactions with law enforcement professionals from this area whose skin color and phenotypical features would place them as mestizos in Brazil or Venezuela. However, they regarded themselves as direct descendants of the first Spanish conquistadores. As such, they disdained the identitarian stance of Chicanx or “darker” modes of Latinxness.82 Many undocumented Indigenous immigrants or folks whose legal migration status in the global north is still in a sort of borderline suspense83 may upload pictures of their new cars and other goods for the world to see. Perhaps they come to visit their home communities in Latin America with a particular attitude not unlike that described by Fanon in the passage I quoted earlier in the chapter. Yet, taking this to mean that their racial status has gotten whitened might be a real stretch. Here is where the conflation of class and race tends to confuse certain scholars, which corroborates the significance of bringing disability explicitly into the intersectional agency picture. The cheerful reception of these people’s money, the realization that their folks back home in the Latin American communities of origin are likely to increase their purchasing power, may soften certain symbolic violence gestures. The truth, though, is that, regarding matrices of hierarchy, very little changes when it comes to social positionality. This is not by any means intended to deny the tremendous fluidity of these identitarian levels of relationality. One also needs to add the defining features of whiteness as property. These include (1) rights of disposition; (2) right of use and enjoyment; (3) reputation and status property; and (4) the absolute right to exclude others from use and enjoyment.84 In the U.S., these features had consolidated over time through a merging of racialized and legal status specifically linked with black slavery and Native American land seizures by white settlers. This ties white privilege and domination directly with decolonial theories, although Cheryl Harris, the critical race socio-legal scholar who formulated the concept of whiteness as property, does not make this link an explicit part of her analytical paradigm. Likewise, there is no reference in Harris’s analysis to Latinx dispossessions in the southwestern part of the U.S. This silence should be interpreted as the exception that confirms and helps refine the nature of the white supremacy rules that operate underneath the formal socio-legal surface of whiteness as property. As I already pointed out in Chapter 3, a core part of the ego conquiro approach of U.S. imperialism involves a historical ambiguity in the legal status of large portions of Latinx populations.85 Despite a formal adscription of white status to Mexican
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Americans, for example, it was never coupled with the kinds of property characteristics analyzed by Harris. As a matter of fact, the discriminatory responses against Latinx and Chicanx were at times more blatant than those displayed against other subaltern racial subgroups.86 More recently, Buras87 demonstrates how, in the case of New Orleans reconstruction, the structural materiality of whiteness exclusionary property has been used as yet another instance of dispossession of black communities. Buras stresses the inequitable basis of charter school reforms. These are reforms driven by socalled “conscious capitalism.” This process of reform has served to build the capital of white entrepreneurs and their black allies. Buras’s analysis combines David Harvey’s theory of urban space capitalism88 with Cheryl Harris’s whiteness as property ideas. The New Orleans process consists of removing “failing” schools (mostly populated by black children) from the control of the school district. This serves the purpose of neutralizing union bargaining mechanisms along with all other accountability checks and balances. The result is a privatized microcosm of charter schools. These schools are isolated from democratic controls. They are richly funded through sources that used to be public moneys, subject to much stricter scrutiny. Also anchored in the global north, there is another interesting illustration of whiteness as property that engages areas of intersectional materiality. As such, these areas are central to my intersectional disability agency concerns. Broderick and Leonardo’s89 work borrows elements from the whiteness as property model to examine the uneven distribution of behavioral justice and discipline systems in U.S. schooling contexts.90 The embodiment of “goodness” is conflated with white normativity. It is thus decreed as equivalent to smartness.91 Especially in terms of understanding/explaining intersectional disability agency trajectories and early sources of proto-resistance among nonwhite students, e.g. those labeled under the umbrella of behavioral disorders in school settings and elsewhere, this approach equates very explicitly these processes with disablement, with the corresponding enablement of white normativity as the ruling mode of domination. Disability construction, therefore, acquires not only ideological contours but especially racialized ones, with very strong relational overtones. “Just as the process of interpreting a student’s interactions through the lens of deficiency is indeed a form of ability profiling … interpreting another student’s actions and interactions through the lens of capacity, privilege, pardon, and entitlement is also part and parcel of ability profiling, or ablement.”92 The implications of this relational paradigm are crucial. They are very much in line with how I interpret the racial contract in conjunction with its ableist ideology counterpart. Both whiteness and blackness studies are necessary to understand/explain white supremacy dynamics. In the same way, disablement and en/ablement must be understood as intersectional components of these same processes. Global south origin, for example, is yet another ingredient that exacerbates the pernicious effects of disablement for children and adults of color with and without disabilities. Many of Arturo’s experiences can be looked at through this prism. Thus, this serves as a sort of intersectional magnifying glass.
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It enlarges the catalyzing identity issues to which Broderick and Leonardo allude. This is so not only in terms of their negative connotations. Hopefully, in terms of resistance spaces of emancipatory learning and radical solidarity, these disablement dynamics can eventually help subaltern people of color with disabilities realize their common plight. In turn, they might start developing strategic moves that transcend mere efforts to neutralize concrete modes of microaggression. Always in a nonlinear pattern, they might evolve toward macro-movement-level approaches that will take seriously radical exteriority’s multiple interlocking ways of being and impacting one’s evolving sense of being at the level of self-configurations. Hence, coming back once again to addressing mestizaje, there are two important intersectional disability agency points to take home from the discussion so far in this section. First, since ontological mestizaje brings race-based sociocultural fixation on an intrinsically fluid set of sociopolitical and diasporic dynamics, its value is at best questionable. Second, at the axiological level of basic social justice interactions, just by bringing in disability components, one unearths a lot of fundamental problems that need urgent interdependent addressing in very tangible ways.
Bringing the epistemology of Dei’s blackness studies into trans-Latinx intersectional agency analyses The previous section provides an excellent segue into the decolonial blackness studies paradigm developed by George J. Sefa Dei.93 Dei’s framework helps unify Latinx decoloniality as a powerful conflation of identity perspectives for LatDisCrit to become an actionable sphere where knowledge workers and activists meet. It indirectly addresses frameworks not explicitly grounded in negritude or African diaspora, e.g., Chicanismo, indigenismo, Hispanismo, hegemonic and non-hegemonic perspectives on mestizaje, and so on. Dei’s core theoretical principles are as follows.94 First, there is a mutual implication between the personal and the political. This mutuality operates at the intersecting complexities of blackness. Yet, it also gets enacted within all forms of oppression and subaltern selves in racialized settler coloniality contexts globally and locally.95 It is important to understand the direct implications of this first principle of mutuality for the intersectional analysis of race and disability in the global north as well as in the global south. To this end, it is helpful to look at the example Dei brings up with respect to the interlocking nature of settler colonialism. Dei points out that settler colonialism, indentured labor, and transatlantic slavery are closely intertwined in the configuration of Anglo-American identities. The genealogical examination of racial and subaltern subject categories within colonial and European settlement arrangements makes evident their specificity and their fluidity.96 They enact mechanisms to conciliate contradictory imperatives such as liberal claims of progress and universality as well as the colonial and capitalist need to manage the labor, reproduction, and social organization of colonized subjects.97 “Viewing categories as historically specific social constructions allows a tracing of
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their transformations and reinscriptions in particular places and times, the fictions they help to create and uphold, and the forms of governance organized around them.”98 Extrapolating this into contemporary societies one starts to understand the unifying sense of material precarity as a feature common to people of color with disabilities in the global north and in the global south. Furthermore, one realizes that the material precarity plight of working-class and marginalized segments of global populations is not a coincidence. It is inscribed in their global sense of subjection through abjection and material as well as symbolic deprivation via tragedy myths, mendicity governmentality,99 and the like. Dei’s100 second principle asserts that, because blackness must not be seen in terms of a rigid essence, there is no point in searching for its authenticity,101 at least as tantamount to genuineness/purity. This is a principle equally relevant for intersectional disability agency since it also applies to broad racialized constructs such as indigeneity, Hispanidad, Xicanidad, Asian-Latinx identity, or ontological ideas about mestizaje. “Since White supremacy is a system which shapes other forms of oppression such as patriarchy, transphobia, homophobia, ableism and sexism, racism is also connected to these other systems of domination.”102 Appropriations of blackness for antiblackness purposes is yet another important facet of these complex intersectional dynamics. Thus, progressive anticolonial work demands sharpening one’s skills. These skills are key to detecting and proactively addressing pernicious manifestations of manipulative appropriation. Helping others to do the same is paramount as a crucial dimension of antiracist, anti-ableist, and anticolonial emancipatory learning that crosses multiple spheres of intersectional subalternity. Dei’s103 third principle stresses that there is an absolute need to speak about and interrogate race. This need transcends similar needs to speak about gender, class, disability, etc. There is in the case of race a convenient social desire and operational ethos on the part of dominant racial/colonizing groups to create the false perception that racism is a thing of the past. The aim is to create a false hegemonic impression that race dimensions, especially antiblack race dimensions, as organizing frames under which white supremacy rests have lost their significance. This is increasingly happening in the recent past, despite so many reasons magnified by the COVID global pandemic, which speak eloquently to the contrary. What intersectional subaltern actors, activists, and knowledge workers alike need to strategically realize is that unless racism ends, “race will always be relevant. Anti-Black racism is one of the many pernicious aspects of racisms. Black and African peoples have continually endured this social cancer. If race is to become obsolete then racism must first be obliterated.”104 Of course, this does not involve doing away with race’s intersectional character.105 Quite on the contrary, it entails going back to the political roots of an intersectionally decolonial retheorizing process for blackness studies.106 This radical retheorizing needs to explicitly depart and end with the certainty that, as global south epistemologies should help emphasize, Black is African and vice versa: “hegemonic ‘systems’ are put in place to perform anti-Black racism globally … these systems are used as ‘divide and conquer’ tactics to diminish any interest of Diasporic
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Africans and Black people.” Dei goes on to outline his desiderata and the implications of these principles for blacks and nonblacks as follows: Part of the diasporic experience is still to deal with or to resist the subhumanity of the African and the Black subject, our social and economic marginalization and the continuing legacies of enslavement and the question of Land displacement. These experiences shape the development of thought and action about what it means to be Black and to affirm our Blackness in particular contexts … reclaiming Blackness may be subversive and liberating for the subordinated/oppressed especially when evoked for political and social transformation. In both conceptualizations, “reinventing Africanness” and “Diasporic Blackness,” it is important for us to acknowledge ongoing global legacies of colonial genocides with particular impacts on Black, Indigenous and other intersectional communities and the displacement of African peoples and how this has deeply shaped the relations between Black, African and Indigenous peoples in North America, Africa and the global Diaspora. Identities [Black, African and Indigenous identities in particular] have been a site for colonial impositions … There is some significance in asking: how are certain imposed Black identities being normalized within contemporary social formations of anti- Blackness and antiAfricanness? Also, how can we distinguish between current mobilizations of identity around cultural and ideological constructs of White nationalism and xenophobia (i.e., extreme Right discourses, neo-nazi) and the political and politicized mobilizations of identity for anticolonial projects?108 How could Dei’s radical framework be transposed to the specific materiality of structural and identity issues pertaining to intersectional disability and trans-Latinidades in both Latin America and north America as well as elsewhere in the globe? What is its added value as a radical decolonial approach for trans-Latinx intersectional disability agency, radical solidarity, and emancipatory learning? An obvious initial answer is that this framework elevates black Latinidades. This in turn entails addressing issues of antiblackness intrinsic to many ideological frameworks that disrupt the field by way of problematizing “harmonious” Latinx identity formulations.109 For instance, talking about Afro-Latinidades in Latin America and in the U.S. involves dealing with many spheres of contestation. Their analysis requires framing and engaging crucial questions. By the same token, engaging Africanness in conjunction to Latinidades demands interrogating core notions. It is in the sense of a “counterculture” of transmodernities that I view blackness issues. They transgress and “darken” all perspectives of Latinidad that might claim some sort of pristine/harmonious, fixed ontological authenticity. I also view the collective-action energy of blackness movements around the world as key. They provide a special sense of sociopolitical, metatheoretical, and axiological vitality. As such, they contribute in crucial ways to the making and remaking of intersectional disability agency possibilities for trans-Latinx
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collectivities, both those residing and struggling in the global north and those inhabiting the global south. These trans-Latinidades are always interacting in their mutual articulation of diasporas and proto-diasporas, surviving while transforming what I call elsewhere multiple modalities of “interimperialism.”110 When I frame this as a countercultural exercise, I am thinking most particularly of disabled Latinx of color. I make the clarification, in the doubtful case that there is, ontologically speaking, such a thing as a white Latinx category beyond the complex, quasi-fictional socio-legal contours exposed by LatCrit thinkers such as López and Valdes who I discussed more extensively in Chapter 3. These legal contours operate essentially as divide-and-conquer white supremacy tactics.111 There are disabled Latinx folks who reside in the global north. Nevertheless, whether they realize it or not, they are in dire need of understanding the interdependence of their identitarian emancipatory plight. They need to become aware that their emancipatory quest is uniquely aligned with the fate of marginalized subaltern subjects all over the world. They need to realize that as intersectional transitional subjects they are extreme by-products of global dynamics of material precarity. They are, whether they like it or not, united under that common banner with all sorts of people at a global scale. At this extreme deprivation level of existential materiality, it does not really matter whether they are socially excluded because they are disabled, perceived/selfdefined as racially inferior, or both. Nowhere is the hypervisibility of whiteness more palpable than in the racial ontology of ideologies of mestizaje. To be sure, one must distinguish approaches that regard mestizaje as a racialized ontology from those that emphasize epistemological and sociopolitical border crossing as an imperative of contemporary collective action and intersectional identities. In terms of Latinx classical ontoracial examples of theory and political practice, Bolívar’s112 “Jamaica Letter” and Vasconcelos’s113 philosophical musings on a “cosmic race” are very much representative manifestations of the former. Simón Bolívar was a doer, a paradigmatic symbol of Latin American liberation in the nineteenth century. Thus, it could be said that Bolívar’s “Jamaica Letter,” written in 1814, was a manifesto of what makes up Latinidad as a new mode of identity in the context of early nineteenth-century independence struggles and nation building. However, one must not ignore that Bolívar, despite his preeminent role in these independence struggles, was a power icon. Bolívar was a personification of preexisting hierarchy structures in Hispanic American colonial territories. Bolívar was member of a white wealthy family that had close links to the European sources of domination. Those links were conveniently disdained then. The excuse was that Spain’s monarchy was being usurped by French invaders. True, it is often said that someone had to lend Bolívar a shirt when he was about to die of tuberculosis in Santa Marta, part of today’s Colombia. That is how depleted his wealth was at the end of his life.114 Yet, none of that does away with the practical and symbolic implications of Bolívar’s class origins and the underlying race dimensions that defined all the independence struggles throughout what today we
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call Latin America. The discussion is especially relevant in the early wave of armed conflicts that the local white elites led against Spain during the first three decades of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, one needs to go deeper once again, transposing the conversation to twenty-first-century multilayered expressions of Latinx transmodernities. Thus, considering the materiality of Vallega’s115 concept of simultaneity that characterizes Latin American history, this race/class contradiction should be read as being at the core of the irony of decolonial liberation in Latin American contexts. These are features very much applicable today throughout all the nations in the Americas. Whether one likes it or not, they impact the various modalities that decolonial thought and activism adopt against hegemonic western modernity. Western thought is fundamentally “instrumental, rationalist, productive, and subjectivist.”116 Vasconcelos’s idea of a “cosmic race” builds upon the assumption that racial hybridity in and of itself means racial superiority. It operates in a sense not so different from the kind of superiority that proponents of eugenics attributed to whiteness. The problem is that, although indigeneity and blackness are in the mix, it is the “renewed ontology” of the European white male in the American continent that makes viable such a racial, cultural, and geopolitical miracle. Thus, this kind of ontological conception of mestizaje is nothing but a back-door modality of white supremacy.117 Quite apart from Vasconcelos’s original metatheory, ontological versions of mestizaje have had various explicit and implicit applications throughout Latin America and the U.S. For instance, in the 1930s and early 1940s, during the Lázaro Cárdenas administration and those that preceded it in México, there was a deliberate effort to utilize the cultural myth of mestizaje as a cosmic superpower.118 Their purpose was to further the political ethos of the Institutional Revolutionary Party.119 The campaign used a mystified configuration of indigenismo. Its epitome was portrayed as embodied by Cuauhtemoc, the last emperor of the Aztecs. During that period, the Mexican state erected many statues in his honor. It did so while doing everything possible to hide/deny the reality of extreme precarity and marginalization faced by Indigenous people throughout the nation. Interestingly, in looking critically at these apparent ambiguities, it is worth noting that “while revering this indigenous ‘past’ in the process of modernizing Mexico through the narrative of Mestizaje, Emiliano Zapata, an indigenous hero of the Mexican Revolution, has never been ‘formally’ revered by the state.”120 Racialized ontologies of mestizaje are set up to hide much more than what they appear to reveal. In this regard, it is clear that antiblackness (even as ambiguous expressions of anti-indigenismo) are at the root of these ontological ideas on mestizaje as a racial category. As a child, Arturo had an intuitive sense that this was the case. He liked to engage in playful exchanges with his grandmother (la Nona). He wanted to test the limits of racial “truths.” La Nona was a very wise and joyful mujer campesina who had never experienced formal schooling. Arturo, a blind brown boy, would assert to his grandmother that he was black. La Nona would immediately respond by rebuking him for saying so. It was as if she felt that reminding this blind child of his brownness,
