Revisiting 'Midnight’s Children'
Critical Disability and Postcolonial Studies Interventions in Christology
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/post.v7i3.20305Keywords:
disability, postcolonial, Christology, healthAbstract
Within postcolonial literature, “Midnight’s Children” (Rushdie) their births laden not only with supernatural expectation, but traumatically marked with cultural upheaval—appear as symbols of hope in an unreliable future. Given the presence of disability in postcolonial literature, this essay pushes Christian theology to think with our own “midnight’s child”—one born “uncomely,” disfigured (Isaiah 53). “Disability”— never without some material signature, but always a cultural representation— names the ply of rhetoric batted back and forth between colonial and anti-colonial, these volleys shifting aesthetics and bending arcs of affect. Through the optics of modern realism, Jesus appeared as healer for the regime of “ablenationalism.” This essay, however, dares to think the figure of Jesus as volleyed back at Empire by anti-colonials. Reading with the Global South—namely, with the biblical scholar Simon Samuel and the constructive theology of Marcella Althaus-Reid—makes the figure of Jesus as postcolonial crip not wholly unprecedented.
References
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———. 2001. Indecent Theology. London: Routledge.
Barker, Clare. 2011. Postcolonial Fiction and Disability: Exceptional Children, Metaphor and Materiality. Basingstoke, Hampshire, England, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
Barker, Clare and Stuart Murray. 2010. “Disabling Postcolonialism: Global Disability Cultures and Democratic Criticism.” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 4(3): 327–332. http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/jlcds.2010.20
Berlant, Lauren. 2007. “Slow Death: Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency,” Critical Inquiry 33(4): 754–780.
Betcher, Sharon V. 2007. Spirit and the Politics of Disablement. Minneapolis: Fortress.
———. 2013. “Disability and the Terror of the Miracle Tradition.” In Miracles Revisited: New Testament Miracle Stories and Their Concepts of Reality, edited by Stefan Alkier and Annette Weissenrieder, 161–182. Berlin: DeGruyter.
Bhabha, Homi. 1994. The Location of Culture. Oxford and New York: Routledge. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/9783110296372.161
Borg, Marcus J. 1987. Jesus, A New Vision: Spirit, Culture and the Life of Discipleship. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco.
Buchanan, Ian. 2000. Deleuzism: A Metacommentary. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Carter, Warren. 2011. “‘The blind, the lame, the paralyzed’ (John 5:3): John’s Gospel, Disability Studies and Postcolonial Perspectives.” In Disability Studies and Biblical Literature, edited by Jeremy Schipper and Candida R. Moss, 129–150. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.
Chow, Rey. 2002. The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Columbia.
Comaroff, Jean. 1993. “The Diseased Heart of Africa: Medicine, Colonialism, and the Black Body,” in Knowledge, Power and Practice: The Anthropology of Medicine and Everyday Life, edited by Shirley Linedenbaum and Margaret Lock, 305–329. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Comaroff, Jean and John Comaroff. 2012. Theory from the South. London: Paradigm.
Connell, Raewyn. 2012. Southern Theory. Sydney: Allen and Unwin.
Crossan, John Dominic. 1994. Jesus, A Revolutionary Biography. New York: Harper Collins.
Davidson, Michael. 2008. “Universal Design: The Work of Disability in an age of Globalization.” In Concerto for the Left Hand: Disability and the Defamiliar Body. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.
Davis, Lennard J. 2002. Bending Over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism, and other Difficult Positions. New York: New York University Press.
Ehrenreich, Barbara. 2009. Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermining America. New York: Metropolitan Books.
Einstein, Gillian and Margrit Shildrick. 2009. “The Postconventional Body: Retheorising women’s health.” Social Science and Medicine 69: 293–300. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2009.04.027
Foucault, Michel. 1994. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. New York: Vintage.
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———. 2002. “The Politics of Staring: Visual Rhetorics of Disability in Popular Photography.” In Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities, edited by Sharon Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggemann and Rosemarie Garland Thomson, 189–205. New York: The Modern Language Association of America.
