Elusive Kinship: Disability and Human Rights in Postcolonial Literature by Christopher Krentz (review)

Abstract

Reflecting on the “compelling presence” (2) of characters with disabilities in postcolonial literature, Christopher Krentz proclaims in Elusive Kinship: Disability and Human Rights in Postcolonial Literature that “disability is finally on the world’s agenda” (11). Despite there being over half a billion people with disabilities living in the Global South, they have been largely neglected when it comes to social, political, and scholarly awareness. Postcolonial literature provides a “corrective” (2) for this absence, argues Krentz, restoring the dignity of people with disabilities through depictions of “human, relatable, and exciting” (5) disabled characters in and from the Global South. Such literary works, he argues, both reflect and inform the progress that has been made in disability rights since the mid-twentieth century. Recognizing the parallel growth of postcolonial literature and global human rights, Krentz traces how literary works published after the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights potentially informed future rights instruments, most notably the 2006 Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). Studying African, South Asian, and Caribbean fiction in English from the 1950s to the present, Krentz analyzes writing by, among others, Chinua Achebe, J. M. Coetzee, Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai, and Edwidge Danticat. In highlighting the centrality of disability in these texts, he acknowledges that “disability theory needs to expand and shift if it is to engage meaningfully with global disability” (22). His push to expand the field of disability studies beyond its North American and European biases echoes calls made by scholars such as Ato Quayson (2007), Clare Barker (2011), Shaun Grech and Karen Soldatic (2016), and Jasbir K. Puar (2017), among others, who have pushed for robust scholarship on both theoretical frameworks and literary texts produced in the Global South. Acknowledging the complexity and ambiguity in how the term disability is understood, Krentz refuses to simplify the concept to an