Duke U's 'Crip Genealogies' reorients disability studies from the logics of whiteness and imperialism

Brett T. | 7:03 PM on February 18, 2023

This post exists simply to give an example of where the American university stands today. This editor went to college in the ’80s before gay studies had taken over the English department, and in the ’90s made it through grad school after sitting through classes about black English vernacular — the thing my black students were trying to unlearn. College today? This editor can’t imagine.

If you’re interested, the intro to Duke University’s “Crip Genealogies” is free to read.

The contributors to "Crip Genealogies" reorient the field of disability studies by centering the work of transnational feminism, queer of color critique, and trans scholarship & activism. Read the free intro now! #AmericanStudies #DisabilityStudies https://t.co/hYBVXoC2Hs pic.twitter.com/nvFOWKYW5M

— Duke University Press (@DukePress) January 27, 2023

OK, here are some of the essays that make up “Crip Genealogies” — buckle up:

TOWARD A FEMINIST GENEALOGY OF US DISABILITY RIGHTS: Mapping the Discursive Legacies and Labor of Black Liberation
CRITICAL DISABILITY STUDIES AND THE QUESTION OF PALESTINE: Toward Decolonizing Disability
THE BLACK PANTHER PARTY’S 504 ACTIVISM AS A GENEALOGICAL PRECURSOR TO DISABILITY JUSTICE TODAY
FILIPINA SUPERCRIP: On the Crip Poetics of Colonial Ablenationalism
RHIZOPHORA: Queering Chemical Kinship in the Agent Orange Diaspora

How about just the abstract then, as the book doesn’t come out until April:

The contributors to Crip Genealogies reorient the field of disability studies by centering the work of transnational feminism, queer of color critique, and trans scholarship and activism. They challenge the white, Western, and Northern rights-based genealogy of disability studies, showing how a single coherent narrative of the field is a mode of exclusion that relies on logics of whiteness and imperialism.