Ghai, Anita. 2012. “Engaging with Disability with Postcolonial Theory,” in Disability and Social Theory: New Developments and Directions, edited by Dan Goodley, Bill Hughes, and Lennard Davis, 270–286 . New York: Palgrave Macmillan. http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/9781137023001.0022
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Hughes, Bill. 2012. “Conclusion: Disability and Social Theory.” In Disability and Social Theory: New Developments and Directions, edited by Dan Goodley, Bill Hughes and Lennard Davis, 308–317. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/9781137023001.0024
Jain, Sarah Lochlin. 2007. “Living in Prognosis: Toward an Elegiac Politics.” Representations 98(1): 77–92. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/rep.2007.98.1.77
Jordan, Thomas. 2013. “Disability, Able-Bodiedness and the Biopolitical Imagination.” Review of Disability Studies: An International Journal 9(1): 26–38.
Keller, Catherine. 2004. “Introduction: Alien/Nation, Liberation, and the Postcolonial Underground.” In Postcolonial Theology: Of Divinity and Empire, edited by Catherine Keller, Michael Nausner and Mayra Rivera, 1–19. Atlanta: Chalice Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/9783527612369.ch1
Kwok Pui-Lan. 1998. “Jesus/The Native: Biblical Studies from a Postcolonial Perspective.” In Teaching the Bible: The Discourses and Politics of Biblical Pedagogy, edited by Fernando F Segovia and Mary Ann Tolbert, 69–85. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis.
Meekosha, Helen. 2008. “Contextualizing Disability: Developing Southern/Global Theory.” Keynote paper given to 4th Biennial Disability Studies Conferences, Lancaster University, 2-4 September 2008. Accessed 1.21.2014.
Moore, Stephen. 2001. God’s Beauty Parlor: and Other Queer Spaces in and around the Bible. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2001.
Moraga, Cherrie. 1998. Heroes and Saints. Albuquerque: West End Press.
Morrison, Toni. 1994 [1970]. The Bluest Eye. NY: Plume/Penguin Press.
Morton, Timothy. 2010a. The Ecological Thought, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
———. 2010b. “Guest Column: Queer Ecology,” PMLA 125.2:273–282. http://dx.doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2010.125.2.273
———. 2013. HyperObjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Nandy, Ashis. 1988. The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism. Delhi: Oxford University Press India.
Nepveux, Denise and Emily Smith Beitiks. 2010. “Producing African Disability through Documentary Film.” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 4(3): 237–254. http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/jlcds.2010.21
Ngue, Julie C Nack. 2007. “Colonial Discourses of Disability and Normalization in Contemporary Francophone Immigrant Narratives: Bessora’s 53cm and Fatou Diome’s Le Ventre de l’Atlantique.” Wagadu 4 (Summer 2007). Online at http://colfax.cortland.edu/wagadu/Volume%204/articles4.html.
Puar, Jasbir. 2012. “Coda: The Cost of Getting Better: Suicide, Sensation, Switchpoints.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 18(1): 149–158. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/10642684-1422179
Ralston, Holmes III. 1995. “Does Nature Need to be Redeemed?,” Zygon 29(1): 205–229.
Razack, Sherene. 1998. Looking White People in the Eye: Gender, Race and Culture in Courtooms and Classrooms. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Roets, Griet and Rosi Braidotti. 2012. “Nomadology and Subjectivity: Deleuze, Guattari and Critical Disability Studies.” In Disability and Social Theory: New Developments and Directions, edited by Dan Goodley, Bill Hughes and Lennard Davis, 161–178. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/9781137023001.0015
Roy, Arundhati. 2008 Reprint [1997]. The God of Small Things. New York: HarperPerennial.
Rushdie, Salman. 1981. Midnight’s Children. New York: Knopf.
Samuel, Simon. 2002. A Postcolonial Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus. Etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/3422/1/247231.pdf. Internet edition. Accessed 10.24.13.
Sinha, Indra. 2007. Animal’s People. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Snyder, Sharon L. and David T. Mitchell. 2010. “Introduction: Ablenationalism and the Geo-Politics of Disability.” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 4(2): 113–125. http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/jlcds.2010.10
Stiker, Henri-Jacques. 2009 [1999]. A History of Disability, Translated by William Sayers. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Thrift, Nigel. 2008. Non-Representational Theory: Space/Politics/Affect. Oxford and New York: Routledge.