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his mestizo being, would exorcize the shadow of blackness. Perhaps this would make it flee, leaving the family intact from polluting influences. Looking back, Arturo now realizes a few lessons that one can extrapolate from these dialogues. Certain words are euphemistically designed to demarcate racialized categories of hierarchy. They serve to elevate the pseudo-mythical ideology of ontological mestizaje. For instance, in his native Venezuela, they use the word trigueño, which literally translates as wheat-like. Wheat is a scarce cereal in Venezuela. Although it used to be121 eaten by folks of all classes, it is associated with an aura of European (what they used to call in colloquial, oldfashioned circles “music,” i.e. white and foreign) things. The trigueñx racialized category is neither brown nor white. It is a golden epitome of ontological mestizaje.122 In many ways, in its discursive ambiguity, trigueñidad represents an allegorically racialized version of the famous myth of “el Dorado,” the mystified territory that conquistadores chased unceasingly, anxious as they were to put their blood-filled, imperialist hands on the immensely rich gold mines el Dorado purportedly harbored. I often wonder,123 was el Dorado a mythical trick? Was it a clever vengeance of Indigenous nations knowing firsthand the infinite avarice and arrogance of conquistadores? Could such a mythical construct have relevance for contemporary global north and global south intersectional disability agency considerations? If so, what would it be? In other words, how could a construct like el Dorado help bridge global north and global south modes of resistance while at the same time the discursive and the material realms get practically combined as both tools for activism and knowledge work purposes? In concluding this section, it is important to say a word about the idealized relation between both Chicanidad and Xicanidad in the United States with various versions of indigeneity, e.g., mythical constructs of Aztlan or contemporary engagements with the Zapatista Indigenous movement. The evolution of Chicanx movement stances have at various points in time been determined by dynamics that, in the strict sense, have their origins in intraand interorganizational struggles.124 In other words, they are not so much the natural ideological or strategically aligned adjustments of movement building.125 In terms of the critical hermeneutics of racial ideologies such as mestizaje, this points to the need for knowledge workers and grassroots activists alike to ascertain the extent to which major organizations can or should shape collective identities. This is especially true when these identities get to be sold and accepted as a fixation of the most genuine, the purest, the ultimate expression of any given racialized/cultural/ideology-free phenomenon or trend. This is a tendency that resembles what Arturo has observed among major organizations of the blind in the global north. They claim to capture the “essence” of the blind movement in a politically ecliptic manner. Their organizational style becomes at once nationalist and global in scope. As such, these organizations of the disabled dictate the “movement master lines,” stifling de facto its creative transformations both nationally and in distant lands.126
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Chapter summary and concluding intersectional agency reflections This is by far the longest and densest chapter of the book. My central emphasis has been on transmodernities and decoloniality as crucial to intersectional disability agency in conjunction with Latinxness in both global south and global north contexts. Therefore, I devoted the first two sections to emphasizing how a lot of the analysis in the global north does not make sense without a good grounding in the analytical critical disability studies efforts being carried out in Latin America and vice versa. The third, fourth, and fifth sections then prepared the way for linking activism and knowledge work as interdependent movement-building components where racialized dimensions are paramount. The third section examined a couple of social movement instances in the global north and in the global south to inspect their emancipatory learning lessons. The fourth section addressed multiple knowledges whose interdependent complementarity earns liberatory legitimacy only when intersectional subalternity is in the driver’s seat. The fifth section revisited the overall idea of intersectional disability in its existential materiality, this time through the lens of race-based relationality. Hence, I dealt in the sixth section with mestizaje’s hindering role for purposes of intersectional disability agency. Finally, in the seventh section, I dived into Dei’s overarching decolonial theory of blackness studies, looking at some of his principles for comprehensive activism worldwide, which I explicitly linked with concrete disability dimensions. Thinking primarily of global north readers for whom a lot of this may still feel complicated, I bring up here two essays that, coincidentally, were published back to back in the International Journal of Inclusive Education. 127 Their complementary ethos helps illumine a lot of what is at stake in the discussions of the present chapter. Both of these pieces deal with intersectionality. However, while the first of them targets race and disability, filtering ableism through a transposition of concepts borrowed from antiracist theorizing, the second of the articles, presumably written by a Latinx scholar, attacks the overemphasis on disability for purposes of inclusion, which the article frames fundamentally as a matter of civil rights societal transformations. Thus, the latter article centers on issues of language and “spatial” inclusivity, not race as the core matrix of oppression that needs addressing. Here are some questions that jump to my mind. If one deracializes Latinxness, emphasizing exclusively matters of language, how different would be the existential materiality of a white Russian diasporic student from a Central American one, assuming that both of them got to the U.S. last week or so? Now, adding core layers of complexity concerning intersectional disability agency, what if one assumes that both of these students have visible disabilities? What should be the core areas for resistance’s sake? How should radical solidarity be pursued in both cases in terms of privileging decolonial dimensions of subaltern intersectionality? Now, in concluding the chapter, I stress that beyond purely ontological conceptions of mestizaje, that is, in terms of epistemological and even spiritual perspectives of mestizaje, particularly within the U.S., the picture for intersectional disability agency possibilities is rich and most promising. This is especially evident among Chicanx feminist scholars and activists. For example, Gloria Anzaldúa128
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looks at la conciencia de la mestiza to help us understand mestiza womanhood identity as fluid consciousness formation. On the other hand, Chela Sandoval129 frames her U.S. third-world feminism paradigm around the fluidity of mestizx identities.130 Norma Alarcón131 talks of “the subject in process” to accentuate this fluidity, emphasizing the significance of border-crossing dynamics in the configuration of identities and modes of alterity in contemporary multiracial and multicultural contexts. Finally, Ruth Trinidad Galván132 illustrates the hermeneutic potential of mestizaje as an epistemic ethos and a tool for the enactment of emancipatory learning in intersectional spaces of subaltern marginality. Trinidad Galván centers on portraying alternative knowledge formulation and diffusion by mujeres campesinas, i.e., Latinx peasant women. Her analysis is set in a Mexican rural setting. This focus on campesinas is extremely important. In terms of Latinidad’s plurality of fluid identities, campesinas, perhaps more than any other group, represent the conflation of multiple layers of subaltern marginality. Therefore, the understanding of their radical agency possibilities under such extreme circumstances is key to transcending hopeless marginality theorizing and activism. The counterstories in the next two chapters illustrate the relational contours of these marginalizing dynamics. Yet they are not by any means defeatist testimonial renditions. Above all, these final counterstories in the book are presented as an exploration of ways to circumvent the preempting matrices of hierarchy imposed by the coloniality of power, knowledge, and being. These matrices express most uniquely through the normalizing ideologies of ableism and racism, which adopt multimodal ways and get differentially reproduced/played out in the global north and in the global south. Here is the core idea upon which I want the reader to reflect at the end of this chapter. The overall analytical metaphilosophy integrated throughout the chapter and the present volume shows that in every instance when a brown blind Latinx actor like Arturo walks the streets of a global north city, with or without cane, with or without spouse, with or without a dog (guiding or otherwise), an embodied social metamorphosis of LatDisCrit is taking place. This is true even if no one names it as such,133 especially when disabled brown, black, or Indigenous Latinx leaders are oblivious. It does not matter if these brown, black, or Indigenous disabled leaders prefer to simulate obliviousness to their unique intersectional, existential, and relational materialities. Some kind of rhythmically transformational learning is taking place there.134 Its timid, almost invisible, transformational ethos works tangible embodiment wonders. It does so by creating new spheres of perception that open the door for new modes of relational, creative, and transitive decolonial solidarity that go way beyond the subjective confines of both disability agency and trans-Latinidad.
Notes 1 For a variety of applications and theoretical discussions primarily centered around multilayered ideas on or about alterity dimensions, see Bacchetta, Maira, and Winant (2019); Fuller, Jonas, and Lee (2016); Jenson (2014); Lazzarotti (2020); McNeilly (2017); Nealon (1998); Taussig (2017); Wulf (2016).
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2 Spanish philosopher Rosa María Rodríguez Magda (2013) asserts that she was the first scholar to use the notion of transmodernity in her 1989 book titled La sonrisa de Saturno: Hacia una Teoría Transmoderna. She seems to think that her transmodernity metatheory is like no other, an innovative and original way to deal with the limitations of postmodernity as a paradigm. However, she clarifies that Enrique Miret Magdalena had used the term decades ago in a conference, although he never went back to the notion till the publication of his (2004) book titled La Vida Merece la Pena de Ser Vivida, as one of its chapters. Likewise, Rodríguez Magda indicates that Jüri Talvet, a Hispanist scholar from Estonia had used the term transmodernity to designate current poetry that tries to escape the exhausted canon of postmodernity. For the purposes of understanding/explaining LatDisCrit’s intersectional agency dimensions, Dussel’s (1995, 1996, 1999, 2008, 2012) applications seem very much relevant. I am particularly interested in his use of transmodernity as plural, parallel totalities. This is why I use the word transmodernities in the title of the present chapter. Also, for instance, through an extrapolation of this idea into my understanding of multiple Latinx identities, I use the term trans-Latinidades throughout the book. 3 See Puar (2017). 4 On the symbolic transmodernity dimensions of this embodiment from the perspective of psychoanalysis, see Mura (2012). 5 See Dussel (2012, p. 269). 6 See, for example, Hughes (2007); Hughes and Paterson (1997); Hughes, Russell, and Paterson (2005); Hughes et al. (2005); Paterson and Hughes (1999). 7 See Shakespeare (1993, 2004, 2006); Shakespeare and Watson (1997, 2001). 8 See Siebers (2008). 9 See also Siebers (1998a, 1998b, 2003) for expansive variations of his theoretical positionality. 10 See especially Ferrante (2015, 2018); Ferrante and Dukuen (2017); Ferrante and Ferreira (2008, 2010, 2011); Ferrante and Venturiello (2014); Ferreira (2005, 2007a, 2007b, 2008a, 2008b, 2010, 2020). I also anchor the analysis contained in this section on the metatheoretical critique to the concept of diversity as relevant for disability modes of oppression in Latin America formulated by Almeida et al. (2010). 11 On this, see, e.g., Ferreira (2005, 2007a, 2007b); see also Ferreira (2010, especially pp. 48 and following). 12 Ferreira (2010: pp. 47–48, my translation). Unless specified otherwise, all translations from texts in Spanish in this section are mine. For extensive renditions of Bourdieu’s texts on which Ferreira’s analysis is based, see Bourdieu (1997, 1999a, 2008). 13 See Merton (1948). 14 See, for example, Garfinkel (1984, 2016a, 2016b, 2017). 15 Ferreira, personal communication (December 29, 2020). 16 See Ferrante and Ferreira (2010, 2011). 17 See Ferrante and Ferreira (2010). 18 On this, see, e.g., Ferrante (2015, 2018); Ferrante and Joly (2017); Joly and Venturiello (2013). 19 See Palacios et al. (2012). 20 See also Rodríguez Díaz and Ferreira (2008) for an expansive discussion of some of these and other critiques. 21 Ferreira (2010: p. 59). 22 See Fanon (1967: pp. 37 and following). 23 See, for example, the essays in Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser (2012). 24 See Alexander (2003, 2006); Alexander, Giesen, and Mast (2006). 25 See Jacobsen and Aljovin de Losada (2005). 26 On this, see, for example, Roberts (2012).
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27 Tellingly, for instance, even though the award-winning Routledge Handbook of Disability edited by Berghs et al. (2020) devotes an entire section to the topic, the sense one gets about the transformational and intersectional agency evolving dimensions of this particular sphere of disability activism, especially in global south contexts, is rather pessimistic. See, e.g., Dube (2020); Gavério, Guedes de Mello, and Block (2020); Rae (2020). 28 See, for example, Chacón (2018); McCaughey and Ayers (2003); Vink (2019); Vlavo (2018). 29 See his (2012) essay; see also Hall (1993, 1998). 30 Hall (2012: pp. 128 and following). 31 That is where the bulk of Hall’s analysis concentrates. 32 Hall (2012: pp. 128–29). 33 Ibid (p. 130). 34 See Graebner (2007). 35 Hall (2012: p. 130). 36 Malone (2012: p. 169). 37 On this, Geuss’s (1981, p. 58 and following, as well as p. 82 and following) discussions are particularly poignant. See also Arenas Conejo (2011, 2015); Ruíz (2012, 2017, 2020); Ruíz and Berenstain (2018); Schutte (1998, 2004, 2007); and Williams (2002) for illustrations of works that try to bridge subaltern and decolonial studies within the specific situated emancipation contours of Latin America’s global south contextuality and/or Spain’s semiperipheral structural hegemony modes of positionality. 38 On the deeper ethical implications of this kind of move and the sort of amoral coalition strategies that feed them, see Gorski (2020). 39 Ben-Moshe (2018: n.p.). 40 See Geuss (1981, p. 17). 41 Ibid (pp. 17–18). 42 Freire (2002); Shor and Freire (1987). 43 See, e.g., Bernal (2002). 44 On Freire’s ambiguities toward revolutionary practice, consult Morrow (2013), who compares Freire’s intellectual trajectory to that of Habermas. Morrow stresses the progressive softening of their revolutionary rhetoric toward an emphasis on democratic spheres. 45 See Darder (2017, pp. 98–99). 46 On this, Meyers’ (2019a) extensive analytical discussions within the emancipatory context of multi-ethnic groups with disabilities in Nicaragua represents a great illustration of the sort of reality checks and legitimation challenges at stake. 47 Geuss (1981, pp. 18–19). 48 As demonstrated by Cudworth and Hobden (2018) regarding posthumanist paradigms. 49 See, e.g., Beresford (2000); Braz and Gilmore (2006); Brown and Schept (2017); Canguilhem (1970); Chase (2015); Cohen (2011); Danforth and Gabel (2016); Duggan (2004); Exum (2015); Foucault (1996); Gottschalk (2016); Hong (2015); Kim (2016); López (2004); Newman (2009); Nguyen (2015); Oparah (2004); Povinelli (2011); Reynolds (2008); Richie (2012); Ritchie (2017). 50 See, for instance, the arguments presented by Berghs et al. (2019). 51 On the need to establish this link through decolonial epistemologies in ways that transcend traditional renditions of political economy, see Grosfoguel (2007). For a variety of perspectives on this debate, see Bakan and Dua (2014); Dua (2007); Dua and Lawrence (2005); Green (2006); Lazarus (2002, 2004). 52 See also Ferrante and Venturiello (2014); Joly and Venturiello (2013); Venturiello (2016, 2017). 53 See the essays in Bourdieu (2001). 54 See Bourdieu (1977a, 1977b, 1979, 1984, 1988).
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55 Giroux (1983: p. 267). 56 It is important to notice here that in Ferreira’s (2010) and in Ferrante and Ferreira’s (2010) metatheoretical renditions, the focus was primarily on habitus. They do not refer to habitat. Nevertheless, it must also be recognized that in Ferreira’s complex articulation of transductivity as constitutive reflexivity through a combination of ideas from Bourdieu and Garfinkel, there may be room to include some of the points raised by Giroux. There could even be greater richness in Ferreira’s possibilitarian metatheorizing for purposes of intersectional disability agency. This is so, first, since it is clear that Giroux has no concern for concepts such as ableism, disablement, and the like. Second, Giroux’s (1983) theory of resistance does not refer either explicitly or indirectly to global south contexts and/or dimensions. 57 See Bourdieu (1999a); Bourdieu and Passeron (1977, 1979). 58 Giroux (1983: p. 268). 59 See Giroux (1983, pp. 270–272); see also Bourdieu (1977b); Connell et al. (1981); Davies (1981). 60 See Zembylas (2008). 61 Although Zembylas is specifically concerned with school intercultural education settings, which are more likely to experience control and inspection by state domination and curriculum compliance mechanisms. 62 See, e.g., Allen’s (2016) critical decolonial engagement with this specific hermeneutics literature. See also Allen (2008, 2009, 2013, 2014a, 2014b, 2014c, 2015) for a variety of parallel discussions on subsidiary issues associated with their formulations and normative traditions. 63 Matias and Allen (2013: p. 286). 64 See, e.g., Allen and Mendieta (2018, 2019); Allen and O’Connor (2019); Benjamin (1988); Christman (2019); Freud (1930); Grotstein (2009); Honneth (1999, 2009, 2012); Jaeggi (2014); Marcuse (1955); Niebuhr (2013); Whitebook (2001). 65 See Boler (1999); Britzman (1998); Darder (2017); Fromm (1941, 2013); Gonsalves (2008); hooks (2001); Lake and Dagostino (2013); Leonardo and Porter (2010); Roseboro (2008). 66 Zembylas (2008: p. 268). 67 Fanon (1967: p. 38). 68 See Freud (1960, 2002). 69 Using here, of course, the word citizen in the interrogating mode toward citizenships employed by works contained in Minich’s (2014) edited volume. 70 See, e.g., Fromm (1970). 71 See Sahlins (2008). 72 See McIntosh (1988, 1989). 73 See Amico (2017, p. 3). 74 For extensive discussions of the sort of whiteness issues associated with relevant transformational processes at stake here, see Alexander (2010); Allen (2012); Amico (2017); Blau (2003); Brodkin (1998); Feagin (2006, 2013); Feagin, Vera, and Batur (2001); Gugliemo and Salemo (2003); Helms (1990); Howard (2006); Ignatiev (2009); Kendall (2006); Kivel (1996); Lipsitz (1998); Massey and Denton (1993); Oliver and Shapiro (1997); Picca and Feagin (2007); Smith (2007); Takaki (2008); Weber (2010); Wise (2005, 2009b, 2010); Xing et al. (2007). 75 Readers who may be less familiar with Dolores Huerta’s activism and legacy in the U.S. and beyond are encouraged to consult Bender (2018); Chávez (2005); Schiff (2005) for a bibliography and an introductory account. 76 To extrapolate here the title of an edited volume by Amy Allen and Brian O’Connor (2019) that links normative critical theory discussions to psychoanalytical issues and debates from a political philosophy standpoint. These discussions help the field of intersectional disability agency to go beyond mere issues of exilic or diasporic considerations in their material relationality, as if they were mere expressions of
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Decoloniality of blackness and indigeneity “Nomadic identities.” For an illustration of these rather oversimplified nomadic applications within disability studies, see Roets (2009). For illustrations of more complexified discussions of the contours of equitable inclusivity within or with relevance to disability studies that complement those I bring up in this chapter, see Armstrong, Armstrong, and Spandagou (2011); Azzopardi (2011); Goodley and Lawthom (2011); Grech (2011); Shaw and Martin (2008); Thompson (1998). See, e.g., Viáfara Sandoval (2016, especially pp. 148 and following). Allen (2012: p. 29). For expansive considerations of these historical dimensions from the perspective of decolonial blackness studies, see Patterson (1982, 1991, 1997, 2019); Patterson and Fosse (2015). Importantly, in this video interview, which was conducted in Spanish, Cirilo claims not to have received any kind of organizational support in the U.S., portraying a self-made picture of outstanding “success.” Arturo knows firsthand that this portrayal does not correspond to the factual sequence of events that took place decades ago, since Arturo was too close to the action to have missed key details. See Padilla (forthcoming, 2021b). See Padilla (forthcoming, 2021a). On the historical underpinnings of this identitarian process, see Nieto-Phillips (2004). E.g., the current case of so-called “dreamers” in the U.S. For discussions of some of their sociopolitical and identitarian contours in relation/opposition to older Chicanx and Indigenous movements in the U.S., see, Abrego and Negrón-Gonzales (2020); Castillo (2014); Nicholls (2013). See Harris (1993: pp. 1724 and following). See, e.g., López (2006). See, e.g., López (2004). See Buras (2011). See Harvey (1973, 2006). See Broderick and Leonardo (2016). For broader discussions of the links between race and disability dynamics, see Artiles (2011, 2013, 2014); Artiles and Bal (2008); Artiles, Bal, and Thorius (2010); Connor (2008a, 2008b, 2012); Connor and Ferri (2007); Erevelles (2000, 2011, 2014); Erevelles and Minear (2010); Erevelles, Kanga, and Middleton (2006); Ferri and Connor (2014); Leonardo (2013a, 2013b); Leonardo and Broderick (2011); Leonardo and Grubb (2014). See Broderick and Leonardo (2016: pp. 57 and following). Ibid (p. 60). See Dei (2017). I encourage readers to consult the expansive discussion in the third chapter of Dei’s (2017) volume. There, Dei spells out ten principles. My foregoing analysis only touches on a few of these insofar as they have relevance for my broader intersectional disability agency possibilities focus. See Dei (2017, ch. 1). See also Abawi (2017); Ahmed (2004); Anderson (2007, 2009); Angod (2006); Bacchetta, Maira, and Winant (2019); Bakan and Dua (2014); Carroll (2014); Dei (1999, 2000, 2008, 2012); Dei and Asgharzadeh (2001); Dei and McDermott (2014); Dua and Lawrence (2005); Escobar (1995, 2004, 2020). See Lowe (2015). See ibid (p. 9); see also Dirlik (1997); Smith (2006). Dei (2017: p. 25). See Ferrante and Joly (2017); Joly and Venturiello (2013); Kerddaen (2018); Teklu (2007). See Dei (2017, ch. 2). See Foster (2007); Johnson (2003); Mutua (2006). Dei (2017: n.p.). See ibid (chs. 2–4).
