Section I: Reorientations

The aim of this section on "reorientations" is to demonstrate how Asian-descended, Asian Americanist, and other scholars of disability who center objects and archives related to these communities are part of a vanguard of thinkers. These scholar-activists demonstrate the mutually inextricable connections between Asian racialization and the disabling cultures of coloniality. Additionally, in recognising these contributions that center frameworks of disability and crip critique, this section attempts to evidence the ways that crip frameworks have not always been available to Asian/American thought in the same ways ideated in canonical renditions of disability justice histories thus necessitating the philosophical impulse of "reorienting" and "reorientation" in the first place.

Because of the auspicious convergence of Asian/Americanist and postcolonial thought that this special issue has garnered, a few words should be spared for thinking through the ways that Asian comparative racialization and disablement intertwine. Asian American studies has often embraced an understanding of Asian racialization through a triangulation model of analysis that is foundationally concretized in Claire Jean Kim's "The Racial Triangulation of Asian Americans." 11 Contemporary race relations in the United States that cast Asian Americans as the "model minority" that productively contributes to US society in ways that "problem minorities" like Black and Latinx/e peoples supposedly do not, have deep historical roots. Scholars like Lisa Lowe and Iyko Day have demonstrated the ways that the Asian racial form has always been partially conditioned by the realities of Atlantic slavery and Indigenous dispossession and genocide. 12 We wanted to mark this thread as a thematic orientation that is constellated in this special issue which, on the one hand, has powerful and entrenched interlocutors that have been developing the field of Asian American crip critique for quite some time and, on the other hand, feels emergent in the sense of signposting a vital importance for the field of disability studies and crip of color critique broadly speaking. This special issue was edited and constructed during a time of heightened racial violence against Asian-descended peoples which still shapes the "post" ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The activists, scholars, and teachers in this thematic cluster center Asian American archives and objects; sites and colonial networks; persons and theorists; lived and embodied experience; art and expression.

What does it mean that Asian assimilation into white settler colonies has often connoted the tactical ascription of capacity via the trope of the Model Minority? What happens to the efficacy of this trope, as it evokes motifs of robust cognitive capacity, when contextualized within histories of mass disablement through militarism and settler colonialism?

The Asian/American and Americanist authors in this issue powerfully advance the "triangular" arguments of Asian American critique to discussions of ableism and extend it. Jina B. Kim, Mel Chen, and Mimi Khúc, for instance, in their essay "Work Will Not Save Us: An Asian American Crip Manifesto," discuss the perils and pitfalls of the structures of racial capitalism's techniques of self-responsibilization and disciplinization. Centering feminist crip of color labor analysis, the authors call to question the Asian American myth of respectable integration into ableist capitalism through model minority achievement. The racialized exploitation of Asian American bodyminds symptomatically manifests as and through an affect of achievement.

Minority achievement exacts a toll on the Asian American body and mind. Kim, Chen, and Khúc's excoriation of the debilitating effects of racial ableist capitalism feature a stunning centering of autoethographic experiences as crip and disabled Asian American femme and gender non-conforming subjects in the academic industrial complex. Other such granular and experiential representations appear in many of the contributions by artists in the special issue. For instance, this double bind of Asian American estrangement from and yet intimacy with racial capitalist forms is aesthetically and movingly represented in the stark self-portraiture of artist Chanika Svetvilas's "what i have learned (fill in the blank)," in which she represents her navigation of a clinical diagnosis of bipolar and the racist dynamics of American life. Drawing on a multimodal archive of prescription receipts and medical texts, Svetvilas reflects on her Thai American crip identity through the stark, scraping, textural effects achieved through the medium of charcoal.

