Abstract: In this talk, I will briefly outline the interventions of my first book Crip Colony (Duke 2023) which attempts to give an account mestizo politics in the Philippines and how the discourse of mestizaje offers a framework to understand the colonial afterlives of disablement. In doing so, the book contributes to a burgeoning field of diasporic crip critique which confronts the intersections of migration, colonialism, and the strategic in/capacitation that shapes the histories of the major settler colonies of the world. The bulk of the talk will then transition to thinking about the theoretical and historiographic contributions of ethnic studies in problematizing the in/capacitations and disablements central to the project of colonial racial capitalism. I will do so through an analysis of the philosophical and affective dynamics of racial misrecognition as a precondition for political coalition, which I explore in my forthcoming book Dos X: Disability and Racial Dysphoria in Latinx and Filipinx American Cultures (Texas UP).
Sony Coráñez Bolton is associate professor of English & Spanish and chair of Latinx and Latin American Studies at Amherst College. He is the author of Crip Colony: Mestizaje, US Imperialism, and the Queer Politics of Disability in the Philippines (Duke 2023). It demonstrates the ways that colonialism and disability are part of a unified ideological structure in Philippine mestizo politics. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Critical Ethnic Studies, Journal of Asian American Studies, Periphêrica, and Verge: Studies in Global Asias. He is currently finishing a second book project entitled Dos X (University of Texas Press) which concerns the intersections of Latinx and Filipinx culture, disability, history, and politics. It argues that racial misrecognition is an epistemology unto itself that helps to diagnose the ableist dimensions of racial capitalism.