Decoloniality of blackness and indigeneity 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122
123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134
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Ibid (2017: n.p.). On this, see Hall (1998); Saldaña-Portillo (2001, 2016). See Dei (1999, 2014). Dei (2017: n.p.). Ibid. See Lao-Montes (2016). See Padilla (forthcoming, 2021a). On this point, see Trucios-Haynes (2000); Weber (2005); Wilson (2005). See Bolívar (2004). See Vasconcelos (1997). See, for instance, García Márquez’s (1990) aesthetic representation of the drama of power under those circumstances. See Vallega (2014). Ibid (p. 220). See Miller (2004); Saldaña-Portillo (2016). See Hernández (2016). PRI, according to its acronym in Spanish for Partido Revolucionario Institucional. Hernández (2016: n.p.). Since the current circumstances of the nation make it impossible to obtain it even through contraband. There are other racialized categories typically made invisible through mestizx ontologies within trans-Latinidades. For instance, there are tropes of racial aversion against Chinese communities across the continent. On this, see Borensztein (2011). In general, mestizaje ontology literatures make invisible Asian traces. The same could be said of Crypto and Sephardi Jews, Arabs, and other racialized communities with relatively large waves of settlement in Mexico and South America. On the diasporic connotations of some of these questions, see Forster (2003). See Hernández (2016). See Anaya and Lomeli (1989); Chávez (2002); Gonzales (2003); Mariscal (2002); Martínez (2002); Muñoz (1989); Pérez (1999); Saldaña-Portillo (2001). On this, the critical examination work on disabled person organizations (DPOs) conducted over the years by researchers like Grech (2009, 2011, 2015, 2017) and Meyers (2014, 2016, 2019a, 2019b) is certainly instructive. See Broderick and Lalvani (2017) as well as Cioè-Peña (2017). See Anzaldúa (1990); Anzaldúa and Keating (2002); see also Bost (2019). See Sandoval (1991). On this, see also Herr (2014); Hurtado (1985); Mohanty (2002); Pérez (1999). See Alarcón (1996). See Trinidad Galván (2006). On this, the recent volume by Taussig (2020) is especially poignant. De Freitas and Sinclair (2014) would probably say something similar, following Deleuze’s neo-materialist epistemologies.
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Jóvenes Progresistas? A radical solidarity counterstory
Introduction: Returning to the micropolitics of global south contexts This chapter describes Arturo’s global south encounter and dis-encounter with radical solidarity spaces. Within the argumentative architecture of the book, this chapter is unique. It contains the only counterstory where critical hermeneutics dimensions of understanding/explanation target relational interactions with nondisabled groups. As such, it involves an expansive interrogation of decolonial radical solidarity, emancipatory learning, and intersectional disability agency within and beyond the micro- and macropolitical confines of critical disability studies, pandisability culture, and disability justice modes of organizing and activism. My reliance on counterstories elevates the embodied habitus of metanarratives of blindness since this is the experiential space transductively navigated by Arturo. However, it is certainly my purpose to emphasize intersectional disability agency in its most comprehensive pandisability and neurodiverse connotations. It helps to start by outlining here the historical roots of the entire modern state of affairs with respect to intersectional disability dimensions as they have eventually become operationalized in both global north and global south contexts. To this end, Miguel A. Ferreira develops a sharp critique of mainstream disability models. Ferreira points out in his critical assessment of the ontogenesis of disability in western nations that its treatment during the modern period (i.e., after the eighteenth century) has been tied to three interlocking spheres: (1) economic/capitalist, (2) political, particularly in terms of nation-state interventions, and (3) epistemological, as relevant to scientific interventions and formulations.1 One must stress (which corroborates the entanglement of these three transformational axes of modernity) that this process of normalcy imposition has undoubtedly an underlying economic reason. Due to funding needs coming from the state, political power will progressively appropriate scientific knowledges. The declining absolute monarchy experiences the economic boom made possible by the start of industrialization under a context where technical knowledges acquire crucial significance. Such knowledges were at the time fragmentary, of local and even secret character, and in dispute among themselves. Yet, given the acceleration of economic progress, the DOI: 10.4324/9781003084150-7
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state changed that situation by means of … “disciplining of polymorph and heterogeneous knowledges.”2 All of this led to the consolidation of the medical model of disability. This model, with its false and ambiguous hegemony of controls centered on cure and/ or rehabilitating premises dominated normalizing ideologies up until the 1970s. At that point two phenomena were vital: the process of globalization (which encompasses economics, politics, and knowledge dimensions) and the instauration of neoliberalism as the hegemonic model within the capitalist economic system. This brought about an overarching consequence: flexibility that, as a principle born within the economic sphere (labor flexibility … productive flexibility … and organizational flexibility) has gotten diffused way beyond its boundaries (configuring identities, restructuring social classes). Disciplining normalization persists through the devices of knowledge/power that make it possible. It is just that after the 1970s it will be conducted through other channels … The main sphere of the economic model had been progressively moving from production to consumption … This implies that the consumer starts replacing the worker as the preeminent category … Neoliberal principles stipulate, unlike Keynesian principles, that the priority is not to guarantee a booming demand for manufactured products … but rather sufficient capital investment, to which end it is necessary to incentivize that investment intent … which in many respects is accomplished at the expense of the working-class … Neoliberalism thus exacerbates individualism, engendering fragmentation … disaggregation of social identities … This places the enterprise as the new principle of social articulation.3 This is the period when the independent living movements emerged in the U.S. and later in Great Britain. Interestingly enough, this is also the period when Arturo’s coming of age took place within the global south, encompassed by specific macro-sociological transformations unique to Venezuela derived from its oil nationalization process as underscored in Chapter 1. In its origin, the social model emerges in the U.S. and Great Britain, precisely the birthplace of neoliberalism. When it revendicates personal autonomy and demands the recognition of rights, it is merely revendicating that same hypertrophic individual that neoliberal ideology postulates. When it questions the interference of professionals adhering to medical science precepts in the decisions pertaining to folks with disabilities, it is merely revendicating a person-centric entrepreneurial model of investment, the configuring of a person/consumer/enterprise that aims to invest their personal capital to obtain an individual benefit. The social model is by no means communal. If it constitutes into a collective movement, it does not do so because of some sort of group identity (it has never existed, as its defenders
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Jóvenes Progresistas? acknowledge). It is an aggregate of individual interests. In the social model the principle of sacrifice is completely absent, of individual sacrifice for the benefit of collective interests. The social model is profoundly neoliberal. What is probably worse, is that in its generation within the birthplace of neoliberalism and endowed within the dynamics of globalization, it has expanded into other social contexts, assuming that its particular revendications uniquely set to their original contexts are nevertheless appropriate to other cultures and places.4
Ferreira’s powerful critique stresses that the medical and the social model have something in common. Both of them have forgotten the embodied body. Ferreira’s bodily definition is extremely valuable. It gives this chapter its core axiological, epistemological, and ontological impetus. It links most intentionally new materialist/neo-vitalist frameworks5 with race-based and decolonial renditions, emphasizing the discursive and various embodiment and representational/performative realms borrowed from the fields of phenomenology and cultural studies. Let us remember … that the perspective through which we tackle disability is a sociological one. Therefore, the body to which we allude is by no means a mere biological materiality that gives natural support to our existence. We mean a body that has memory, that knows and feels, a culturally configured body. We name a body that gets constituted in performative ways by virtue of the various discursive denominations to which it can be subjected. It is a body that possesses abilities and skills as a by-product of its permanent process of learning. It is a body at once objective and subjective. It is a body that has identity and creates identities. It is a body that is at once variability and process. In other words, our biological materiality is far from being a neutral entity. This is the complex and multiform body that has been forgotten by both models of conceiving disability that we have been analyzing. In its genesis and ontology resides the constitutive nature of disability itself. Disability is embodiment.6
Enacting decolonial modes of radical solidarity: Reflections from the Latin American global south The morning was already hot. A vigorous sun kept everything in a sort of expectant sense of alertness. Although it was late in May, the rains had gotten delayed that year. It was 1981. The two brothers kept on riding their bikes as was usual for them on weekdays at that time. Arturo was sitting in the bar frame that links the front part with the rest of the bike. Melanio was busy with the forward rhythm of the pedals. There was a strange silence in the air. There were only a couple of blocks left to get to the high school, but everything was so quiet. At last, the ride was over. They had arrived at their destination. Yet, there was not a spot for them to park the bike. They were forced to remain
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standing with the bike’s frame in their hands. The gates of the high school were secured with thick chains. A stubborn lock dominated the scene. After waiting for a while, a couple of Arturo’s friends came to the gate to chat with him. “What’s going on?” Arturo’s inquiry was met with acoustic reverberations accentuated by a brief silence. Alfonso and Silvia, from the inner side of the gate, gazed at the two brothers with an air of self-sufficiency. “We took over the high school,” one of them responded. It was probably Alfonso, who was an outspoken brown guy affiliated to the “Liga Socialista.” Liga Socialista was a leftist party that had opted years before to break away from the Communist Party for not being radical enough. Liga Socialista had been tied to short-term guerrilla activities in the 1960s. Silvia was a member of “Movimiento Electoral del Pueblo” (MEP) or perhaps “Movimiento Institucional Revolucionario” (MIR), Arturo no longer remembers. Arturo found both names contradictory and thus he tended to mix them up in his mind. Both parties had split from Acción Democrática (AD). Acción Democrática was a social democratic ideological formation. It was by then one of the parties that had become a core component within the corrupt power machinery in Venezuela. It alternated every five years clientelist administrations with COPEI, whose ideological branding was in theory Christian Socialist, but which shared with AD a pragmatic, antipopular kind of conservatism that favored oligarchic interests. Both party administrations operated under a perpetual parade of never-ending political scandals. This corroborated the climate of impunity that characterized both of their regimes. A lot of the current disgraceful political and humanitarian plight for Venezuela as a nation can be traced back to the disappointment people cumulated during those years. It is not uncommon to find among leading figures of today’s “opposition forces” protagonists from those scandals who, gambling on people’s forgetfulness, want to establish themselves as pseudo-resistance heroes. This, among many other factors, has eroded the credibility of Venezuelan democratic opposition, leaving the nation in a state of political vacuum that often leads to levels of desperation and hopelessness that are very much understandable and that have led in recent years to a massive diaspora of Venezuelans throughout South, Central, and North America, Europe, and beyond. Back to our 1981 counterstory; at that point, Alfonso went on to say: “You know what happened with Alfredo; we couldn’t let that go by without doing nothing.” Arturo was appalled. As a member of “Jóvenes Progresistas,” an autonomous, grassroots youth-driven group he had formed a few months earlier with the youth inside the gate who were leading the high school takeover, he could not understand Alfonso’s claim. How could this act be compatible with the ideals they purportedly espoused as a grassroots resistance group? “I’m never consulted,” Arturo exclaimed, although he knew there was no point in trying to argue with Alfonso. Everything seemed precooked, too advanced, so much in motion. It did not seem that these youth were truly in control of the situation anymore. Alfredo was an AD representative. He had been expelled from the high school
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for good reasons the previous week. Alfredo was a heavy-drinking guy with a terrible reputation. Everybody knew that AD and COPEI paid these kinds of unscrupulous fellows as infiltrated agents. This was done both in high schools and universities all over the country. Most unfortunately, the practice was also extended to minor leftist parties as well and transferred into the opportunistic ethos of what later became the so-called “5th Republic,” Bolivarian Movement, or Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (PSUV). Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela still sustains today’s modalities of Chavismo as a dictatorial conflation of corrupt forces. These forces oppress the same people who brought them to power out of desperation in 1998. These people are now unable to get rid of their dictatorial rule, no matter how hard they try—sadly, at the expense of so many young lives lost most dramatically during the last decade. Arturo’s position on this issue was unique. He was the only member of Jóvenes Progresistas who was not affiliated to any political party. He was skeptical of party politics. He believed and still feels that autonomous grassroots alternatives are a much better (less corrupt and ethically apt for decolonial intersectional subalternity modes of activism) option for resistance than party affiliation. In general terms, this is true for both global south and global north contexts, regardless of the ideological branding of the parties in question. The closest Arturo got to becoming a party member was when, back in 1980, one of the members of Jóvenes Progresistas told him about a scholarship to conduct undergraduate studies at Patricio Lumumba’s University in Moscow. The scholarship required membership in the Communist Party. He now realizes that this was yet another example of the same clientelist strategy for recruitment they had in place. Arturo thus wonders how much his radical agency trajectory would have changed under the constraints that this option would have created for him. The high school take-over ended up lasting several months. All of those who, like Arturo, were seniors that year (including several of the members of Jóvenes Progresistas inside the gates) were negatively affected. Many of them had to delay their college entry for a year or more. Several of them, especially girls, never entered. Therefore, they saw their educational aspirations and their agentic possibilities altered in significant ways. Arturo had special respect for Silvia’s intellect and sensitivity. Hence, he came several times to the high school to converse with her about the futility and the mercenary character of their efforts. She told him that he was too much of an idealist, disdaining at the time Arturo’s views. Years later, Silvia confessed to Arturo how ideologically trapped she had been during that period. She was probably 17 or 18 in 1981 and was already married. Her husband was a university professor. He was deeply engrained in the leftist party politics of the time. Her perspectives were very much preempted by that kind of influence, which made her a rather typical expression of the kind of radical feminism prevailing in Latin America and Venezuela in particular in those days.7 Eventually Silvia got divorced. As a writer and engaged scholar, her intellectual life became less tied to collectivist ideologies.
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There is one emancipatory learning lesson that Arturo extrapolates from this first snapshot in his leadership-development trajectory. Decolonial radical solidarity must not get circumscribed to one’s closed identity circle. Notice that none of the other members of Jóvenes Progresistas was blind. It was certainly something unplanned, rather serendipitous. However, Arturo’s blindness was never an issue. At the same time, Arturo’s grassroots idealism made him a political outsider in the group. This feature made evident the limitations of models of radical solidarity grounded on the old processes and structures of party politics and class-based organizations.8 In Romance languages like Spanish and Portuguese, the transitive verb “solidarizarse” (something like enter into the relational living dynamics of solidarity) is much more common than the noun form used in English. Rubén GaztambideFernandez quotes Paulo Freire’s definition of solidarity to emphasize the nonstatic nature of its relationality: “Solidarity requires that one enter into the situation of those with whom one is solidary; it is a radical posture … true solidarity with the oppressed means fighting at their side to transform the objective reality which has made them these ‘beings for another.’”9 This is what differentiates solidarity from static feelings or unidirectional emotions such as empathy. “The pedagogy of solidarity is not simply about entering into a state of solidarity—to be in solidarity—which might suggest feelings towards, but about actions taken in relationship to someone … the pedagogy of solidarity is about an action that also affects or modifies the one who acts—to solidarize oneself with.”10 Second, in their constant search for transformation, transitive and creative modes of decolonial solidarity are, by definition, contingent and transient. Under this intersectional subalternity paradigm, all assumptions about a core human essence, and by extension, in line with the intersectional disability agency themes relevant to this interdisciplinary volume, core race, class, gender, and disability matrices of identity are rejected as essentializing, anti-transgressive failures. This is so insofar as they (1) exclude by default; (2) operate with a nullifying attitude toward difference; and (3) are premised on fixed conceptions of normality, fairness, etc. a priori of interactional encounters.11 At the same time, the transitivity of decolonial modes of solidarity challenges “the kind of ‘ironic solidarity’ based on Rorty’s (1989) conception of contingency, in which solidarity becomes ‘a matter of self-empowerment’ through which the idealized Western subject improves his humanity at the expense of the suffering of others.”12 The power of open questions that transitive and creative modes of decolonial solidarity engender is at once ground-breaking in its trans-utopian ethos yet also frightening in its daring horizons of uncertainty.
Critical LatDisCrit notes on intersectional disability agency, decolonial subalternities, and the search for feminist/masculine spaces of emancipatory unlearning and radical transgressive solidarity In this section I deal with broader solidarity issues that pertain to feminism and masculinities as expressions of subaltern modes of intersectional disability
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agency. Hence, I talk about a situation that (1) takes place in the geographical confines of the global north and (2) involves a disabled woman of color. Fighting for one’s sense of justice can get messy. This is especially so when the complexity of intersectional identities blocks one’s radical solidarity relational vision for transformation. Here is what I mean. It helps looking ahead for a moment at the next chapter’s counterstory. It helps to think about the Latinx leaders in the van with Arturo. At a surface level, one gets the impression that they are and have been fighting long term for blindness issues broadly conceived. One may perhaps feel that they have been sacrificing their inner radical exteriority sense of Latinidad. However, one soon realizes that their conceptualization of justice concerning blindness issues is color blind. Indeed, their conversation in the van turns at times to Spanish, as a whale gets oxygen while going through the ocean. Yet, their crucial leadership activities are carried out in English. The color of their skin, their distinctive accent is nothing but a feature, a salient component of their diversity as underrepresented minority bureaucrats for (not with) the blind, not necessarily the Latinx blind as a specific concern of their leadership legacy. In 2015, Arturo was confronted with a similar identitarian organizing dilemma. While trying to design a Latinx blind organizing strategy in a conversational context he had the chance to worked closely for a few months with a female Latinx blind emerging leader. She had recently arrived from Central America. Unlike Arturo, this woman (let us call her Sonia) possessed the logistical and key sociopolitical advantages afforded by her geopolitical birthrights of U.S. citizenship. This was the first and only time Arturo had the opportunity of mentoring informally a female blind Latinx emerging leader. To be sure, Sonia was not perceived at the time as an emerging leader in her immediate circle. She was a member of the National Federation for the Blind (NFB). Importantly, all of this took place in a state considered under dispute for blind organizing purposes. The state was perceived as having historical status as a territory under the control of the American Council of the Blind (ACB). Symbolically, this felt for them as affording that organization certain leadership and agenda-setting privileges. The truth is that Sonia’s arrival at that time was too recent. She had limited community links. Primarily, those links were limited to non-blind Latinx circles made up of immigrants from Central America. Thus, both Arturo and Sonia agreed that the blind Latinx population of the state and the region was too small to try to consolidate a new organization. Therefore, their option was instead to work separately and in parallel within NFB (which would be Sonia’s responsibility) and ACB (which would be the sphere of influence targeted by Arturo). The idea was to keep this parallel development process for one or two years as a tentative incubation strategy. Looking back, Arturo has started to question the assumptions that grounded this determination. Given the unknown proportion of unauthorized blind Latinx populations in the state and region, it could very well be that indeed the opposite is true, namely that there are more blind Latinx folks than originally assumed.