In a similar domain as that of Svetvilas, José Miguel Esteban demonstrates the ways that Asian American art and performance constitute a vital site of crip politics for the Asian North American experience. Esteban leads us through a meditative choreo-essay on his depression in "My Panalangin of (Un)belonging: Encountering Still Gestures of Prayer, Improvising Still Movements Through Depression." Through movement and dance, he reflects on how his depression, his interactions with psychiatric normalization, and his reflective engagement with the Catholic rosary as a Filipinx Canadian allows for a rapprochement with a potentially colonial object of desire that unsettles his relationship with the ableist settler multiculturalism of the Canadian state. Fascinatingly, it is the colonial fetish object of the Catholic rosary that orients Esteban's Filipinx embodiment vis-a-vis the settler multiculturalism of Canadian life. Through it, Esteban leads his readers through a crip prayer that opens up a space in which madness challenges the presumptive normativity of Asian American respectability thus gesturing towards different ethical orientations to the settler construction of rationality that undergirds the ongoing settler conquest of Turtle Island.

Furthering the crucial conversation on the intersection of artistic endeavor and crip critique, scholar-artist Min Gu anchors the brick and mortar Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland, California as another unexpected site to which crip politics may be reoriented. In similar ways in which Esteban explored the seemingly contradictory values of stillness in the context of dance, in her essay "The Pedagogy of Waiting: A Reorientation to Time with Artists with Disabilities and the Creative Growth Art Center," Gu explores a "pedagogy of waiting" that rests with, alongside, and in solidarity with those that arts educators are meant to teach. Rather than a linear pedagogical model that instills and insists on normative mastery, Gu lingers with immigrant Latefa Noorzai as an unexpected artist from whom we can learn so much. Gu argues that her identity as a Chinese-American arts researcher drawing on the philosophical tradition of wu wei, which means inaction or inexertion, allows for a different kind of relationship between her and her interlocutors grounded in a crip politics of interdependence and mutuality.

heidi rhodes' "Bed/Life: Chronic Illness, Postcolonial Entanglements, and Queer Intimacy in the Stay" resonates with the stillness and contemplative relationality that both Gu's and Esteban's work invite us to ponder. Rhodes offers a feminist reading of chronic illness as a "condition of global entanglement within the colonial and postcolonial milieu of racial capitalism, its afterlives, its historical traumas." Focusing specifically on the bed, perhaps one of the single most taken for granted technologies, Rhodes reorients our thinking against the grain of capitalist directives that command wellness and narrow notions of productive being. Using Eunjung Kim's framing of the punitive imposition of cure, Rhodes questions the logics of what it means to be "well" and to get out of bed. 13 The stakes of such work are what kinds of capacities and uprightness are required in order to be a fully fledged political subject.

Jiya S. Pandya "rezones" disability studies by analyzing the ways that the disabling aftermaths of the Bhopal chemical disaster constitutes a critical site of crip politics not often centered in the field. In Pandya's essay, "Crip Life Amidst Debilitation: Medicalization, Survival, and the Bhopal Gas Leak," she crucially centers the knowledge of those affected by government, corporate, and medical malfeasance against normative accounts of environmental disaster. However, Pandya does so to center the savvy navigation of their imposed vulnerabilities rather than through tropes of victimhood that can accompany accounts of a debilitated global South. The embodiments of Global South subjects are similarly scoped within the transpacific militarism and empire-building that Athia Choudhury critiques in her analysis in "Milky Appetites: The Foods that Make Us Human." Choudhury invites us to linger with the tainted taste, texture, and tactility of colonial food cultures. By following the curious history of US American milk powder and its transnational circulation via networks of militarized conquest, Choudhury interrogates a staple commodity that has come to emblematize racialized constructs of American wellness and corporal health—all imposed and inextricably linked to histories that have occasioned mass disablement throughout Asia and its diaspora.

Lzz Johnk draws on the collective wisdom of women of color disability theorists like Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and Nirmala Erevelles in order to recast, perhaps, the most canonical example of Asian American literature as a foundational disability studies text. Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior (1976) constitutes a vital object and archive for a "Mad Asian American" subjectivity that solidifies the origins for an Asian American feminist disability studies in a much earlier era of multiethnic fiction. In a stunning and admirable way, Johnk positions Asian American madness in wide and collaborative conversation with foundational thinkers in Black and Latinx crip critiques that positions, much like other Asian American authors and creatives in this special issue, Asian American crip politics in necessary conversation with other racialized experiences of disablement and their creative and philosophical expression.