———. 2001. Indecent Theology. London: Routledge.
Barker, Clare. 2011. Postcolonial Fiction and Disability: Exceptional Children, Metaphor and Materiality. Basingstoke, Hampshire, England, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
Barker, Clare and Stuart Murray. 2010. “Disabling Postcolonialism: Global Disability Cultures and Democratic Criticism.” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 4(3): 327–332. http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/jlcds.2010.20
Berlant, Lauren. 2007. “Slow Death: Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency,” Critical Inquiry 33(4): 754–780.
Betcher, Sharon V. 2007. Spirit and the Politics of Disablement. Minneapolis: Fortress.
———. 2013. “Disability and the Terror of the Miracle Tradition.” In Miracles Revisited: New Testament Miracle Stories and Their Concepts of Reality, edited by Stefan Alkier and Annette Weissenrieder, 161–182. Berlin: DeGruyter.
Bhabha, Homi. 1994. The Location of Culture. Oxford and New York: Routledge. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/9783110296372.161
Borg, Marcus J. 1987. Jesus, A New Vision: Spirit, Culture and the Life of Discipleship. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco.
Buchanan, Ian. 2000. Deleuzism: A Metacommentary. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Carter, Warren. 2011. “‘The blind, the lame, the paralyzed’ (John 5:3): John’s Gospel, Disability Studies and Postcolonial Perspectives.” In Disability Studies and Biblical Literature, edited by Jeremy Schipper and Candida R. Moss, 129–150. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.
Chow, Rey. 2002. The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Columbia.
Comaroff, Jean. 1993. “The Diseased Heart of Africa: Medicine, Colonialism, and the Black Body,” in Knowledge, Power and Practice: The Anthropology of Medicine and Everyday Life, edited by Shirley Linedenbaum and Margaret Lock, 305–329. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Comaroff, Jean and John Comaroff. 2012. Theory from the South. London: Paradigm.
Connell, Raewyn. 2012. Southern Theory. Sydney: Allen and Unwin.
Crossan, John Dominic. 1994. Jesus, A Revolutionary Biography. New York: Harper Collins.
Davidson, Michael. 2008. “Universal Design: The Work of Disability in an age of Globalization.” In Concerto for the Left Hand: Disability and the Defamiliar Body. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.
Davis, Lennard J. 2002. Bending Over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism, and other Difficult Positions. New York: New York University Press.
Ehrenreich, Barbara. 2009. Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermining America. New York: Metropolitan Books.
Einstein, Gillian and Margrit Shildrick. 2009. “The Postconventional Body: Retheorising women’s health.” Social Science and Medicine 69: 293–300. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2009.04.027
Foucault, Michel. 1994. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. New York: Vintage.
Garland Thomson, Rosemarie. 1996. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press.
———. 2002. “The Politics of Staring: Visual Rhetorics of Disability in Popular Photography.” In Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities, edited by Sharon Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggemann and Rosemarie Garland Thomson, 189–205. New York: The Modern Language Association of America.
Ghai, Anita. 2012. “Engaging with Disability with Postcolonial Theory,” in Disability and Social Theory: New Developments and Directions, edited by Dan Goodley, Bill Hughes, and Lennard Davis, 270–286 . New York: Palgrave Macmillan. http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/9781137023001.0022
Grech, Shaun. 2012. “Disability and the Majority World: A Neocolonial Approach,” in Disability and Social Theory: New Developments and Directions, edited by Dan Goodley, Bill Hughes, and Lennard Davis, 52–69. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/9781137023001.0007
Haraway, Donna. 1992. “Ecce Homo, Ain’t (Ar’n’t) I a Woman, and Inappropriate/d Others: The Human in a Post-Humanist Landscape,” in Feminists Theorize the Political, eds. Judith Butler and Joan W Scott, 86–100. NY: Routledge.
von Harnack, Adolf. 1908. The Mission and Expansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries. Vol I, translated by James Moffatt. New York: GP Putnam’s Sons.