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Perhaps the underlying issue has more to do with the shame/guilt/ignorance of Latinx immigrant families who perceive the presence of blindness in their homes as a curse, something to hide. This, in turn, impacts the visibility and the relational and existential materiality possibilities for these blind Latinx individuals. They would, by definition, lack access to education, employment opportunities, etc., in ways much more dramatic than those faced by the general population of blind folks in the U.S. Despite the money spent for decades on rehabilitation initiatives, their material precarity conditions are already unbearable. They are in many respects not so distant from the precarity conditions observed in global south contexts as reported by Ferrante and Ferreira, among others, in Chapter 6. Tellingly, the U.S. is the only industrialized nation that has not yet ratified CRPD. Pandisability organizing strategies grounded in trans-Latinidad were never examined by Arturo and Sonia. They wrongly assumed that, with the resources afforded by the organizational infrastructures of NFB and ACB, and given these organizations’ need to compete for blind Latinx membership, it made sense to operate within their shadows. There were several problems with this approach. Outreach versus the kind of relational, transitive, and creative transductivity modes of decolonial solidarity I have discussed are very different things. Neither of the two organizations were willing to go beyond an outreach mode of relationality. Moreover, even then, their attitude was neither proactive nor welcoming for blind Latinx. Soon, Arturo would sourly confirm that Sonia’s sense of relational allegiance favored Fátima (who, by the way, holds significant power within NFB’s national infrastructure). Hence, instead of gambling on Arturo’s precarious positionality, although, in theory, as a blind Latinx, Arturo’s plight could eventually become hers in a not-so-distant future, Sonia preferred to bet on what she saw as the “winning” option. This choice is in essence not too different from the one adopted years before by Cirilo. Under such divisive circumstances, Arturo saw no point in continuing with the organizing path he had outlined with Sonia. But here it is necessary to go deeper once again. How does gender play out as a crucial intersectionality component that preempts both race and disability? How are male and female modes of Latinidad differentially emancipatory? Most significantly, how can both of those emancipatory situatedness habitus embodiments be bridged for the sake of pandisability and other decolonial resistance purposes within a broad logic of intersectional subalternities in either global north or global south contexts? Expanding these questions even further, one must include several additional elements. For instance, one must realize that (1) at the level of radical solidarity metatheorizing, (2) in terms of practical dimensions of movement building, and (3) in terms of the political philosophy of intersectional disability agency in action, there is a crucial question. The basic question of why fight encompasses numerous and interesting emancipatory learning lessons for blind Latinx. How could a field like LatDisCrit emerge and have tangible organizing existence when it has never been named as such or envisioned by blind Latinx leaders? Apart
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from the discursive and material enactment of LatDisCrit, how can blind Latinx’s sense of radical solidarity engage meaningfully with other groups of persons of color with and without disabilities? How can they interact with white allies without missing their core perspective as agents in the driving seat of their movement’s destiny? Should one also keep in mind that driving may be too much of an ocularcentric metaphor for the purpose of this movement? What metaphors and approaches should be flexibly considered as appropriate alternatives? Another, often unspoken, dimension of feminist intersectional agency participation within and beyond disability justice movements involves the collaborative, collateral damage they suffer as spouses, mothers, and sisters of people with disabilities. As Rosemarie Garland-Thomson put it almost three decades ago: The notion that someone with a very visible physical disability might “come out” perhaps seems oxymoronic to those for whom the cultural assumptions that structure the normal remain unquestioned. Indeed, pressures to deny, ignore, normalize, and remain silent about one’s own disability are both compelling and seductive in a social order intolerant of deviations from the bodily standards enforced by a quotidian matrix of economic, social, and political forces … Nevertheless, what enabled my own coming out, as well as the more important accompanying scholarly work, was discovering that disability studies is an emergent academic discourse in the social sciences that can be interrogated and infused into recent trends taken in the humanities by cultural studies and literary criticism.13 There is a body of literature that condemns the vicarious consequences experienced by “innocent children”14 due to the corporal punishment exercised against women, especially women of color. Many of them are women with different kinds of neurodiverse experiences and both visible and invisible disabilities.15 Less attention has been given to the examination of the plight of families, friends, and especially spouses and partners of persons with disabilities. They often experience vicarious rejection, something that becomes exacerbated in intersectional spaces of decoloniality such as those where race and disability meet within instances of precarity and marginalization. Kathleen A. King Thorius and Paulo Tan16 offer an interesting exception to the trend of scholarly silence on this subject. Thorius and Tan build on Gloria Ladson-Billings’17 analysis of educational debt. This is a complex construct. It encompasses the historical, economic, sociopolitical, and moral dimensions of debt that have accumulated at the intersection of race and disability. Its multifaceted implications are at the root of many of the modalities of knowledge gap typically invoked to justify the exclusion and the continuous educational as well as socioeconomic marginalization to which these intersectional categories of individuals and groups are subject to in institutionalized settings. Educational debt has reciprocal causality implications in the perpetuation of these gaps. It impacts the tangible expressions of material precarity they engender in the lives of people of color with disabilities in both global north and global south
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contexts. This is not only true with respect to people with disabilities as direct holders of entitlements for the repayment of such historical debt. They also impact in significant ways their families, spouses/partners, and close friends who are often caught up in the spiral of senseless victimization unpaid educational debt precipitates. For instance, when adults with disabilities are unjustly condemned to an endless cycle of under- and unemployment that lasts all the decades of their productive life, the income reduction and the resulting blocked/ missed opportunities impact their families and life partners as much as they do persons with disabilities themselves.18 For persons of color with disabilities, intersectionality compounds the situation. It adds multiple layers of discrimination and microaggressions. These continuous intergenerational dynamics are so pervasive that they eventually acquire epigenetic proportions.19 The same dimensions of educational debt spelled out by Ladson-Billings20 in conjunction with race and class inequities apply to students with disabilities, particularly students of color in the context of “disproportionality” debates. In U.S. educational settings, disproportionality debates address critically the overrepresentation of students of color among those diagnosed with disabilities, questioning their learning and intellectual aptitudes. Yet, in many instances, both in global north and global south contexts, the origin of the discrimination and multiple microaggressions experienced by family members, spouses/partners, and friends of persons with disabilities is much more mundane. For example, it is not uncommon for relational maps and attitudes toward these nondisabled individuals to switch abruptly. This happens as soon as their link to a person with disability is uncovered. Old friends and even family members of nondisabled persons who marry or get engaged to persons with disabilities often show signs of abandonment or flagrant rejection to the prospect of having to relate on a regular basis with a disabled individual. Under these conditions, it becomes clear that some of the metatheoretical ideas offered by critical disability thinkers are not mere speculations or scholarly amusements. Margrit Shildrick, for instance, talks of the intimate relationship that exists between “monster” perceptions of disability as bodily difference and issues of vulnerability. In other words, it is not uncommon for disabilities to engender unconscious modalities of fear that stem from able-bodied individuals’ sense of irrational vulnerability. This leads to rejection of disabled bodies as a whole, which works as a sort of self-defense mechanism of the inner self. I turn to the monster in order to uncover and rethink a relation with the standards of normality that proves to be uncontainable and ultimately unknowable. Although the image of the monster is long familiar in popular culture, from the earliest recorded narrative and plastic representations through to the cyborg figures of the present day and future anticipation, it is in its operation as a concept—the monstrous—that it shows itself to be a deeply disruptive force. My second concept … is that of vulnerability, an existential state that may belong to any one of us, but which is characterized nonetheless as a negative attribute, a failure of self-protection, that opens the
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Jóvenes Progresistas? self to the potential of harm. As such it is, like the notion of the monstrous, largely projected on to the other and held at bay lest it undermine the security of closure and self-sufficiency. The link that I want to make is that we are always and everywhere vulnerable precisely because the monstrous is not only an exteriority. In both cases what is at issue is the permeability of the boundaries that guarantee the normatively embodied self … neither vulnerability nor the monstrous is fully containable within the binary structure of the western logos but signal a transformation of the relation between self and other such that the encounter with the strange is not a discrete event but the constant condition of becoming.21
LatDisCrit in the global south: Triangulating the ideological contours of ableist, racial, and gender/sex-based contractarian frameworks We are at this juncture before an identity triangle. It is one that highlights three contractarian ideologies: ableist, racial, and gender (should I say sex-based or “sexual,” to borrow the language employed years ago by Pateman22) hegemonic contracts of domination. Hegemony unites them. But the way this hegemony works is very telling. For instance, up until Arturo graduated from law school, he did not hear any stories of blind girls having gone to law school, not only from the school he attended but nationally. From the boarding school’s foundation until 1974, it was run by a female. She was not blind, although she was married to a blind man who also taught at the school. For the 1975–1976 academic year, the sociopolitical conditions changed dramatically in ways that would be too extensive to share here. At that point, a new principal was appointed. Once again, it was a sighted female who played that role. Despite this positional power of women, there were not back then special incentives that Arturo was able to identify for outstanding academic performance in the case of girls. Unwritten, symbolically silenced rules of patriarchy probably operated in the opposite direction. Up until 1974, there was a physical separation of boys and girls in the school’s building. Most likely, this separation worked in practice against blind girls’ sense of intersectional disability agency. An illustrative image in Arturo’s memories for that period is represented by the visits of blind alumni to the school. In every instance, these visitors were male. They tried very proactively to play a mentoring role for boys. Arturo benefited a great deal from this intangible relational incentive. Nothing like that was in place for girls. There is another aspect that has important meso and macro relevance. For anybody familiar with Latin America and “charitable” work for persons with disabilities in many parts of the world, the need to underscore for analytical purposes the significance of classism is not a surprise.23 In this respect, Arturo’s school for the blind was exceptional. At the time he attended, it was the only school for the blind in the country that was genuinely free. By this I mean that it was truly without uniform and extraneous requirements that would prevent poor families from registering their children there. As a consequence, the concentration of brown, poor, peasant, blind students at this school was much higher than that of other
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schools for the blind. At that time in Venezuela there were not more than four schools for the blind nationwide. They were all limited to the elementary level of instruction. For blind girls, this kind of educational access was no more than a symbolic consolation prize. Yet, it was meaningful. It is unlikely that most of the blind girls there would have had access to the most basic level of literacy under that context if that boarding school for the blind had not been in existence. After 1975, the number of students at the school for the blind increased. However, during the time that Arturo was there, the proportion of blind girls was never higher than a third of the number of boys registered and active. It must be stressed that the ableist materiality of the sexual contract is by no means exclusively a global south phenomenon. Especially for blind girls of color, the proportional distribution of resources and opportunities is, from what Arturo can tell, not fair at all. The evidence on college graduation rates for people with disabilities is not readily available. However, in a recent presentation, it was reported that among teachers, a profession dominated by white women, the most recent statistics were that only 3.6% admitted their identity as persons with disabilities. This, despite an estimate that at least 21% of individuals in the U.S. have some sort of disability, i.e., more than 60 million people. Assuming that the majority of those represented in this percentage are women, one can try to pinpoint the map of material possibilities awaiting a girl with disabilities in the global north. Yet, if one adds to the equation racial contract exclusion considerations, can anybody ascertain the extent to which girls of color with disabilities experience material and other instances of disparity? There are symbolic violence dynamics at work as well. While living in Maracaibo, Venezuela’s second largest city back in the early 1980s, Arturo had a blind female piano professor. Let us call her Guillermina. Her musical and didactic skills were extraordinary. To Arturo’s knowledge, there was no other blind person in Venezuela at the time with as much conservatory advanced-level training (which included several years of conservatory training in London). There was another blind female piano performer that everybody kept bringing to Arturo’s attention as the ideal role model those days; let us call her Gabriela. Gabriela was charismatic. She was perceived by sighted folks as very independent. Guillermina was secluded by choice, rather shy, sweet tempered, and truly humble in her demeanor. Guillermina never used a white cane, did not like to go outdoors unaccompanied, and thus was perceived as dependent and frightened. But how could Guillermina’s case be read as an interdependence failure? How could her outstanding talent, long-term discipline, determination, and hard work be ignored in the name of blind independence? Guillermina is no longer alive. Apparently, her family’s greed had a lot to do with her ultimate fate. The unfolding of this story is so obscure that Arturo prefers to keep it tied to question marks. Arturo does not know what happened with Gabriela. Yet, Arturo is almost certain that if he asks, several people would remember her and her aura of apparent success. Very few people knew about Guillermina, even when she was still active. These material enactments underscore how discursive constructs engender
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deceitful shadows of reality unfolding. They literally engender embodied modes of becoming very much in line with Merton’s self-fulfilling prophecy as mentioned in Chapter 6. To what extent could it be possible for the blind Latinx Guillerminas out there to earn respect and validation for their leadership style and their heterodox role-modeling approaches? To what extent will blind movements in the global north and in the global south embrace multiple forms of intersectional decoloniality and cultural materiality? How can they learn to transcend traditionalist conceptions of leadership and performativity? Unknowingly, yet often in ways that seem intentional, these conceptions align very explicitly with ableist ideological frames under material performativities associated with the discursive, often deceitful and alienating, umbrella of independence. For example, talking about female role models, when Arturo looks back at his experiences growing up blind, he does not remember anything mentioned by anybody concerning Helen Keller. She was invisible in his world. It was not so much the kind of invisibility that neglects. It was a sort of reverential, rather mythical silence. It was something like the silence of the untouchable, the unreachable. To use a nonfeminine ableist trope, it was more like Superman with his white-guy superpowers from another planet. Helen Keller was present in movies, in the world of white Americans. Thus, nobody in Arturo’s world ever had the temptation of naming her as a role model for him, a brown guy from the barrio. After all she was a girl, right? Plus, she was white, college educated, etc. Those were features not necessarily expected of him or folks like him (whatever that means in the complex hierarchical arrangements of global south relationality reserved for lower-class people of color with “sensorial” disabilities).
Decolonizing intersectional disability movement building: Notes on the discursive materiality of organizational alienation as separatist identity constructions Once again, looking at blindness as the social/relational expression of an embodied impairment might provide a helpful illustration. The first thing that one notices is that, unlike other modalities of physical and mental disabilities, blindness does not necessarily entail the endurance of chronic pain. A lot of what gets identified as implicit between the lines in the very idea of independence as expressed by blind organizational voices and outreach documents is precisely this painless “proximity” to able-bodied “normality.” Hence, Arturo reflects upon the hermeneutic paradox that emerges here. National Federation for the Blind actors claim in their banquets that blindness is not a “disability” but rather a mere feature of one’s unique sense of difference. In doing so, they are also creating a sort of objective distanciation, a possible source of alienation from other disabled conglomerates. The experience of blindness thus gets bracketed, so to speak, with respect to so-called “true” disability, that is, painful, limiting, dependent forms of embodiment. Arturo has never heard this implicit
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comparison verbalized with specific cases of true disabilities. However, he has never heard anybody claim in these meetings that disability as a whole is a myth. It is a territory of conjecture, a sort of analogical exercise of meta-reading, metaperception, or meta-interpretation. Arturo recalls a comment made by one of NFB’s national leaders24 to the effect that NFB does not favor the frequent profiling of Helen Keller as a role model while ACB does. Assuming that this could be subject to empirical measurement via systematic comparison and/or content analysis of relevant policies and online documents, what sort of phenomenologically relevant organizational implications could this differentiation have? What is it about Keller’s deaf/blind embodiment that reciprocally causes and gets impacted by such profiling? In terms of outreach and conceptual messaging, e.g., with respect to values/belief systems such as those aligned with interdependence versus independence, what are the consequences of the resulting role-modeling differences between these two blind membership organizations? The ACB’s membership is indeed older. Perhaps, at least discursively speaking, friendlier to aging issues. However, could this be attributed to this kind of selective messaging as an imprint of ACB’s organizational culture? Is it instead possible that the opposite sequence is at work, namely, that the messaging has resulted from the kind of blind membership that has been recruited over the years? It was recently brought to my attention that Helen Keller’s story is part of a hybrid list selected in a preliminary vote by the Texas Education Board to be excluded from the curriculum set for the learning adventures of Texan children in years to come.25 This makes me wonder how is it possible that Keller’s radical affiliation with emancipatory movements has been noted and selected for attack by conservative forces but not as an intersectional leadership role model by important segments of the organized blind movement? To what extent does Keller’s sense of interdependence or perceived “dependency” from others as a deaf/blind radical agent and leader26 justify not looking at her as a desirable role model? Could it be possible that her embodiment of “severe” disabilities and the relational ethos of a woman of her time threaten patriarchal blind leadership? Could it be that her embodied ethos, her embodied ways of knowing and being, her alternative embodied disability politics threaten organizational culture styles not so prone to promoting mechanisms for power alternation within the blind movement? Could it be that this reveals a specific kind of organizational inability to adapt its movement building strategies to the identitarian vicissitudes and possibilitarian spaces opened within twenty-first-century global realities of intersectional subalternities? As can be seen, the range of practical, metatheoretical, and research questions opened up by this critical identitarian line of inquiry are very valuable for purposes of intersectional disability justice activism and movement-building considerations. What if one adds to the mix the layers of pain and race-based microaggression experienced by Latinx embodiment inside these global north membership organizations of the blind? What if one muddies the theoretical
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waters a bit further? What about matters of decoloniality? I am certain that by adding these issues the spectrum of thick signification would be even richer. For instance, a core concept of relevance in this regard is the notion of dysappearance.27 Dys-appearance entails the realization that in everyday life our experience involves “the disappearance of our body from awareness … the ‘body not only projects outward in experience but falls back into unexperienceable depths …’ However, this customary mode tends to be profoundly disrupted in the context of factors such as pain and disease.”28 First, one needs to recognize that pain exacerbates our perceptual consciousness of our body. Second, and most importantly, this perceptual realm of pain or impairment is by no means limited to the physical domain. It encompasses relational dimensions. They are such that they lead to the configuration of political subjectivities around the existential materiality of impairment’s specific links with oppression, precarity, etc. Therefore, it is incorrect to assume that there is nothing that one can do about the pain of impairment,29 as traditional social model proponents claim. This is understood as meaning that disablement’s social oppression dimensions should be the sole target of disabled movements’ collective action. Adopting this position ignores the intrinsic social nature of pain and impairment. In turn, this means missing a crucial opportunity for disability justice and metatheoretical interventions centered on the dimensions of embodiment that make disability as interdependence a unique emancipatory learning and radical agency space. Therefore, the proto-feminist intersectionality and radical solidarity attempts of an interdependent role model like Helen Keller can offer an excellent learning incubation mirror. Her fragility as a deaf/blind leader, her attempts at transcending disability to tap into the workers’ movements of her time, all of it should suffice. But Arturo has experienced firsthand how deaf/blind folks are treated as a lower caste. They do not hold prominent leadership positions among the organized blind movement and rehabilitation processes currently in existence in the U.S. and elsewhere in the global north. The excuse of severe intersectional layers of disability is often invoked. Education and other services for deaf/blind are extremely secluded. They are seen as not belonging to the realms reserved to either schools for the blind or schools for the deaf. If they qualify, deaf/blind children can be placed in the highly selective Helen Keller Center located in New York or one of its satellite regional coordination teams. A Latinx rehabilitation counselor told Arturo several years ago the story of one of her transition-age cases. This was a Latinx deaf/blind female who, despite many challenges, had achieved excellent academic results up to middle school (the logistics of this exceptional success were not revealed). The Latinx rehabilitation counselor tried to place this student in the Texas regional center but “socio-emotional” complications were used to justify the rejection of this student. As usual, I have to wonder if the Latinx identitarian profile of this female deaf/blind student played a role in the journey that ultimately resulted in such a negative determination. Also, while working with the state’s rehabilitation agency in his jurisdiction, Arturo had the opportunity to design and pilot a leadership development curriculum specifically targeted at deaf/blind adults.