Recuperating or reinvigorating critical attention to political subjects not often or even considered foundational crip thinkers is a powerful critical intervention that is descriptive of Hilary Rasch's essay "Holding On and Letting Go in Kia LaBeija's Self-Portraiture." In a similar attention to portraiture surfaced in Svetvilas's portfolio, Rasch offers a moving analysis of the choreographed photography of Kia LaBeija's self-portraiture in her series 24, which curates her life, its banalities and triumphs, as a Black and Filipina person living with HIV. As a former house mother in New York City's ballroom scene, LaBeija cleverly plays with the performance origin of voguing. Voguing begins with the editorial posing of classic model poses found in the magazine Vogue that are corporally stylized into a series of steps, movements, and gestures that have long centered Black and Latinx queer survivance. LaBeija plays with these origins in her portrait series returning to "still" photography rather than choreography in order to performatively render and shed light on the banality of debility associated with the treatment, persistence, and polemics of living with HIV. Rasch in her writing elaborates and honors the dignity of Black and Brown life.

Section II: Revisitations, Revisions

This section features contributions that harbor a shared impulse to revisit familiar sites and sources in disability's historiography, while asking new questions that surface submerged racial histories and unravel historiographic consensus. One essay returns to a well-known scene in disability studies, Helen Keller's "miracle" at the water pump with Anne Sullivan, but lingers on the unnamed black laborer who drew the water. What disability histories, of black labor and Indigenous removal, remain untold on the Keller plantation in Tuscumbia, Alabama? Another lingers at a familiar site in Deaf cultural history, the residential school, but centers combined schools for blind and Deaf African American youths. Another reveals nested histories of race and rehabilitation in autism's archives that have been concealed by autism's contemporary attachments to white, middle-class boyhood. How might these obscured and untold histories unsettle the representational politics and narrative proclivities of what Chris Bell once aptly termed "white disability studies"? 14

In their staged revisitations and theoretical revisions, the essays in this section refuse additive models of racial inclusion, in which the meaning of disability remains unchanged despite its racial and spatial contexts. In their analyses of the racial coordinates of disability, these essays answer Cristina Visperas' urging, referenced earlier in this introduction, to "take seriously the limits of seeing and naming disability in subjects who have been at the margins of its theorizations and field building." 15 Instead, the contributions in this section revel in the myriad ways that blackness and Indigeneity scramble (white) disability studies' common referents and narrative tropes. For example, another contribution locates a "Black mad politics" that emerged from Black-authored mental health films in the 1970s, a politics that remained distinct from the ambitions and aesthetics of the white-led anti-psychiatry movement. The remaining essays each apply pressure to existing theories of disability and disablement to better account for the rhetorical strategies and political-ontologies of racialized debilitation. In doing so, these contributions revise conceptual frameworks in Christian theology and biopolitical theory, using histories of disability and enslavement and Indigenous theories of trauma as invaluable resources for advancing critical thought. The contributions in this section revisit and revise in pursuit of a disability studies that is irrevocably disrupted and rerouted by histories of race and racialization, toward more expansive reading practices and ethical horizons.

In "The Keller Plantation and the Racial Plot of Disability History in the U.S.," Camille S. Owens attends to the "racial occlusions" that underwrite Keller's storied iconicity by refocusing our attention on the untold black labor and Indigenous removal that subtends "the most hegemonic origin story of American disability history." Turning to narrative theories and critical geographies emerging from black and Indigenous studies, including those of Sylvia Wynter, Katherine McKittrick, and Tiffany Lethabo King, Owens centers the landscapes of racial violence that constituted Keller's childhood surrounds and cohered her disabled subjectivity. In doing so, she accentuates the violent irony of white disabled representation as it obfuscates the black and Indigenous life it materially and metaphorically depends on. Owens reads cultural production about Keller's life alongside Keller's own memoir, The Story of My Life, to stake larger claims about the "marginal plots," both narrative and topographic, that have unfolded alongside and underneath the canonical whiteness of disability history. Census reports, land records, newspaper clippings, and interviews with local historians and descendants of the Keller plantation's black laborers, alongside material culture artifacts from the plantation's museum Ivy Green, offer "black and Indigenous counter-archives" that challenge who qualifies as a viable subject in disability history.

