CRIP COLONY : mestizaje, us imperialism, and the queer politics of disability in the philippines

In Crip Colony, Sony Coráñez Bolton examines the racial politics of disability, mestizaje, and sexuality in the Philippines. Drawing on literature, poetry, colonial records, political essays, travel narratives, and visual culture, Coráñez Bolton traces how disability politics colluded with notions of Philippine mestizaje. He demonstrates that Filipino mestizo writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries used mestizaje as a racial ideology of ability that marked Indigenous inhabitants of the Philippines as lacking in civilization and in need of uplift and rehabilitation. Heteronormative, able-bodied, and able-minded mixed-race Filipinos offered a model and path for assimilation into the US empire. In this way, mestizaje allowed for supposedly superior mixed-race subjects to govern the archipelago in collusion with American imperialism. By bringing disability studies together with studies of colonialism and queer-of-color critique, Coráñez Bolton extends theorizations of mestizaje beyond the United States and Latin America while considering how Filipinx and Filipinx American thought fundamentally enhances understandings of the colonial body and the racial histories of disability. "Crip Colony is an interdisciplinary analysis of the racial politics of disability, mestizaje, and sexuality in the Philippines. Sony Coráñez Bolton reads across language archives and overlapping Spanish and US imperialisms, drawing on colonial records, visual culture, poetry, presidential speeches, travel narratives, and political essays, in addition to the famous Spanish-language Filipino novel Noli Me Tangere. Through these texts he shows how these imperial and racial regimes were also regimes of ability. Expanding traditional engagements with mestizaje, Coráñez Bolton examines the ways that Filipinx mestizaje became a eugenic framework which identified native Filipino subjects as inherently disabled, in need of reform and rehabilitation, and mixed-race Filipinos as able to offer a form of "benevolent rehabilitation" which would prepare these deficient natives for assimilation into the US empire. Through this crip critique of coloniality, Coráñez Bolton shows how mestizaje allowed for "superior" mixed-race subjects to govern the archipelago in collusion with imperial processes of dispossession and debilitation"-- Provided by publisher Contents 7 Acknowledgments 9 Crip Colonial Critique: reading mestizaje from the borderlands to the Philippines 15 One. Benevolent Rehabilitation and the Colonial Bodymind: Filipinx American studies as disability studies 47 Two. Mad María Clara: the queer aesthetics of mestizaje and compulsory able-mindedness 81 Three. Filipino Itineraries, Orientalizing Impairments: Chinese foot-binding and the crip coloniality of travel literature 113 Four. A Colonial Model of Disability: running amok in the mad colonial archive of the Philippines 145 Epilogue. A Song from Subic: racial disposability and the intimacy of cultural translation 176 Notes 185 Bibliography 201 Index 211 Sony Coráñez Bolton examines the racial politics of disability, mestizaje, and sexuality in the Philippines, showing how heteronormative, able-bodied, and able-minded mixed-race Filipinos offered a model and path for assimilation into the US empire. Sony Coranez Bolton examines the racial politics of disability, mestizaje, and sexuality in the Philippines, showing how heteronormative, able-bodied, and able-minded mixed-race Filipinos offered a model and path for assimilation into the US empire.