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Despite the withdrawal of American sign language (ASL) supports and the eventual elimination of funds for the pilot, Arturo continued working with a cohort of about five deaf/blind individuals for an intermittent period that lasted about two years. This afforded Arturo firsthand knowledge of the outstanding leadership skills present among segments of this population. This issue of leadership development is a feature especially salient for them, given the complete isolation of their work from so-called “hearing blinds.” This is the name with which many American Sign Language (ASL)-proficient deaf/blind designate the bulk of persons with visual impairments such as Arturo. In turn, this also highlights an aura of relational distance on their part that could very well bring to mind the structural rigidity of caste systems even for certain deaf/blind individuals who become proficient in the use of braille, white cane, and so forth. There was one of these individuals in the leadership development cohort who stood out for Arturo. Let us call her Camille. Camille was a white, college-educated deaf/blind female in her fifties. Camille had created her own non-profit. She had a system in place for the training of certified social support persons (SSPs). Social support persons epitomize the notion of interdependence. They help with tactile ASL interpreting and other supports specific to deaf/blind individuals’ needs. For some, however, who look at these issues from the distance of their narrow conceptions of dependency in the blind movement, SSPs would simply be an example of how much these deaf/blind people need “proper training,” the kind of training that insures independence for all blind categories.30 Arturo’s critical look at the radical solidarity potential of SSPs is different. The SSP model, especially in the versions that emphasize critical disability approaches, such as the ones used in Canada, illustrate quite well the application of radical transformation ideas around disability as multitude. Mitchell and Snyder’s31 idea of disability as multitude builds on Hardt and Negri’s conceptualizations of empire, common wealth, and multitude.32 The transposition of this idea of multitude criticizes traditional Marxist conceptualizations of people with disabilities. It sees them as “surplus labor,” that is, masses of nonproductive labor power, “unemployable” segments of active population whose “parasite” economic ethos is evident in the extremely high percentage of unemployed and underemployed persons in the ranks of disability categories across the board. Mitchell and Snyder’s alternative is to rely on Hardt and Negri’s multifaceted definition of multitude. This involves a duality of factors: (1) “affective labor” networks that play into late capitalism’s transformational sense of productive becoming through eclectic, cross-movement identities and (2) social and community sites for resistance incubation and political subjectivity. Camille’s dream, and that of many deaf/blind activists and self-advocates, is to access tax-paying resources for the funding of standard services for deaf/blind populations such as those afforded with the help of SSPs throughout the nation. A similar model is already in use throughout several states for children and some adults with socio-emotional, developmental, and intellectual disabilities. An apparent weakness of deaf/blind segments is their relatively low number, compared to the categories currently funded through tax-paying resources. However,
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in terms of relational, transitive, and creative transductivity modes of decolonial solidarity, this low number could be used as an opportunity to experiment with various forms of cross-movement network building. The emerging networking mechanisms could target multiple layers of interlocking issues. They could even serve to transcend typical conceptions of material precarity divide between global north and global south contexts for purposes of emancipatory resistance and social entrepreneurial organizing. If this experimentation proves successful, it could provide emancipatory learning grounds for replicating some of its features in the organizing of blind Latinx cross-movement types of identitarian and material precarity pursuits. Although grounded in race-based and intersectional modes of coloniality, some of the caste-like, structural rigidity features of hierarchization and isolation observed for deaf/blind populations are also present in the plight of blind Latinx. Cross-pollinating relevant organizing experiences might prove reciprocally edifying. At a minimum, this cross-pollination has the virtue of bringing together conglomerates of oppressed agents typically isolated from one another. On the other hand, in the case of Latinx deaf/blind segments, the experimental nature of these efforts should model strategies for an intersectional approximation to identitarian modes of decolonial solidarity. With the changing demographics of trans-Latinidades in U.S. contexts, the configuration of Latinx deaf/blind ranks is likely to expand significantly in upcoming decades. Getting ready for the necessary paradigm shift in movement-building approaches must start now.
Notes 1 On this, see Foucault (1996, 2008). 2 Ferreira (2020: p. 408, my translation). See also Foucault (1996, pp. 150–153). 3 Ferreira (2020: pp. 411–12, my translation). See also Alonso (1999); Bilbao (1999); Castells (1996); Foucault (2008); Sayer (1999); Sennett (2000). 4 Ferreira (2020: pp. 413–414, my translation). See also Barnes (2010); Ferrante and Ferreira (2010). 5 See, for instance, Bergson (1998, 2006) for the sort of philosophical paradigms I have in mind here. 6 Ferreira (2020: pp. 415–16, my translation). 7 Allende’s (1988) aesthetical rendition of these dimensions in her famous novel Eva Luna is an interesting depiction of the dynamics behind such a patriarchalist type of leftist way of conducting politics in those years. 8 As Michels stresses in his classic (1915) “Iron Law of Oligarchy” thesis and analysis. 9 Freire (1999: p. 49). 10 Gaztambide-Fernández (2012: p. 54). 11 See Rorty (1989); see also Razack (1998, 2007). 12 Gaztambide-Fernández (2012: p. 55). 13 Garland-Thomson (1996: pp. xviii–xix). 14 My quotation marks in this case do not object to this axiological sense of innocence but rather to the strategic overuse of its nonsensical connotations, to the point of risking desensitizing the very audiences they try to target. 15 On this, see Meiners (2007, 2016). 16 Thorius and Tan (2016). 17 See Ladson-Billings (2006).
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18 See Artiles (2013); Brantlinger (2006); Reid and Knight (2006); Reid and Valle (2004); Yell, Rogers, and Lodge-Rodgers (1998). 19 See Squier (2017); Wallace (2017). 20 See Ladson-Billings (2006). 21 Shildrick (2002: p. 2). 22 See Pateman (1988, 2002). 23 See, e.g., Liu (2011). As a matter of contrast, see Pomerleau’s (2013) book-size analysis of Califia Community in southern California as a grassroots example of the struggle against the sexual contract in the U.S. 1970s context, although this example was not directly associated with disability issues. 24 Kane Brolyn (private communication with the author, April 23, 2018). 25 Honolulu Star (2018). 26 See, e.g., Keller (2003). 27 See Paterson and Hughes (1999). They borrow this concept from Leder (1990, see especially p. 53). 28 Paterson and Hughes (1999: p. 602). 29 See Crow (1996). 30 Importantly, it is worth mentioning that the infrastructure for these mandatory trainings is suspiciously under the organizational control of the same advocates who lobby for state sponsoring funds for most blind consumers to be sent there. Furthermore, one needs to realize that this option, de facto, is typically not available for “severely impaired” categories of deaf/blind individuals anyway. 31 See Mitchell and Snyder (2010). 32 See Hardt and Negri (2000, 2005, 2009).
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A postcolonial LatDisCrit leadership Development counterstory: Diving into global north contours of subalternities and intersectional disability agency
Introduction: The intersectional subalternity of embodiment Within the possibilitarian threads of the book, this chapter, in its overall critical outlook, is less optimistic, unhopefully hopeful, to use language remotely analogous to that used by Joseph Winters1 in the context of black political theology studies. The chapter is set specifically within the radical exteriority and decolonial solidarity confines of a global north context. Its emancipatory and transgressive interrogations are solidly anchored on disability justice organizing dynamics. It is an embodied theoretical social action and critical hermeneutics exercise. It looks at the multilayered contours of intersectional subalternity bridging. It aims at identifying and addressing very concrete corrective needs made visible through Arturo’s macropolitical and existential sources of material precarity and exclusionary marginalization. In that sense, these needs are part of a given transductive creativity habitus. At the same time, they represent aspirational pandisability and decolonial solidarity musings that explore the embodied value of notions such as radical solidarity and global south epistemologies in concrete actionable ways. As such, they are relevant to both various modes of activism and intersectional disability agency theorizing. This theorizing explicitly invokes transmodern, decolonial, and subaltern modes of multiple knowledge formulation, distribution, and implementation as tangible expressions of emancipatory situatedness, resistance, transgressiveness, and struggle. Reading the preceding chapter, it seems that I am unaware of positive organizational intersectional disability justice efforts in the global north, and most specifically in the U.S. I am aware, for instance, of the intersectional pandisability trans-Latinx work currently undertaken by the National Coalition for Latinxs with Disabilities (NCLD).2 However, the experiential dimensions of intersectional disability agency in this book are filtered through encounters and dis/encounters to which Arturo has been exposed in both global south and global north contexts. Furthermore, as Ibram X. Kendi makes clear in one of his recent books,3 it is by no means the same to be nonracist as to be anti-racist. By the same token, it is by no means the same to be non-ableist versus being anti-ableist. This is one of those things that despite being seemingly self-explanatory tends to be forgotten, DOI: 10.4324/9781003084150-8
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misread, or ignored by way too many folks. Not only this, in terms of decolonial intersectional subaltern modes of emancipatory agency and solidarity, it is paramount for disability organizations in the global north and in the global south to be at once decolonial, anti-ableist, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, antipatriarchalist, and anti-racist. This pertains especially to transmodern intersectional subaltern identitarian conglomerates such as those of trans-Latinx diasporic populations. On the other hand, beyond placing the blame/shame on organizations that by no means should be confused with the ontological seeds of intersectional disability justice movements, the target in the present chapter and throughout the volume is on double-, perhaps even triple-consciousness formation, very much in line with what I said in Chapter 3 when commenting on Du Bois’s metatheoretical and activism legacies. In other words, the task at hand involves undoing alienating practices and modes of relationality. Thus, this is the hermeneutical reading provided by the forgoing counterstory and discussions. They must be read as existential and analytical ways to both explain and understand LatDisCrit as a space where a new generation of intersectional disabled Latinx leaders stop being mere Sancho Panza (Don Quixote’s shield holder and attendant) followers of white supremacy, colonialist modes of organizing, or, what is even worse, mercenary expressions of an alienating identitarian stance that affects both themselves and other trans-Latinx folks in their rank and file.
Diasporic global south agency bifurcations: Interrogating organizational modes of alienation as expressions of radical exteriority in the global north, part 1 We are now fast-forwarding to 1991. Arturo is conversing with Cirilo. Cirilo is another blind Latinx from South America. Cirilo is telling Arturo how his blind friend, a prominent white blind leader in the state’s blind bureaucracy and the national organized movement of the blind in the U.S., is helping him to secure a scholarship and a position in the agency that he directs. Cirilo has just come back from the national convention and is impressed with the rhetoric and persuasive power of the leader. A couple of years earlier Arturo had attended the convention and had been part of the membership of their state’s chapter for a year or two. However, the main take-away Arturo had gotten from that experience was how Latinx individuals were invisible in major leadership positions at the national level and, despite their numerical significance in the state, held positions that were subsidiary to those of white blind leaders. Arturo could not understand that a single person could hold the leading role in an organization for decades. Hence, he asks Cirilo his feelings about that: “Well, I don’t see anything wrong with it,” Cirilo says with a smile. “If a leader is good, why should he be removed?” Most likely, the prospect of even talking about female leadership roles in the blind movement was something never present in Cirilo’s thoughts up to that point. Thus, the conversation, which was held in Spanish, alluded exclusively to male leadership figures (a fact reinforced by
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the conspicuous absence of present-day female leadership figures in the organization they were talking about). Cirilo had arrived from Latin America about a year after Arturo. At the time, Cirilo was an undergraduate. As I mentioned in Chapter 6, decades later Cirilo would declare to media in his home country that he had never received any help when he arrived. Arturo’s recollection is quite the contrary. As a matter of fact, Cirilo made a long-standing and successful career in blind-related bureaucracies thanks to his direct ties with key white leadership. Arturo remembers that the core message from Cirilo that day had been to remind him that there was no point in making waves; that taking the side of hegemonic leadership was a much more desirable approach for them as foreigners. Arturo’s heart was filled with sadness. Somehow, he felt he should be a sort of de facto mentor for this undergraduate blind friend. However, it was clear that Cirilo’s fate was already inalterable at that point. His course was set. Success (measured in terms of material stability) was his driving ambition, and nothing would deter him from such a fixed journey. The emancipatory learning questions that arise from this counterstory are fundamentally concerned with radical solidarity possibilities. What kind of radical solidarity should be built among blind Latinx like Arturo and Cirilo? In terms of relational leadership and in terms of the relational modes of decolonial solidarity concerns discussed by Gaztambide-Fernandez, how do Arturo and Cirilo’s selves act as a mirror to one another? How does their reciprocal sense of alterity feeds into their own sense of identity? How can these distinctive identities collaborate in a common solidarity quest that gets anchored in a profound sense of transitivity and creative co-transformation?
LatDisCrit and Sancho Panza modes of coloniality: Interrogating organizational modes of alienation as expressions of radical exteriority in the global north, part 2 This portion of the counterstory shows Arturo in the back seat of a van. It is 2015. Van riders are going to a one-day workshop hosted by a public university on blindness issues. Arturo is going to present on braille literacy initiatives. With the exception of the driver, all of the persons inside the van are blind. Three of them are male and Latinx, including Arturo; one is a white female (the driver is also white). The round-trip that day involves more than six hours. Since, with the exception of Arturo, all of the persons in the van can be said to constitute established leaders of the blind movement, this snapshot is a showcase of collective concerns and ways to interrogate the unfolding of organized trans-Latinx expressions of subaltern intersectionality. Blind Latinx are a minority among minorities in the state where the workshop takes place. Hence, it is somewhat understandable that nothing in the conversational back-and-forth set of dynamics profiles the fate of blind Latinx within the state agency whose leadership was most represented on this trip. There is something that should be clarified at this point. One of the issues causing the underrepresentation of blind Latinx as service seekers in this
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particular state jurisdiction derives from specific policies set up to exclude unauthorized migrant Latinx from services. Including in a proactive way those marginalized populations would certainly change the demographic representation of blind Latinx in this and other states, not to mention the collateral effects of these policies on prospective blind Latinx who would qualify under existing policies but who are led to believe that they are not welcome or worthy of such “privileges” and human capital investments. However, blind Latinx are a majority among blind populations in the state where two of the blind leaders come from. The policy in that other state jurisdiction is theoretically more inclusive of unauthorized blind immigrants. On the other hand, these two blind Latinx leaders are long-time friends. They attended together the same blind school in the 1960s. Not surprisingly, many of their anecdotes surround matters related to the high school. There is another thing that strikes Arturo at that point. Arturo realizes all of a sudden that nothing in their conversation reflects a vision or a desire to consolidate a specific change-making agenda that targets blind Latinx in that state or nationwide. How could such obliviousness be justified? Would it be possible that in this case positional and relational leadership do not go hand in hand? Could it be that the “iron law of oligarchy” thesis has permeated the lives of these blind Latinx leaders to the point of desensitizing them with respect to the urgency of a solid blind Latinx agenda? As far as the blind Latinx rank and file is concerned, what would be necessary for them to become bottom-up intersectional disability agents who shape the content of such an agenda, despite the apathy and obliviousness of their leaders? What kinds of relational and creative transductivity modes of decolonial solidarity would be necessary to propel such bottom-up movement? There is a non-agentic stance that ties these Latinx blind identities to neocolonial modes of what they perhaps perceive as transgressive organized solidarity. As such, it is paramount to think critically of certain features of solipsistic alienation. These modes of alienation originate in mainstream disability organizational leadership styles. They are in several respects associated with what Meyers and other thinkers and researchers call NGO-ization.4 These are modes of leadership alienation that operate as pseudo-transgressiveness. They constitute stumbling blocks to emancipatory and resistance efforts.
