Bassam Sidiki reviews Crip Colony

Sony Coráñez Bolton. Crip Colony: Mestizaje, US Imperialism, and the Queer Politics of Disability in the Philippines. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2023. 224 pp.

21 June 2023

Review by Bassam Sidiki

Crip Colony is a welcome contribution to both disability and US empire studies. Coráñez Bolton argues that the American project of “benevolent assimilation” in the Philippines was in fact one of “benevolent rehabilitation,” undertaken to reform the Filipinos whose indigeneity appeared as inextricably tied to disability (p. 34). This rehabilitation was undertaken not just through standard medical intervention, as Warwick Anderson has shown, but also through the discourse of mestizaje—the racial admixture of indigenous Filipinos and conquering Europeans.[1] Thus, “Filipino mestizaje . . . becomes a marker of difference from the colonized indio and a vehicle evoking and evidencing their reform—the mestizo body then is the evidence, product, and agent of colonial rehabilitation” (p. 7). However, as the author astutely notes, this mestizaje is different from that of the American continent’s borderlands because of the Philippines’ location in Asia. Filipino mestizaje thus shuttles “between the native, tidally locked in a usable past, and the Orient, recalcitrantly impervious to much-needed Westernization” (p. 10).

Coráñez Bolton’s original analysis of Filipino mestizaje bridges the gulf between American hemispheric studies and Asian American studies, which have heretofore existed in silos. But Crip Colony is also significant for launching a project of “crip colonial critique” which—taking its cue but also departing from Jina Kim’s “crip-of-color critique”[2]—“proposes the analysis of disability and colonialism as a unified ideological structure” (pp. 8, 6). This may be the monograph’s most enduring contribution. Disability studies, even in their “crip-of-color” manifestations, have remained geographically limited to the US and avoid meaningful engagement with the Global South. Crip Colony is a key corrective on that front.

The book marshals a diverse corpus of literary, cultural, and visual materials—political cartoons in Puck magazine, Rudyard Kipling’s poetry, José Rizal’s Noli me tángere (1887), travel literature, and newspaper reports. Coráñez Bolton takes inspiration from Gayatri Gopinath’s Impossible Desires (2005) for this “‘scavenger methodology’” of using diverse archival materials, although a more careful review of the book would have exchanged its citation in Crip Colony with Jack Halberstam’s Female Masculinity (1998), which in turn inspired Gopinath (p. 34).[3] The author uses this method most effectively in the first chapter, drawing on materials from the turn of the century to show the ableist underpinnings of US imperial tutelage in the Philippines.

However, this method falters in the third chapter, on Philippine representations of a “disabled” Orient in travel literature (p. 100). Here Coráñez Bolton critiques a 1908 travelog representing Chinese foot-binding practices, but drifts away from this interesting topic too quickly to “scavenge” other aspects of the narrative, missing a key opportunity to historicize Chinese foot-binding. Coráñez Bolton argues that Filipino mestizos took up the mantle of their white colonizers to rehabilitate the “Orient”: the foot-bound Chinese woman represented an immobile Orient, while the mestizo’s freedom to move indexed his capacity and ability (p. 100). But Chinese foot-binding was already a ubiquitous specter in liberal thought by John Locke, John Stuart Mill, and others.[4] More consistent research in this vein could have made the chapter stronger and would have lent further credence to the author’s argument that the mestizos in China were rehearsing long-standing tropes of liberal empire.

[1] See Warwick Anderson, Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines (Durham, N.C., 2006).

[2] Jina B. Kim. “Toward a Crip-of-Color Critique: Thinking with Minich’s ‘Enabling Whom?,’” Lateral 6 (Spring 2017), csalateral.org/issue/6-1/forum-alt-humanities-critical-disability-studies-crip-of-color-critique-kim/

[3] See Jack Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham, N.C., 1998).

[4] See Hagar Kotaf, “Little Chinese Feet Encased in Iron Shoes: Freedom, Movement, Gender, and Empire in Western Political Thought.” Political Theory 43, (Jun. 2015), pp. 334–55.