G. Jasper Conner's essay similarly challenges the archival and representational limits of disability histories oriented around white subjects. Conner punctures the unmarked whiteness of Deaf cultural history by reorienting readers toward the Black Deaf communities that emerged out of residential schools for deaf and blind African American children in the twentieth century. In "Blind and Deaf Together: Cross-Disability Community at Virginia's Residential School for Black Disabled Youth," Conner argues that a nearly exclusive focus on white residential schools in Deaf history, schools that were largely segregated based on specific impairments, misrepresents the prevalence of cross-disability community among Black deaf and blind youths. Combined schools, a relic of the Jim Crow era intended to reduce state spending on Black life, meant deaf and blind African Americans shared dorms, classrooms, sports teams, and robust social lives. Working with previously unstudied archival records from the Virginia State School alongside oral histories with former residents, Conner highlights the centrality of blind African American children to Black Deaf histories. Advancing scholarship in Black disability history, Conner argues that blind and deaf African American students accessed identity and community that often exceeded specific impairments, gathering around their shared status as Black and disabled.

Like Owens and Conner, Olivia Banner's work directs disability historians toward new lineages that are obscured by an exclusive focus on white disability icons and archives in her essay, "Mental Health vs Mutual Aid: Competing Visions of Care in Black-authored Films in the 1970s." Banner positions two little-known films, Hitch: Portrait of a Black Leader as a Young Man (1970) and Sam, Sam in Harlem (1974) as profound "countervisions" to state-sponsored mental hygiene cinema in the post-WWII era that fomented psychiatric and sociological condemnations of Black "cultures of pathology." Instead, these films illuminated a "vernacular aesthetics of mutual aid" intended to refuse state divestments in Harlem's Black community, and positioned Black cultural production, specifically "community-determined media," as a kind of care work. Mobilizing Sami Schalk's articulation of a distinctly "Black disability politics" that emerged out of 1970s Black health activism, as well as Jina B. Kim's "crip-of-color critique," Banner demonstrates that Black disability media confronted the co-constitution of racism, ableism, and sanism in ways that were distinct from the white-led psychiatric survivors movement. Intervening in disability media studies, Banner amplifies histories of "Black self-determined media," in which Black youths used mass communications to document care practices and combat the pathologization of Black life in their own communities, as a novel expression of "crip-of-color information politics."

In "Wolf Girls and Mechanical Boys: Whiteness and Assimilation in Bruno Bettelheim's Narratives of Autism," Elizabeth Cady Maher furthers this section's commitment to recovering submerged racial histories, this time recovering those obscured by autism's contemporary associations with white, middle-class masculinity. Maher foregrounds the diagnostic labors of psychologist and Jewish concentration camp survivor Bruno Bettelheim as he developed multiple narratives of autism's etiologies and symptomatic expression, all of which were distinctly racialized. Revisiting seminal texts in Bettelheim's oeuvre, Maher identifies several racial prototypes for childhood autism, including Kamala the "wolf girl" of Midnapore India and Joey the (white) American "mechanical boy," that presented a continuum of in/curability premised on their capacity for racial assimilation. Maher argues that Bettelheim instrumentalized his "feral children," representing a primitive, feminized, and animal "inhumanity," as foils that positioned "mechanical" inhumanity as comparatively salvageable given its alignment with white, masculine, technocratic modernity. "Wolf Girls and Mechanical Boys" also connects Bettelheim's therapeutic emphasis on racial assimilability to his Jewish identity and Ashkenazi Jewish efforts to avoid religious persecution by emulating Christian whiteness. Maher argues that Bettelheim universalized stereotypes of the pathological "mechanistic Jew" by mapping them on to the autistic "mechanical boy" and asserting his curability, and thus assimilability, into white humanity.