Concluding critical notes on LatDisCrit, the racial/ableist contracts and collective agency Enacting truly transgressive and resistance efforts such as those suggested in the preceding section, making them reality, involves placing decolonial intersectional subalternity at the core of disability justice and pandisability modes of activism, collective agency, and interdisciplinary theorizing. Keeping in mind the definition of radical agency I employed in Chapter 1, namely, in terms of nonlinear trajectories, one of the lessons to be extrapolated is that one’s amount of formal education does not insure any particular inclination toward emancipatory endeavors. This is so for persons with or without disabilities as well as those
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under the situational exclusionary confines of both sex-based and racial contracts. For example, none of the male or female students who coincided with Arturo during the years he spent at the boarding school for the blind completed college, unless they have done it during the twenty-first century while Arturo has been outside Venezuela. Something similar could be said about radical solidarity. The propensity to link with others for grassroot social movement building in emancipatory learning pursuits is not directly proportional to one’s formal instruction. Another similar example may be instructive here. Although the cohorts of blind students prior to Arturo’s time in the boarding school had a higher rate of college completion, their organized efforts were never galvanized in a movement or concretize in a small organization for the blind that could carry out collective agendas. Thus, their “success” was individualistic and fragmentary. Therefore, it is important to conclude this chapter by considering a different kind of counterstory. It is one that at first glance may indicate complete lack of agency. I have in mind Asdrúbal’s global south predicaments as outlined in the following narrative passage, which takes us once again to Arturo’s youth. Asdrúbal walks into the classroom. His thick glasses precede him as a banner. He is here to see Arturo. Arturo has no idea. He does not know that this kid from the boarding school where both had spent years of their lives as institutionalized blind children has come to talk with him. It is not even Asdrúbal’s idea. Somebody with teaching power has decided that this blind guy needs to see a “successful” blind student. That somehow this will set things straight for Asdrúbal. Asdrúbal’s academic performance is way below what these educators had expected. Their expectations are based on what they had seen from Arturo, a long-time student at that same high school. Worse for Asdrúbal, he, unlike Arturo, has some residual vision. Somehow, this engenders harsher, less forgiving expectations. Teaching bureaucrats blame Asdrúbal for his “failure.” No amount of explanation attempts from Arturo (or anybody else for that matter) can tame or dissuade them. The setting does not matter too much. For the sake of analysis, let us say it is a global south, working-class, brown geopolitical segment in the Americas. The year is 1979. For some reason, when Arturo tries to remember the content of this conversation nothing specific comes to mind. Arturo merely remembers a sensation, a repulsive sense of injustice. He was not yet 14. Nevertheless, the nonsensical nature of that forced encounter was plain for him at that moment. Arturo suddenly wonders, if inclusion is not tied to emancipation, how can it be relevant to peoples with disabilities in an existential materiality sense? Here is a paradox. As it gets enacted by institutions in the global north and in the global south alike, inclusion, by its discursive, structural, and material connotations, stifles emancipatory agency. There is no inclusion without concomitant exclusion. This is particularly true in intersectional bureaucratic contexts of domination.5 In these contexts, the layers of inclusivity are tied to intersectional power asymmetries. They make inclusion less and less “enabling” through the hegemonic agency concessions it entails. Hence, it is
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helpful to link the conversation to Charles Mills’ conceptualization of the racial contract.6 If one talks about inclusion and disability issues, why should one dive into the examination of something apparently so unrelated as the racial contract? Considering that Mills premises his racial contract framework on the exclusionary epistemology and politics of white supremacy, the association is not unfounded. Many of the moral and naturalistic claims inherent to the white supremacist social contract are replicable as justifications for ableist policies and practices. This is particularly so in multiracial, intersectional contexts of domination. Mills’ framework makes the paradox of inclusivity as an exclusionary ontology and epistemology understandable. Through it, exclusionary ideologies become more likely to be deconstructed, challenged, and addressed for the pursuit of emancipatory transformations. Mills’ analogy of the racial contract exposes white supremacy. It demonstrates that the philosophical basis of the classical sociopolitical and moral ethos of the social contract in authors such as Hobbes,7 Kant,8 Locke,9 and Rousseau10 is very much analogous to the structural issues of patriarchy that radical feminist thinkers had denounced in the 1980s. These radical feminist thinkers exposed a preexisting sexual contract for the perpetuation of male domination.11 Yet, there is still another question that rings in Arturo’s heart. If the racial contract is a dystopia, an ideological entrapment, how would transracial modes of radical solidarity be possible? In many respects, the core task of the present chapter is to tackle this emancipation conundrum. For Mills, Rousseau’s discussion of inequality makes the paradox of the racial contract perhaps clearer than any of the other contractarian theorists. Rousseau justifies the social contract as a naturalist expression of the primordial sense of equality of humans.12 Meanwhile, he rejects the technological and governmental mechanisms that transform this into artificial modes of hierarchy and social exclusion. Ontologically, the contract presupposes that only white Europeans have the personhood attributes necessary to be signatories. Nonwhites are the object, not subjects of the contract.13 “The establishment of society … requires the intervention of white men, who are thereby positioned as already sociopolitical beings. White men … encounter nonwhites … who are savage residents of a state of nature.”14 Back to Asdrúbal’s and Arturo’s forced encounter, one needs to realize that, in similar ways to the racial contract, the ableist ontology objectifies people with disabilities. This often happens in an intersectional interplay with the very terms of the racial contract described by Mills.15 The layers of domination/exploitation also create multiracial modes of hierarchy justification within disability organizations, ways of knowing/ignoring, and so forth. Therefore, the more one complies as a nonwhite or “disabled” person or collectivity with the terms of the contract for inclusion’s sake, the more one perpetuates the exclusionary epistemology, axiology, and political ethos that sustains its unjust paradigm. Think for a moment about disability rights. Imagine a global south context where inclusivity legislation has not been enacted. This is precisely the sociolegal context that corresponds to what Asdrúbal and Arturo faced back in
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Venezuela in 1979. Would that context be necessarily more unjust than a context where the contractarian rules of legally imposed inclusivity are in full swing? The ideological sources that sustain the hierarchical power of ableism do not differ so much in both contexts. Therefore, the comparison is more about what unites them instead of what separates them. I am not saying that all the struggles to bring about disability rights at a global scale are pointless. However, and this is also paradoxical, the most genuine transformational power resides in the radical solidarity spaces that this long struggle has engendered for peoples with disabilities all over the world. It has been an existential kind of emancipatory struggle. It has come about with the concomitant realization that there is as much precarity in the global north as in the global south. Of course, the intersubjective dimensions of relative deprivation in terms of per capita wealth and anthropological characteristics complicate this conversation.16 Precarity does not go away magically with the enactment of inclusive legislation. Often, the roots of precarity are legislative in nature. It is true that Asdrúbal’s and Arturo’s forced encounter takes place incidentally in a schooling setting. Despite this, I privilege the trajectories followed by these individuals. Both are divergent manifestations of equally legitimate radical agency possibilities within the parameters of diasporic global south contexts. Asdrúbal and Arturo in their allegorical trajectories illustrate how contextual emancipation could work in the face of exclusionary modes of inclusion and their domination mandate. Asdrúbal plays for me a core allegorical role. Asdrúbal represents at once the malice of social exclusion and the global positionality of peripheral global south decolonial subalternities.17 Asdrúbal eventually drops out of high school. He stops meeting with Arturo or anybody who might remotely link him with an organized counter-narrative of “successful” social inclusion. Asdrúbal is literally pushed away. His existence continuously moves toward the ineluctable destiny of destitute materiality, to the “non-plus-ultra” of exclusionary realities. Arturo holds in his soul a vague lasting remembrance that Asdrúbal was selling lottery tickets outside the legally prescribed distribution networks. Here and there, he was simply engaging in multiple forms of informal economy underemployment. He kept doing so, going through the motions that take people nowhere, both materially and beyond. He kept living under the threshold of decency and survival, without getting to meet his basic needs. Somebody said that Asdrúbal had started drinking more than he should. He was becoming a de facto homeless, an addition to the demolishing dehumanizing statistics of his peripheral nation-state. No wonder Asdrúbal became so hopeless, angry, selfdefeated. Asdrúbal epitomizes social exclusion. Of course, given the extent of today’s dramatic humanitarian crisis in Venezuela, the meaning of this extreme social exclusion acquires terrible connotations. Babies are dying for lack of basic medical services. Absence of food and even minor supplies are an integral part of everyday survival struggles for Venezuelans of all races and class strata. Hyperinflation remains rampant. Working folks are simply unable to survive. A
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massive exodus is under way that is likely to change forever the demographic and proto-institutional face of the country.18 It is impossible to imagine what could be the fate of lumpen proletariat individuals with disabilities under such circumstances. Where could Asdrúbal go? What means would allow him to survive? Would it be unreasonable to imagine that Asdrúbal has passed away? Could he be another unnoticed, anonymous, hidden number among the thousands of victims of this pseudo-revolution with its nonsensical race to get nowhere under the additional constraints imposed by the COVID pandemic? Arturo’s fate is not necessarily better. His plight is allegorical as well. He symbolizes the migrating nonwhite disabled in the age of disposable/diasporas of twenty-first-century globalization. Though seemingly more integrated by ableist and racial contract standards than someone like Asdrúbal, Arturo’s archetype remains at the margins of social “inclusion.” Could perhaps this limbo state be best called exclusionary social inclusion or pseudo-inclusionary exclusion? Still, it is worth wondering, could Asdrúbal have cultivated paths toward radical agency and radical solidarity? What kind of factors would have stirred him up in that direction? Both Arturo and Asdrúbal were subject to the racial contract. Both experienced the oppressive chains of ableism as brown male blind individuals in the same global south environment and during the same regulatory framework. Both were contemporary students of the same total institution, although it must be clarified here that due to his evolving visual impairments, Asdrúbal did not experience his entire elementary instruction at the boarding school, as was the case with Arturo. Asdrúbal’s visual impairment was probably detected while he was attending a rural elementary school. Thus, Asdrúbal only spent two years or so getting exposed to instruction specific to the blind. Arturo does not even remember if Asdrúbal was proficient in braille. Identity-wise, this must have had an important differentiating effect. Yet, how could one know if this was a crucial factor as far as radical agency is concerned? This is probably a good context to end by talking about the ontology of new materialisms in connection to agency, which creates a bridge between this and the next chapter. The question of how much freedom one possesses to act in the world was indeed one of the elements that inspired Marxian conceptions of historical and dialectical materialism.19 When talking about new materialisms, thinkers such as Coole and Frost20 underscore the need to transcend the limitations of these old materialisms that, ontologically, were dualist in nature. They were dualist because their sense of economistic and even cultural21 materiality was aligned with evolutionary, teleology-centered, primarily linear modes of idealism. This idealism preempted historical and humanist conceptions of individual and collective action, undermining its ontological sense of materiality. There are two relevant criteria associated with this: (1) the monist understanding of material causality and (2) “the significance of corporeality.” As a way to link materialism and intersectional disability agency, one needs to realize that rather than thinking of agency exclusively in terms of one’s freedom to act in the world (especially thinking of freedom as a subjective realm of the
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immaterial world invented by idealist dualisms), it is more productive to think of it as a journey, as a process. Embodied intersectional disability agency involves a nonlinear trajectory toward the exploration of one’s freedom within emancipatory learning spaces. These spaces might be circumscribed, oppressive, apparently empty of any hint of agency-like political subjectivities. In their exploratory, intrinsic contingency, they are always filled with agency prospects in the materiality of their utopian potential. In this sense, agency is always within one’s reach in the realm of potentiality, of mystery, of the miraculous stubbornness that keeps alive hope’s revolutionary flame. Back in Chapter 3 I spoke of Ezequiel. Ezequiel’s relational embodiment reminds us that (1) radical agents are not born but made; (2) their making takes place over time in alignment with collective endeavors of subaltern critical existence that materialize their political subjectivities in relational processes of radical solidarity and emancipatory learning with other oppressed agents; and (3) their making, remaking, and even their unmaking is by no means autonomous. They are influenced (although not driven) by complex identity negotiations between oppressors and their oppressed. Often, the nature of these “negotiations” is non-intentional. This sounds like a contradiction in terms because of the anthropocentric, voluntarist set of preconceptions inherited from idealist dualisms.
Notes 1 See Winters (2016, especially chs. 2 and 5). 2 For book-size discussions of broad intersectional disability justice modes of organizing, see, e.g., Nguyen (2015); Piepzna-Samarasinha (2018). See also Malhotra (2017) and Obourn (2020) for interesting metatheoretical treatments of these dimensions of subaltern intersectionality. 3 See Kendi (2019). 4 See, e.g., Bob (2005); Choudry (2008, 2010a, 2010b, 2011, 2012); Choudry and Shragge (2011); Meyers (2016, 2019b); Nelson and Dorsey (2008); Nguyen (2015); Phillips (2009). 5 See Ahmed (2012); Iverson (2012); Niemann (1999). 6 See Mills (1997). 7 See Hobbes (1991). 8 See Kant (1991). 9 See Locke (1988). 10 See Rousseau (1968, 1984). 11 See Pateman (1988). 12 See Mills (1997, p. 5). 13 Ibid (p. 17). 14 Ibid (p. 18). 15 See Arneil (2009). 16 On this, see, for example, Hickel (2017); McGill (2016); Milanovic´ (2016). 17 See Wolbring et al. (2013). 18 See, e.g., Uzcátegui and Broner (2018). 19 As spelled out by Marx himself in his early writings or by structuralist thinkers such as Althusser. Althusser favored Marx’s late writings. He saw them as the only ones truly scientific due to their dialectical grounding in objectivity. See, e.g., Althusser
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(1969, 1970, 1971); see also Balibar (2009) for expansive discussions on Althusser’s political philosophy. 20 See Coole and Frost (2010). 21 See, e.g., Williams (1989, 2005).
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The power and perils of LatDisCrit’s situated emancipation Bringing home lessons and forging possibilitarian intersectional disability agency paths
Introduction: Toward actionable, embodied, diasporic/transmodern, and transgressive decolonialities. Summing up the basis for an intersectional subalternity approach to LatDisCrit as intersectional disability agency movement building This second to the last chapter summarizes emancipatory learning, metatheoretical, and disability justice activism lessons from previous chapters. It focuses on a targeted exploration of the actionable meaning of decolonial modes of intersectional disability agency, emancipatory learning, and radical solidarity for diasporic LatDisCrit actors residing and struggling within the normalizing ideological confines of global north institutionalized identity politics. It uses anticolonial, racebased critical hermeneutics, and global south epistemologies to pursue a critical integration and interrogation of core experiential and metatheoretical strands that emerge from a careful reading of both counterstory and conceptual chapters of the book. Ezequiel, Lidia, Edwina, Juan Luis, Asdrúbal, Silvia, Camille, Guillermina, Gabriela, Sonia, Cirilo, and Fátima are all embodied expressions of intersectional agency. They are all in relational dynamicity. They exist and get transformed as Arturo co-authors and hermeneutically reads their experiential encounters under both global south and global north interactional conditions. Yet, reading their social textuality, explaining/understanding it purely in terms of individual relational creativity, as atomized units of analysis, as separate, uncoordinated, and even serendipitous attempts to deal with their own isolationist sense of selves, would perpetuate things as they are and have been. It would be a defeatist, non-possibilitarian, and non-inventive way to embrace the ontology, axiology, and epistemology behind the current state of affairs governing intersectional disability subalternities in global south and global north. It would be yet another failed mode of situational/decolonial resistance in its ontological, epistemological, and axiological myopia, to use another of those ocularcentric metaphors so often employed in academic circles specializing on agency theorizing. Therefore, engaging once again with Ferreira’s ontogenetic analysis of disability as outlined in Chapter 7, linking it back to his contributions on transductive creativity discussed in Chapter 6 sheds light on ways to link decolonial and global DOI: 10.4324/9781003084150-9
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south epistemologies with a theoretical treatment of the plight of diasporic people of color with disabilities in the global north as well as in the global south. The second half of Ferreira’s essay1 builds on Gilbert Simondon’s complex relational conceptualization of individuation.2 Unlike traditional sociological ideas on individuation,3 which center exclusively on individualistic processes that preempt interactional dynamics, often through symbolic mechanisms,4 Simondon’s philosophical approach stresses the spiral-like cycle of links between individual actions and reactions, relational factors, contextual dimensions, and their reciprocation processes. In turn, these generative reciprocation processes in their living relationality go back into the transformation of individual conditions and often impact epistemological perspectives and assumptions, which trigger further actions and reactions. For the majority of people with disabilities around the world … impairment is mainly and most clearly the result of social and political factors; not a “natural fact” which cannot be avoided … assertions regarding the social origin of impairment point to the explanation of social causes for material and biological phenomena. As such, these assertions should be directed at fundamental and inextricable social elements which ground the material basis for ideological phenomena … “Despite its critique of the medical model, the social model of disability surrenders the body to medicine and understands disability in terms prescribed by medical discourses. To recover that lost corporeal space […] the social model makes it imperative to criticize its own dualist heritage. It also requires establishing, as far as an epistemological need is concerned, that the body with disabilities is part of the domain of history, culture and meaning, rather than a non-historical, presocial and purely natural object, as medicine claims.”5 Ferreira uses this embodied critique of the social model of disability as a pathway to go back to Bourdieu’s conceptualization of habitus in conjunction with his own articulation of creative transductivity.6 I criticized in Chapter 6 Ferrante and Ferreira’s reliance on Bourdieu due to their concomitant deracializing and nonexplicit treatment of coloniality dimensions. Despite and perhaps because of this situatedness level of critique, thinking specifically of LatDisCrit as an emerging field of inquiry and a space for intersectional disability activisms, I foresee a great deal of potential in Ferreira’s creative transductivity explorations. This is especially so once one combines decolonial Latinx and blackness studies with neo-vitalism/ new materialisms as a way to ground the ontology, axiology, and epistemology of intersectional disability justice as a core realm of subaltern modes of agency. It is in this expansive, situated, and rigorous decolonial sense that I subscribe Ferreira’s preliminary ontological guidelines in the passage that follows: To undo this forgetfulness toward the body, let us anchor our analysis on two premises. First, our sociability is anterior to our existence. We do not become social beings. We do not develop our sociability as we go through
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LatDisCrit’s situated emancipation our existence. We are already born as social beings. Our sociability belongs, so to speak, to our constitutive genetic stuff. Second, our sociality resides in our body. Our rationality is not the core premise to consider to this effect but our corporality. The one that knows and thinks is our body. In it resides a sphere of practical knowledge without which we would be unable to acquire a fully social condition. “We learn through the body. The social order gets inscribed in our body through a permanent confrontation, more or less dramatic, yet always granting preeminence to the affective realm, or more precisely to the realm of affective transactions with social settings. Naturally, […] readers will think of normalizations imposed through institutional discipline. However, one must not underestimate continuous and often unnoticed pressures or oppressions derived from the mundane order of things, the preempting role of material conditions of existence […] The most serious kinds of social commination are not directed to one’s intellect, but to one’s body, which serves as a stern reminder […].” The first of these premises moves us to consider our “transductive” constitution. The second one moves us to take as a core reference the notion of habitus in accord with Bourdieu’s formulations. Both elements combine at the methodological and epistemological levels. They necessarily imply, as a result, an ontological ethos ascribed to social action.7
Integrating critically new materialisms and discursive strands: Looking for thoughtful modes of intersectional disability activisms as actionable trans-Latinx metatheorizing Let us add to this integrative effort a key premise. Language is not to be seen in purely cultural and discursive terms. Instead, language should be approached as biological expressions of corporeal performativity. In turn, these corporeal expressions in their living relationality create reality as it gets named and embodied. If one adopts this stance, the competing ethos of independence versus interdependence for people of color with disabilities vanishes or, at least, becomes less stable and uncontested. Thus, the experiential, relational, and counter-narrative elements described and analyzed in the previous chapters primarily as lived and responded to by blind subjects, especially blind black and Latinx folks, acquire vivid material and transgressively discursive significance. For example, could it be that somebody like Edwina from Chapter 5’s counterstory, in trying to cling to the sense of “independence” of her evolving/ unlearning self as an able-bodied black woman, while simultaneously opting not to disclose her emerging blindness as impairment, is really struggling to materialize the articulation of a new sense of interdependence? What if the duality of discourse and materiality is eliminated? What if one starts to view this simultaneous set of processes as the expression of a single material phenomenon yet to be even nameable at this point due to theoretical and movement organizing underdevelopment? What if this is an expression of embodied,