Calli Micale offers conceptual revisions of trends in contemporary Christian thought that associate the positive revaluation of intellectual disability, as a spiritual gift rather than evidence of sin, as a straightforward path to liberatory theology. Micale grounds her skepticism toward present-day recuperations of intellectual disability in Christian theology in her rhetorical analysis of nineteenth-century Protestant defenses of chattel slavery. In "Signs of Grace: Protestant Pro-Slavery Rhetoric of Disability in the 19th Century," Micale analyzes public sermons and religious tracts to show how positive assessments of black "simple-mindedness," as an expression of open-heartedness and piety, were instrumentalized to soothe Christian guilt and position the plantation as a pedagogical site for black spiritual liberation. Whether enslaved people were appraised negatively, as monstrously "depraved Africans," or positively, as childlike "faithful servants," both were premised on presumptions of imbecility that rationalized racial subordination as the only path to black salvation. Citing critiques issued by Julie Avril Minich and Roderick Ferguson about the perils of inclusion in neoliberal states and institutions, Micale argues that positive language about disability does not ensure liberation or justice for disabled people. Instead, positive evaluations of disability can foster political complacency in inclusive Christian congregations, particularly in their failure to address systemic disability injustices beyond their rehabilitative rhetoric.

Closing this section on revisitations and revisions, Faye M. Fraser evaluates the affordances and limitations of Jasbir Puar's oft-cited biopolitical theory of racial debilitation in "On the Question of Soul Wounding: Secular Debility, Biopolitics, and Canada's Right to Maim." Contending with Canada's ongoing settler colonial project and its "sanctioned maiming" of Nishnawbe Aski Nation (NAN) communities in Northwestern Ontario, Fraser argues that the intrinsic secularity of Western biopolitical theory cannot exhaustively assess the spiritual injuries inflicted by the Canadian settler regime. Fraser adopts postcolonial and anticolonial frameworks as well as Indigenous theories of trauma, like Janice Acoose's "dis-membering" and Eduardo Duran's "soul-wounding," to elucidate the scale and scope of anti-Indigenous debilitation. 16 Fraser urges us to theorize beyond secular-biopolitics when conceptualizing the social determinants of Indigenous sickness and health, so that we might arrive at an "anti-colonial disciplinary ethics'' capacious enough to combat "transcendental violence" against Canada's First Nations people.

Section III: Survivance & New Directions

The contributions in this section look to the past to seek new pathways forward. They return to canonical works of literature or to embodied, situated knowledge(s) to speak to disability justice as practice. The contributions in this section expand foundational disability studies interventions such as David T. Mitchell and Sharon Snyder's Narrative Prosthesis. 17 They build on and are conversant with recent critical interventions such as Jasbir Puar's theorizing of debility and identity and assemblage in The Right to Maim and Terrorist Assemblages, Liat Ben-Moshe's work on disability and carcerality in Decarcerating Disability, and Sami Schalk's troubling of disability and metaphor in Bodyminds Reimagined. 18 Together, the essays in this section demand that we center the disability knowledge generated at the intersections of race and disability in transnational contexts, and use these epistemologies to suggest new directions for disability justice.

The section begins with Micah Khater's essay, which bridges the historical interventions of the previous sections with the new modes of reading for disability and new methods of disability justice organizing theorized by the remaining articles in the special issue. Micah Khater uncovers a new archive of Black writing and theorizing of disability in handwritten letters authored by incarcerated women, as well as state punishment ledgers and prison medical files. Khater situates these women's stories and rhetorical uses of disability in conversations about disability as metaphor and material by reading the discourse in these letters as both "representational and literal." Micah locates in these letters, written in early 20th century Alabama, insights into the ongoing imbrication of state, labor, bodies, and violence in the afterlives of chattel slavery. Khater is interested in how these women used illness, disability, and the act of narrativizing, telling stories, "as a strategy of refusal and escape" from undesired, exploited labor. Their writing revalues the designation of disabled as useless; "uselessness" to the state recuses one from labor exploitation and therefore mobilizes disability as a means of refusal and survivance.