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transgressive materiality in the emerging contours of its relational, transitive, and creative transductivity modes of decolonial solidarity unique to global north contexts, yet useful for global south spheres of emancipatory learning? What if a new material culture is in the process of being created among blind and other disabled people of color like Edwina in their identitarian proto-ableist, yet emancipation-seeking hybridity? What if this is an evolving, an emerging, nonlinear mode of intersectional disability agency as decolonial subalternity for the twenty-first century? In their book, de Freitas and Sinclair8 take up the relational analysis of bodily senses and learning. They pursue this examination from the point of view of a radical ontology, aesthetics, and politics of inclusive materiality. Thus, they help open new horizons to understanding the monist enactment of language and material meaning/cultural embodiment of disability and difference. By “senses,” we refer to the sensory organs (eyes, ears, skin, nose and tongue) that we normally associate with our sensing of the external world (hearing, seeing, touching, smelling and tasting) … Our goal is to think the body free from the confines of current regimes of perception, and to recognize the human body in all its potentiality, even in our current classrooms, where bodies can be seen as differently abled and differently (organ)ised rather than disabled or distracted. In keeping with our post-humanist approach, we do this by decentring the human organs and abilities—with their fixed forms of sensation, prescribed patterns and implied (dis)abilities—so as to understand perception as distributed across the learning assemblage—occurring in temporary, contingent encounters.9 In line with the ontogenetic analysis of individuation and relationality as process formulated by Ferreira and discussed in the preceding section, I am especially attracted to de Freitas and Sinclair’s treatment of blindness as dissensus through the hybrid/rhythmic embodiment of perceptual dimensions of thinking, knowing, and sensing. Blindness played an important role in debates about the sensory origins of ideas. “Molyneux’s problem,” posed in 1688, asked whether a man blind from birth would be able to recognize objects visually were he suddenly to acquire sight. The question fuelled a great debate about the role of the senses and became a centrepiece in developing and promulgating Locke’s empiricist epistemology. Some scholars answered the question negatively, others positively, but a central point of concern was the extent to which knowing with one sense was related to knowing with another. If the blind man had known a cube by touch, would he recognize it by sight? … Sight and touch were incommensurable for Berkeley, and thus the absence of one sense could not entirely be accommodated by or corrected through another … The debate also featured discussion about the unreliability of the visible world and the relative importance of each of the senses.10
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In the mid-eighteenth century, with the emergence of cataract surgery, the speculative debate that had involved thinkers such as Locke, Berkeley, Newton, and others could at last be transposed into experimentation. “For the most part, those who had answered Molyneux’s problem negatively were right, because patients who were suddenly able to see were bewildered by the visual world, not knowing where to look, not knowing what they were seeing. Furthermore, they … could not immediately correlate objects with tactile images.”11 These findings engendered further layers of scientific inquiry: “Could patients pass from sight to touch by means of reasoning? Could they ‘see’ the external world by means of sensation alone? Thus ensued more thought experiments, like those of Condillac, who imagined adding senses to a statue and trying to find out at what point the statue might be said to have sensibility.”12 Condillac’s answer was that the statue would develop “sensation without touch.” However, “it would not be able to discover its own boundaries and the existence of the world beyond; without a sense of tactile encounter, there was no determination of a subject.”13 From this historical examination of the mutable understanding of the interplay between senses and ideas, de Freitas and Sinclair14 move into a conceptual contrast of the way in which sensation and perception are viewed by Kant and Deleuze. Thus, they show how, in contrast to Kant’s metatheory of perception, Deleuze15 opts to deemphasize the rationalistic ethos of the pre-perceptual synthesis: Kant’s pre-synthesis act of evaluation, whereby a sensation is identified, seems to be operating even at the very minute level of apparently immediate sensory encounters. Deleuze suggests that such an evaluative act at the micro-level is relational and highly responsive, and thus the unit of measure is itself in constant variation and infinitely divisible … This variation and recalibration is, in Deleuze’s terms, a grasping of a rhythm that operates beneath the concepts entailed in judgement. The constant recalibration is less a human synthesis of discrete sensations and more the synchronizing of rhythmic intensities across a system. But synchronizing is radically different from synthesizing. We propose that perception is not the synthesis of sensation—where synthesis is taken to be a rational judgement—but rather a polyphonic process of modulation, a process by which new folds and inflections emerge in unstable material configurations. The continuous variability of the unit of measure indicates how sensations are more like folds than individuations. For Deleuze, sensation is vibration, and thus rhythm is the foundation of perception. In what is a far more Leibnizian than Kantian approach to perception, Deleuze suggests that perception is not individualized, but rather comprises the rising amplitude of a wave or rhythm, with frequencies momentarily in phase and resonant.16 Here it is helpful to revisit from a different angle the idea of individuation brought up by Ferreira when discussing Gilbert Simondon’s contribution to the understanding/explanation of disability as an embodied complex relationality, a
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never-ending process of creation and co-creation, of learning and unlearning. Ferreira uses Simondon’s ideas and links them back to Bourdieu’s concept of habitus as a transductive expression of people’s multimodal creativity in their relational embodiments of disability, class, race, gender, and so forth. However, Simondon’s neomaterialist conceptualization of social beings goes beyond purely microlevel modes of relationality. He emphasizes the cyclical nature of social transductive adaptability. The transductive pathway is a permanent (re)construction of method or the meta-pathway throughout the pathway itself. It is undertaken by a subject in process who follows being in its genesis, in its inexhaustible production of new structures … as social beings, we never stop getting constituted in a definite manner. We are a process, rather than a state of being fully developed. In the words of Gilbert Simondon, we are an individuation process that gets constituted via the inextricable link between individuals and their milieu. This process-like propensity presupposes an infinite potential of initial possibilities, a “‘super-saturation of being.’ At first, this being lacks a sense of telos. Then, it adopts structure and telos.” This sort of supersaturation cannot be grasped through traditional categories of logic. Doing so would entail that we would be understood as a “tensely overextended and super-saturated system which exists in a level superior to its own sense of unity. […] Unity and identity are only applicable to one of the stages of being which takes place after the process of individuation. […] It lacks validity to explain ontogenesis in the full sense of this concept.” In other words, as social beings, we do not correspond to either principles of unity or identity. We are process. In addition, our ontological conditions involve at least four levels: physical, biological, psychic, and social (or rather relational), which must be considered and integrated. Already at the level of biology we are provided with a sense of virtuality common to all living beings. This virtuality is indispensable for our process-like uniquely social nature since “living beings solve their problems not only adapting but also modifying themselves through the invention of new internal structures.” We are therefore provided with a self-generating, creative resourcefulness.17 Ferreira comes back to expand on his critique of existing disability study approaches. In particular, Ferreira attacks the over-reliance on normative “solutions” to ontological problems that transcend in significant ways what these normative modes of ideology can offer. Ferreira’s concluding sentences are certainly intriguing. Their invitational tone sets the stage for a transformational kind of emancipatory stance that can take intersectional disability agency beyond its current global stagnation. People’s modes of consciousness are not independent from structures; likewise, structures are not independent from people’s modes of consciousness. The task at hand involves developing practical mechanisms. In reality, these
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LatDisCrit’s situated emancipation should be praxis mechanisms, since we are alluding to action linked to theoretical foundations that may be able to transform at once people’s modes of consciousness and structures. This cannot be accomplished at a normative level. Tools for struggle are erroneous because they are being channeled through inadequate avenues … let us be simultaneously conscious that normalization and discipline are conditioning both our action and understanding capacities. We have internalized them. Let us search for adequate avenues to channel transformative enactments. What are these avenues? That is to be determined. Most certainly, we will have to invent them. That should be the first task to tackle. When something is at once necessary and impossible, it is time for inventing.18
Creeping maroon/quilombo third spaces: LatDisCrit’s race-based transmodernities as decolonial paths for inventing diasporic, subaltern modes of intersectional disability agency and radical solidarity Ferreira’s invitational tone demarcates the task in the remainder of the chapter, which is to explore the parameters for inventive spaces toward emancipatory situatedness as derived from trans-Latinx identitarian diasporic modes of relationality. As such, I will concentrate on four main criteria: (1) emancipatory situatedness versus universal normativity; (2) relational/interdependent intersectional subalternities; (3) race-based, maroon/fugitive global south epistemologies in action; and (4) collective modes of creative transductivity grounded on radical exteriority as diasporic border-crossing modes of organizing. There are normative modes of post-truth performativities in the world of disability studies whose sense of axiology in their approaches for struggling is rather murky. These modes of performativity have their root in beliefs of justice. Ironically, they are false struggles whose hyper-reality derives not from their ends, which may be legitimate and deontologically worth pursuing. Their post-truth nature involves means that are borrowed from the master’s tool bag, to paraphrase the title of Gordon and Gordon’s edited volume on blackness studies anti-racist political philosophy.19 However, here it is paramount to underscore the subtle twist in their title: Not Only the Master’s Tools. The phrase entails that there are still some tools owned by or coming from the master that could be used. At the same time, new, invented tools need to come into play. Thus, how best to distinguish the kinds of master tools that can be preserved versus the ones that need inventing? Ferreira’s simultaneous reliance on Bourdieu, Foucault, and Simondon illustrates at a preliminary level the sort of theoretical tools one can borrow from the master, in this case Eurocentric modes of understanding modernity, enlightenment, etc. Their combination brings about a sense of praxis innovative enough to deserve consideration as emancipatory situatedness and resistance mechanisms. To some extent, one can use their combined metatheory to unearth comparative dimensions relevant to black Latinx, Chicanx, Indigenous Latinx, or
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Asian Latinx modes of situated resistance within concrete global north and global south contexts of intersectional disability oppression.
An illustration from Canada on the drawbacks of normative reliance For instance, Sheila Wildeman develops a powerful critique of the strategic stance taken by groups who opt to use litigation means to preserve the rights specifically designed for the “protection” of persons with mental disabilities within carceral settings. Instead of adopting an intersectional abolitionist strategy, these groups’ “successes” bring about paradoxical and very destructive consequences. Wildeman centers on practical issues related to the use of solitary confinement in Canada. She demonstrates that even under well-intentioned human rights teleological and/or deontological guidance, it is possible to cause more harm than good. This is especially so if a deep understanding of broad intersectionality dimensions of oppression is missing from the emancipatory equation. The significance of solitary confinement should be evident in light of the coronavirus crisis. Confinement has been claimed as the unavoidable COVID panacea in carceral environments, as the core protective strategy for all inmates worldwide. The problem is that for many black, brown Latinx, and First Nation prisoners within most global north carceral institutions in Canada and the U.S., this protective/quasi-therapeutic approach comes on top of reiterated practices of selective solitary confinement. These selective practices affect in disproportionate ways minority populations, often under pseudo-humane paraphernalia.20 Wildeman builds on the work of Debra Parks21 and postulates three core emerging imperatives in anti-carceral lawyering: (1) exposing institutional violence while establishing solidarity with those inmates left inside; (2) surfacing and interrogating the roots of intersectional oppression; and (3) seeking concrete anti-carceral remedies with an eye to wholistic transformations of the ecology of pre-, intra-, and post-factors that make up the system’s oppressive and discriminatory dynamics.22 Wildeman’s thesis entails a careful examination of the violence prisons inflict. Her analysis is construed in light of big-picture accounts of the “social-structural violence through which white, colonialist, patriarchal and class supremacy is perpetuated. Recent work has brought together carceral studies with critical disability theory to explore the manifold ways the carceral state … responds to social-structural problems through strategies of isolation, confinement and control.”23 Yet, it is precisely the reductionist rights-based obsession with disability, and especially with mental disability matters, that Wildeman is trying to warn her audience about. Wildeman’s study showcases four recent human rights litigation cases in the Canadian carceral context. Their ethical and sociopolitical examination demonstrates how their outcomes have meant a stronger legitimation and sophistication of existing oppressive manifestations of solitary confinement. This gets operationalized through the use of those very mental health paradigms employed to “resist” human rights violations, although in a very individualized and de-complexified manner.
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LatDisCrit’s situated emancipation Anti-carceral lawyering requires that we work backwards from anti-carceral remedies—and that we do so in solidarity with prisoners and others across the carceral archipelago, united by a commitment to intersectional substantive equality. It expresses a radical lawyering ethic grounded in the aspirations and capacities of specific communities to resist incarceration and fashion radical alternatives. It requires a willingness to devise strategies in and beyond the courts and to seek remedies reaching beyond the material sites of incarceration. At the same time, lawyers aspiring after an anti-carceral ethic should cultivate familiarity with the insights of both prison abolitionism and critical disability theory, in order to resist (and advise resistance to) strategies that obscure the justice claims of those located at one or the other side of the prison justice/disability justice divide. Last, pursuit of anti-carceral remedies requires challenging conceptions of disability, or mobilisations of this concept or identity category in law, which would isolate disability from social-structural injustice in ways that invite individualising and pathologising “remedies”. This means busting disability out of solitary and situating disability-based justice claims within a broader account of intersectional substantive (transformative) equality. Ultimately, cracking the foundations of solitary confinement requires us to rethink disability, justice, and human rights in a way that is mindful of intersecting oppressions as well as liberations.24
Exploring LatDisCrit within the limits of the quilombo metaphor and maroon knowledges born in the struggle Having dealt with the drawbacks of normativism as a driving epistemology and strategic direction for intersectional disability agency, emancipatory learning, and decolonial modes of solidarity, it is helpful to rely on the transcommunal metaphor of the quilombo. Quilombo serves as a racialized way to bring together disability, gendered, and class-centered knowledges born within various dimensions of situatedness in emancipatory struggles worldwide, but most especially among diasporic global south people of color with disabilities who live and fight conditions of oppression and material precarity in global north contexts. Quilombos were maroon communities. They were communal spaces where Brazilian slaves who had escaped their masters opted to reside together and defend their emerging sense of territoriality and identitarian ethos. What attracts me to quilombo as a possibilitarian, third-space25 metaphor in connection to LatDisCrit is the current pejorative usage of the word quilombo26 in South American contexts. Quilombo is often invoked as equivalent to a problem, to a big chaotic mess. This, in my view, relates to the possibilitarian spaces of intersectional disability agency as a creeping way for multimodal embodiments.27 In addition, thinking of open-ended, possibilitarian avenues, it seems to me much more attractive to deal with a space of contestation, of chaos, out of
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which a new kind of emancipatory transmodern, intersectional decoloniality order may emerge. Interestingly, in marginal geopolitical/inter-imperial global contexts such as those of New Mexico, maroon individuals, mostly men, often mingled with Indigenous tribes. This highlights the kind of transgressive intersectionality third space I have in mind for trans-Latinx and other radical exteriority modes of trans-modern subalternities. My utopian metaphor of quilombo is not tied to physical spaces. It could involve virtual spaces, of the sort that COVID has made possible in ways that were merely potential before the pandemic. At the same time, however, the quilombo link to emerging territorialities may also serve to highlight new modes of land-based epistemologies and intersectional axiological frameworks for disability agency and disability justice. They can either involve an idealized mythical context such as that of Aztlan in Chicanx cultural studies or an actual territorial manifestation of anthropological practices such as those underscored by Escobar28 in Colombian Afro-descendant communities. The important thing to emphasize in this emerging possibilitarian mode of utopian performativity is interdependent relationality. This does not mean a communal enactment of perfect harmony. Quite on the contrary, the expectation is that, on the grounds of radical exteriority, there must be a constant work of transformational acceptance and double/triple consciousness raising that makes this thirdspace dynamicity truly a living experience of unpredictable possibilitarian ways to transgress hegemonic practices, particularly those which perpetuate colonizing, deceitful structures of pseudo-liberation, e.g., rehabilitation, habilitación, rightsbased fetishism, undemocratic/assimilationist modes of organizing, and the like.
Maroon knowledges as dis/gendered, racialized trans-Latinx modes of decolonial solidarity Obourn29 has recently come up with the term “racialized disgender.” She uses this terminology to emphasize a model of disability identities that merges DisCrit traditions with those anchored on gender studies and the humanities. On the other hand, Ben-Moshe30 talks of maroon knowledges to indicate the value of what she calls “fugitive” intersectional subalternities. In this concluding section, I explore preliminary applications from these notions into LatDisCrit modes of actionable theorizing and theory-informed activisms. There is a first aspect worth emphasizing, which emerges from the subtitle of Obourn’s book: A Framework for Radical Inclusion. The radical inclusion Obourn has in mind is tied to radical solidarity, in the sense I have used this notion throughout the book. Obourn is not so concerned about people with disabilities being included by those without disabilities. Obourn’s interest is more about issues of intersectional inclusivity for purposes of emancipatory futurities in disabled ontologies, epistemologies, and axiological frameworks. Second, there is another element that also emerges from Obourn’s work. I refer here to Obourn’s counter-narrative treatment of literary texts, which ties
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quite nicely with the counter-narrative stance used in the present volume as borrowed from critical race theory methodologies. As an actionable, collectivistic exercise, it is worth mentioning here the story-linking model used by Ann Wimberly within black church circles.31 I envision a similar framework that could link various modes of intersectional disability counter-narratives for the sake of decolonial solidarity configurations. I imagine that these could especially be used as open spaces for creative transductive organizing at the margins of existing disability organizational structures in both the global north and the global south. To this end, for example, the de facto exclusion of undocumented trans-Latinx populations from the bulk of disability services in most U.S. jurisdictions provides a practical milieu for experimentation with such a counternarrative mode of intersectional decolonial solidarity trans-subaltern organizing. Finally, as Ben-Moshe stresses in several of her works, building on various kinds of fugitive knowledges, especially those centered on institutional disciplining experiences based on race, gender, class, and disability as a unitarian, multimodal expression of eugenic hegemony and white supremacy, is paramount. Kendi32 says, for instance, that it is a mistake to track the level of support from whites to emerging antiracist movements such as Black Lives Matter. Doing so centers more on non-racist than on anti-racist actionable efforts. In a similar manner, one needs to privilege anti-ableist efforts rather than merely non-ableist endeavors such as those centered on disability access as a neutral, nonpolitical set of dynamics. More relevant to LatDisCrit, it is paramount to find the fugitive spaces of intersectionality that tie interdependently the plight of undocumented, Chicanx, Indigenous, Asian, Jewish, and Arab modes of transmodern Latinx identities throughout the Americas and around the globe. It is precisely this kind of fugitive sense of exceptional communal intersectional survival and mutual protection, as in the perilous context of quilombo territorial forging during colonial times, that needs to drive the boat of decolonial intersectionality among these fugitive emancipatory expressions of situatedness. At the political philosophy and ontological levels, it is paramount to deepen the linkages among decolonial, posthumanist/materialist, and critical hermeneutics modes of theorizing as applied to both racialized and disability-based or disgendered types of resistance against white and ableist supremacy modes of domination. To what extent is it possible that some of these metatheories are more apt to deal with race-based or gender versus disability-based issues? How does intersectionality impact the way these differential aptitudes get resolved? What about emancipatory learning? How many of its dimensions should or could be tackled empirically, especially in terms of transformational pedagogies that could be combined with radical adult education and relational leadership development applications for LatDisCrit and beyond? I am an engaged brown, blind, global south, epistemologies scholar who, cornered by the exclusionary intricacies of white supremacist material precarity in the global north, has become a sort of intersectional disability activist apprentice. As such, it is especially valuable for me to think of intersectional
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disability agency and radical solidarity possibilities as concepts that transcend siloed disciplinary boundaries. Building on this accomplishment, what theoretical and methodological mechanisms should enhance the potential of the emerging transdisciplinary findings and axiological horizons this transgressive exploration affords? How can this transdisciplinarity best translate back to emancipatory learning and radical exteriority dimensions? Above all, how does one insure that the kind of interdisciplinarity practiced models non-hierarchical relationships between knowledge work and activism? How could material and symbolic walls against this possibility be permanently demolished? How can one watchfully guard against their disguised re-erection in subtle modes of servile or mercenary relationality?