Sarah Orsak's work also discusses the afterlives of chattel slavery through her analysis of Thylias Moss's prose poem Slave Moth. In Orsak's work, literate enslaved Black women complicate our understanding of able-bodiedness and disability. Orsak close-reads the main character's experience as an enslaved woman who can read, revealing that whereas literacy is an ability in a literate society, for enslaved people, literacy often served as a disability and was, quite literally, disabling if caught. Moss's work allows Orsak to trouble conversations on disability and normalcy, pointing out that racial slavery positioned what we consider normal and able as unnatural and socially, as well as potentially physically, debilitating for the enslaved. Orsak names this "abnormality-ability." Orsak's work further underscores how whiteness is conflated with able-bodiedness and so normalized and disability is rendered abnormal. In other words, the fungibility of Blackness is necessary to how able-bodiedness as white and normal are constellated.

While Orsak uses Moss's narrative to add race as a necessary analytic in critical disability studies theorizing of normalcy, Liz Bowen's contributions demonstrate how not only non-whites have been rendered abnormal despite in/capacity but also how non-human animals are subjected to the same debilitating racial logics. Bowen returns to and re-reads the works of celebrated Harlem Renaissance writers Jean Toomer and Zora Neale Hurston as unexamined locations of disability theory. Toomer and Hurston "show that a capacious, ecologically oriented disability politics is central to the history of Black cultural production." Within Toomer's and Hurston's fiction, Bowen locates critiques of racial capitalism that reorients larger conversations about the innovative aesthetic practices of both authors, but also discourse about racial violence, debility, environmentalism, and human/non-human relations.

Keish Kim challenges us to take seriously Afro-diasporic religious beliefs that inform how Black people interpret disability and violence. Kim enters conversations about debilitating colonial violence to draw our attention not only to the disabling violence of war and conflict but also to the slow violence that occurs in times of seeming peace. Kim does so by tracing syphilis among a family of poor, Black Dominican women in Nelly Rosario's Song of the Water Saints (2002). Kim demonstrates how a more nuanced approach to race and disability is needed in postcolonial theory and underscores the necessity of acknowledging culturally-specific epistemologies of the body. Similarly, Ally Day argues that we need different ways of reading for disability in Black, queer activism, especially if we are to locate the cross-coalition activism of certain Black queer figures. Day focuses specifically on Audre Lorde, Essex Hemphill, and Joseph Beam, contending that we need to read their works palimpsestically, which requires reading through overlaying identities to reveal the entanglements of race, illness, and disability. Palempsestic reading links these entanglements within the social contexts of these writers and the activist movements in which they participate. Day contends that this new method of reading reveals new genealogies of crip activism.

The last two essays in this section underscore this special issue's commitment to access-centered praxis and pedagogy. Both "Cross-Coalitional Anti-Racist and Anti-Ableist Movements?: Building on Maroon/Fugitive Knowledges and Global South Epistemologies" and "(Re)centering the Knowledge of Disabled Activists, Poverty Scholars, and Community Scholars of Color to Transform Education" demand that disability studies reorient itself to the epistemologies of disabled people outside of academia. Alexis Padilla demonstrates how counterstory reveals narratives of disabled Latinx people in the Global North and Global South that have been absent in formal academic discourse. Padilla proposes LatDisCrit studies as a possible way to fill that want. Moreover, Padilla theorizes quilombo–maroon communities formed by the enslaved–as a mechanism of cross-cultural-ethnic-racial coalition building. "(Re)centering the Knowledge of Disabled Activists, Poverty Scholars, and Community Scholars of Color to Transform Education" is an exercise of coalitional knowledge building, through a duoethnography, a method of collaborative, situated knowledge-making that eschews the hierarchy created in traditional academic-led autoethnography. Using this method, Emily Nusbaum, Lydia X. Z. Brown, Brianna Dickens, Tiny (Lisa) Gray-Garcia, Saili S. Kulkarni, Lateef McLeod, Amanda L. Miller, and Holly Pearson stage a discussion about who should and how to better incorporate disability, poverty, and race into teacher training and conversations around pedagogy.

May the interventions seeded in this special issue embolden more disciplinary disruption that unequivocally aligns disability studies with historical and contemporary struggles for racial and decolonial liberation. We welcome all the objects, origins, and (re)orientations to come.