Notes 1 See Ferreira (2020, pp. 417 and following). 2 See Simondon (1996). See also Deleuze (2004); Schmidgen (2005); Simondon (1989, 2016, 2020) for interesting onto-epistemological discussions that display features seemingly connected to new materialisms as outlined in the previous chapter as well as the next section in this chapter. 3 See, e.g., Simmel (1971). 4 On this, see, for example the classical sociological theory formulations offered by Becker (1991) as well as Mead (1934). 5 Ferreira (2020: pp. 416–17, my translation). See also Abberley (2008); Adams and Meiners (2014); Hughes and Paterson (2008). 6 On the latter of these concepts, see also Ibañez (1985, 1992, 1994) and Woolgar (1991) for extensive book-length discussions of its sociopolitical, philosophical, ethical, and ontological bases. 7 Ferreira (2020: p. 417, my translation). See also Bourdieu (1999a, especially pp. 186–187). 8 See de Freitas and Sinclair (2014, ch. 6, especially pp. 141 and following). 9 Ibid (p. 141). 10 Ibid (p. 143). 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid (p. 144). 14 See also Smith (2003). 15 See Deleuze (1984). 16 de Freitas and Sinclair (2014: pp. 157–158). 17 Ferreira (2020: p. 418, my translation). See also Ibañez (1985, p. 264); Simondon (1996, pp. 259 and following). 18 Ferreira (2020: p. 428, my translation). 19 See Gordon and Gordon (2016). 20 See Struthers Montford, Hannah-Moffat, and Hunter (2018). 21 See Parks (2017). 22 See Wildeman (2020, n.p.). 23 Ibid. See also Brown and Schept (2017). 24 See Wildeman (2020, n.p.). 25 On the notion of third space as utopian performativity configurations, see Allen (1999); Myers (2019); Soja (1989, 1996, 2010). 26 In the colonial territory of Brazil, maroon communities were also called mocambo. However, it seems that the term mocambo was reserved to smaller maroon
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27 28 29 30 31 32
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communities. On the other hand, the word mocambo has not acquired the contemporary linguistic rendition to which I allude below. In the northern part of Latin America, mostly what today constitutes the southern regions of Mexico, a maroon community was in colonial times called palenque. Since the contemporary usage of the word palenque is rigidly attached to rooster fighting and other circus-like spectacle places, I prefer to stick to quilombo for the naming of my third-space LatDisCrit metaphor in the present volume. On this, see Garland-Thomson (1996, 1997); Shildrick (2002). See Escobar (2020). See Obourn (2020). See Ben-Moshe (2020). See Wimberly (1994). See Kendi (2019).
Epilogue Musings on global south distinctiveness and material precarities
I end the book by looking briefly at the unique intersectional complexities of the global south’s geopolitics and epistemology. While I share Fals Borda’s concern for diffusing a “sentipensante” paradigm for trans-Latinx dimensions,1 I am making a case here for the value of adopting a new materialist/transmodern, critical ambivalence stance toward dividing global north and global south. To be sure, disability actors of color in terms of their unique kinds of knowledges and activist frames of reference share important common features. Since their radical solidarity gets damaged any time one divides them, it is key to assess critically when and how this divide could be necessary or useful. This ambivalence can strategically serve both divisive and unifying roles in selective fashion. Thus, it should be used selectively and with a strong dose of cautionary optimism by disabled folks of color on both sides of the north–south material precarity divide. Looking at Arturo’s trajectory, there is an obvious fact. Arturo never stops being a diasporic expression of intersectional subalternities. He lives in the global north, yet he knows he does not belong. There are too many reminders on a daily basis for Arturo to be able to forget this fact. The rightful presence of folks of color with disabilities like Arturo will forever be challenged, even in those cases where some sort of “inclusive presence” is tolerated, as happened with Cirilo, Fátima, and others. As trans-Latinx border-crossing embodiments, these folks make epistemological mestizaje’s transductive creativity something very tangible, very real. Hence, they have the opportunity or the curse to wrestle daily with how to ride on creative energy. They live within the inherent transformational tension of trying to bring about global south epistemologies of suspicion such as those delineated by Manuel Vásquez: what I am suggesting here is another form of “in-betweenness” and “borderlands”: el ser entre mestizaje y otredad. I envision a praxis that is, on the one hand, cosmopolitan and unfinished, a challenge to established boundaries, and on the other hand, deeply aware of the irreducible otherness of the subaltern and their right to name their oppression, to mark alterity and unresolved opposition, even if this exercise may itself be problematic … It is a praxis that at once celebrates and is energized by our shared ludic and DOI: 10.4324/9781003084150-10
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Epilogue aesthetic resources but also is soberly aware of power differentials, not just between Latino communities and dominant groups but also within Latino communities. I believe that a dual hermeneutic of recovery and suspicion would help us develop a clearer sense of the potentials and limits of narratives of mestizaje and a more realistic understanding of the difficulties involved in mobilizing our communities for transformative action. Rather than assuming that because we are all mestizo we carry in ourselves a necessarily emancipatory essence that just needs to be awakened, we need to acknowledge that otredad marks us not only vis-à-vis the dominant groups in mainstream society, but also within our own ranks. We must be wary of letting our rightful impatience for solidarity, reconciliation, and utopia overpower the humbling task of self-critique. In other words, we need to take seriously Isasi-Diaz’s own call for “epistemological vigilance.”2
Ending now by speaking explicitly of the contours behind material precarity worldwide, it is imperative to say candidly and realize that underpaid, extremely marginalized migrant/diasporic work is the new slavery of the twenty-first century. This is why I indicate in Chapter 8 that there is no substantial difference between Arturo and Asdrúbal. I make this claim with the conviction that disability disrupts and complexifies this new mode of slavery, just as it did in colonial, plantation societies, calling for reinforced modes of discipline and normalizing suppression.3 Hence, one must take very seriously as an intersectional subalternity matter for agency considerations in the bridging of global north and global south modes of resistance what Asante and Hall4 tell us regarding the hegemonic/alienating link between slave psychology and race relations, which I make directly applicable beyond purely racial dimensions. The powerful metaphor embedded in the title of their book, Rooming in the Master’s House, is very much relevant to disability and anti-ableism as it is to race relations and anti-racism/anti-colonialism. The false sense of privilege this rooming entails cannot be underestimated. Cirilo, Fátima, and Sonia are a vivid testimony. Therefore, whatever new modes of organizing may emerge as part of LatDisCrit’s enactments must watchfully guard against its alienating ideological connotations.
Notes 1 2 3 4
See Fals Borda (2016). Vásquez (2006: p. 156). See Erevelles (2011); Puar (2017). See Asante and Hall (2016).
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Index
ableist 18, 25, 98–100, 11, 113 ableist ideology 74 ableist ontology 111 ableist supremacy 19, 126 anti-ableist 76, 106–7, 126 activisms 59, 117–18, 125 activist/s 1, 8–10, 13, 54, 59, 61, 63, 65, 67, 69, 75–6, 80–1, 103, 126, 129 Adorno, Theodor 3, 12 agency 2, 3, 7–14, 24, 27, 29, 30, 35, 37, 41–5, 47, 55, 63, 68, 102, 107–08, 110, 113–14, 116–17, 130 alterity 1, 2, 3, 6, 31, 51, 56, 66, 69, 71, 82, 108, 129 anti-ableist 76 antiracist 13, 70, 76, 81, 126 antiracist theorizing 81 Arturo 1–10, 13, 16, 19, 22–3, 25–6, 37–48, 50–4, 70–2, 74, 79–80, 82, 86, 88, 90–5, 98–103, 106–13, 116, 129, 130 Asdrúbal 19, 110–13, 116, 130 Asian-Latinx identity 76 Barthes, Roland 24, 26, 28–9, 37, 70 Bergson, Henri 14, 104 blackness studies 7, 8, 14, 33, 46–8, 56, 70, 74–6, 81, 86, 117, 122 blindness 18–21, 23, 40, 51, 52, 73, 88, 93–5, 100, 108, 118–19 Bourdieu, Pierre 58, 68, 83–5, 117–18, 121–22, 127, 137 Camille 103, 116 catatonic 5, 25 Chicanismo 75 Chicanx 3, 12, 20, 24, 30, 34, 73–4, 80–1, 86, 122, 125–26 Cirilo 72 ,86, 95, 107–08, 116, 129, 130 collaborative agency 49
collective agency 109 coloniality 70, 75, 82, 104, 108, 117 coloniality: of being 36; of power 12, 30, 32, 34, 36, 42, 47, 82, 125; of knowledge 35–6, 125 decolonial solidarity 6, 8, 11, 22, 52, 82, 93, 95, 104, 106, 108–09, 119, 125–26 decoloniality 51, 56, 61, 65, 67–68, 75, 81, 96, 100, 102, 125 Dei, George 14–15, 56, 75–7, 81, 86–7 Deleuze, Gilles 26, 29–30, 37–8, 87, 120, 127 disability 2–19, 21–2, 24–7, 29–39, 41–2, 44, 46–60, 63–9, 71, 73–7, 80–6, 88–90, 93, 95–103, 105–07, 109, 111–14, 116–127, 129–130; agency 47, 59, 63–4, 65–7, 69, 71, 74–7, 80–2, 85–6, 88, 93, 95, 98, 106, 113–14, 116, 119, 121–22, 124–25, 127; justice 4, 24, 31, 35, 39, 48, 88, 96, 101–02, 106–07, 109, 114, 116–17, 124–25; theory 123–24; theorizing 10, 56 DisCrit 2, 7, 11, 12 Dussel, Enrique 11–2, 14, 31, 38, 56, 83 Edwina 19, 46–7, 51, 53–54, 116, 118–19 ego conquiro 33, 57, 73 emancipation 2–3, 6–10, 12, 17, 21, 27–31, 36, 39, 42, 49–50, 54, 56, 59, 63, 65–7, 84, 110–12, 116, 119 emancipatory agency 27, 107, 110 emancipatory learning 2–3, 8–10, 13, 16, 19–20, 30, 38, 42–3, 50–1, 53, 59, 61–5, 75–7, 81–2, 88, 93, 95, 102, 104, 108, 110, 114, 116, 119, 124, 126–27 embodiment 2, 4, 8, 18–9, 25–7, 29, 37, 41, 52, 56–59, 68, 74, 82–3, 90, 95, 100–02, 106, 114, 119, 121, 124, 129
172
Index
Erevelles, Nirmala 14–5, 37–8, 86, 130 existentialism 3–4, 12, 27 Ezequiel 19, 25, 27, 29, 37, 114, 116 Fanon, Frans 13, 26, 37, 61, 69–70, 73, 83, 85 Fátima 10, 40–5, 70, 95, 116, 129–130 Ferrante, Carolina 11, 21, 58–60, 66, 68, 83–6, 95, 104, 117 Ferreira, Miguel 11–2, 15, 58–60, 66, 68, 83, 85, 88, 90, 95, 104, 116–17, 119–20, 127 Foucault, Michel 12, 24, 26, 28–30, 34, 37, 47–8, 50, 54–5, 58, 71, 84, 104, 122 freedom 2, 5, 7, 11–3, 16–7, 25–6, 29, 42, 66, 113–14 Freire, Paulo 2, 11, 14, 65–6, 84, 93, 104 Fromm, Erich 13, 38, 70, 85 Gabriela 99, 116 Geuss, Raymond 36, 65–7, 84, 147 global south epistemologies 24, 64, 76, 106, 116, 122, 126, 129 Guillermina 19, 38, 99, 100, 116 Habermas, Jürgen 54, 65, 84 habilitación 16, 18, 22, 125 hegemonic agency 110 hegemony 33, 56, 65, 84, 89, 98, 126 Hispanidad 32, 76 Honneth, Axel 85 identity 1–2, 5–6, 10, 12, 14, 20–2, 26, 28–9, 31–3, 42, 49–52, 54, 56–7, 69–71, 75–8, 82, 89–90, 93, 98–100, 108, 113–14, 116, 121, 124 ideology 10, 19, 29–30, 32, 41, 57, 62, 65–9, 74, 80, 89, 121 indigenous 8, 56, 59, 71, 73, 77, 79–80, 82, 86, 122, 125–26 indigeneity 38, 56, 76, 79–80 indigenismo 32, 38, 75, 79 individuation 31, 117, 119–21 inter-imperialism 78 intersectional agency 47, 60, 64–5, 69, 73, 75, 81, 83 ,96, 116 intersectional disability agency 26–7, 29, 32, 37, 41–2, 44, 47, 59, 63–7, 69, 71, 74–7, 80–1, 85–6, 88, 93, 95, 98, 106, 113–14, 116, 119, 121–24 intersectionality 4, 8. 31, 33, 35, 37, 46, 48, 51, 59, 64, 81, 95, 97, 102, 108, 114, 123, 125–26
Juan Luis 18–9, 22, 116 Kierkegaard, Sören 3, 12 knowledge workers 5, 17, 27–8, 42, 65, 67, 76, 80 LatCrit 2, 11, 13, 32, 78 LatDisCrit 1–10, 12, 16, 24, 26, 31, 46, 56, 82–3, 93, 95–6, 98, 106, 108–09, 116–17, 122, 124–26, 128–130 Latinidad 4, 6–7, 12, 17, 32–3, 71, 77–8, 82–3, 87, 94–5, 104 Levinas, Emmanuel 14, 31, 38, 56 Lidia 46–7, 51–4, 116 material precarity 3, 8–10, 23, 25–6, 29, 34, 50, 52, 55, 59–60, 67, 72, 76, 78, 95–6, 104, 106, 124–26 Marcuse, Gerber 3, 12, 65, 85 maroon knowledges 6, 124–25 Marx, Karl 13, 36, 44, 61, 66, 103, 113–14 medical inadmissibility 45 Mestizaje 7, 10, 14, 32, 56, 71, 75–6, 78, 78–82, 87, 129; epistemological 129; ontological 71, 75, 80 mestizx 31, 82, 87 movement building 4, 7, 60–1, 63–4, 81, 95, 100–01, 104, 110, 116 mythology 9, 36, 70 negritud 32, 38 negritude 32, 38, 75 neo-vitalist 12, 90 new materialist 10, 24, 90, 129 normalcy 2, 5, 11, 13, 25, 36, 60, 88 normality 9, 17, 26, 28, 93, 97, 100 normalizing ideologies 73, 82, 89 ocularcentric 20, 23, 96, 116 ocularcentrism 19 pandisability 5, 7, 17, 31–2, 37–8, 53, 88, 95, 106, 109 phenomenology 44, 51–2, 57, 65, 90 posthuman 7–8, 19, 26, 47, 84, 126 possibilitarian 1, 4, 8–10, 12, 14–5, 58, 85, 101, 106, 116, 124–25 proto-ableist 119 quilombo 122, 124–26, 128 race 2–4, 6, 8, 13–4, 24, 26, 31–4, 36, 41–2, 48, 51–2, 55, 61, 67–8, 70, 72–3,
Index 75–6, 78–9, 81, 86–7, 90–1, 95–7, 100, 101, 104, 112–13, 116, 121–22, 126, 130 racialized disgender 125 racism 13. 32, 70, 76, 82, 130 radical agency 47, 50, 53, 60, 61, 65, 70, 82, 92, 102, 109, 112, 113, 116 radical exteriority 6–9, 14–5, 17–21, 24, 26, 31–4, 36–7, 39, 50–1, 53, 56, 63, 65–6, 75, 94, 106–08, 122, 125, 127 radical solidarity 2, 5–6, 8–10, 12, 15–7, 19, 22, 26, 31, 34, 37–8, 42–3, 50, 56, 70, 75, 77, 81, 88, 90, 93–6, 102–03,106, 108, 110–14, 116, 122, 125, 127, 129 rehabilitation 2, 9–10, 16, 19, 23–4, 40, 42–3, 45, 53, 66, 68, 95, 102, 125 relational materiality 8, 27, 33, 56 relationality 8, 16, 20, 29–30, 32, 36–7, 42, 47–9, 68–9, 73, 81, 85, 93, 95, 100, 107, 117–22, 125, 127 Ricoeur, Paul 4, 12, 70 rightful presence 45, 129 Siebers, Tom 57–8, 83 Silvia 91–2, 116
173
Simondon, Gilbert 117, 120–22, 127 situated emancipation 6, 8–9, 29–30, 36, 42, 56, 59, 63, 66–7, 84, 116 social movements 62 Sonia 94–5, 116 subalternity 2, 7, 9, 35, 39, 41–2, 50, 55–6, 63–5, 72, 76, 81, 92–3, 106, 109, 116, 119, 130 Teklu, A. 15, 23, 44, 86 total institutions 6, 47 transductive creativity 59, 106, 116, 129 transductivity 57, 59, 68, 85, 95, 104, 109, 117, 119, 122 trans-Latinidad 4, 6–7, 12, 17, 32, 71, 77–8, 82–3, 87, 95, 104 transmodernity 12, 56, 83 Trigueño 80 Trigueñidad 80 understanding/explaining 3, 9, 34, 74, 83 Valdés, Francisco 11–2, 32, 38, 78 Vallega, Alejandro 14–5, 31, 38, 79, 87 Xicanidad 76, 80