Hughes, Bill. 2012. “Conclusion: Disability and Social Theory.” In Disability and Social Theory: New Developments and Directions, edited by Dan Goodley, Bill Hughes and Lennard Davis, 308–317. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/9781137023001.0024
Jain, Sarah Lochlin. 2007. “Living in Prognosis: Toward an Elegiac Politics.” Representations 98(1): 77–92. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/rep.2007.98.1.77
Jordan, Thomas. 2013. “Disability, Able-Bodiedness and the Biopolitical Imagination.” Review of Disability Studies: An International Journal 9(1): 26–38.
Keller, Catherine. 2004. “Introduction: Alien/Nation, Liberation, and the Postcolonial Underground.” In Postcolonial Theology: Of Divinity and Empire, edited by Catherine Keller, Michael Nausner and Mayra Rivera, 1–19. Atlanta: Chalice Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/9783527612369.ch1
Kwok Pui-Lan. 1998. “Jesus/The Native: Biblical Studies from a Postcolonial Perspective.” In Teaching the Bible: The Discourses and Politics of Biblical Pedagogy, edited by Fernando F Segovia and Mary Ann Tolbert, 69–85. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis.
Meekosha, Helen. 2008. “Contextualizing Disability: Developing Southern/Global Theory.” Keynote paper given to 4th Biennial Disability Studies Conferences, Lancaster University, 2-4 September 2008. Accessed 1.21.2014.
Moore, Stephen. 2001. God’s Beauty Parlor: and Other Queer Spaces in and around the Bible. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2001.
Moraga, Cherrie. 1998. Heroes and Saints. Albuquerque: West End Press.
Morrison, Toni. 1994 [1970]. The Bluest Eye. NY: Plume/Penguin Press.
Morton, Timothy. 2010a. The Ecological Thought, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
———. 2010b. “Guest Column: Queer Ecology,” PMLA 125.2:273–282. http://dx.doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2010.125.2.273
———. 2013. HyperObjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Nandy, Ashis. 1988. The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism. Delhi: Oxford University Press India.
Nepveux, Denise and Emily Smith Beitiks. 2010. “Producing African Disability through Documentary Film.” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 4(3): 237–254. http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/jlcds.2010.21
Ngue, Julie C Nack. 2007. “Colonial Discourses of Disability and Normalization in Contemporary Francophone Immigrant Narratives: Bessora’s 53cm and Fatou Diome’s Le Ventre de l’Atlantique.” Wagadu 4 (Summer 2007). Online at http://colfax.cortland.edu/wagadu/Volume%204/articles4.html.
Puar, Jasbir. 2012. “Coda: The Cost of Getting Better: Suicide, Sensation, Switchpoints.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 18(1): 149–158. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/10642684-1422179
Ralston, Holmes III. 1995. “Does Nature Need to be Redeemed?,” Zygon 29(1): 205–229.
Razack, Sherene. 1998. Looking White People in the Eye: Gender, Race and Culture in Courtooms and Classrooms. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Roets, Griet and Rosi Braidotti. 2012. “Nomadology and Subjectivity: Deleuze, Guattari and Critical Disability Studies.” In Disability and Social Theory: New Developments and Directions, edited by Dan Goodley, Bill Hughes and Lennard Davis, 161–178. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/9781137023001.0015
Roy, Arundhati. 2008 Reprint [1997]. The God of Small Things. New York: HarperPerennial.
Rushdie, Salman. 1981. Midnight’s Children. New York: Knopf.
Samuel, Simon. 2002. A Postcolonial Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus. Etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/3422/1/247231.pdf. Internet edition. Accessed 10.24.13.
Sinha, Indra. 2007. Animal’s People. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Snyder, Sharon L. and David T. Mitchell. 2010. “Introduction: Ablenationalism and the Geo-Politics of Disability.” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 4(2): 113–125. http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/jlcds.2010.10
Stiker, Henri-Jacques. 2009 [1999]. A History of Disability, Translated by William Sayers. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Thrift, Nigel. 2008. Non-Representational Theory: Space/Politics/Affect. Oxford and New York: Routledge.
Published
2016-01-20
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Articles
How to Cite
Betcher, S. V. (2016). Revisiting ’Midnight’s Children’: Critical Disability and Postcolonial Studies Interventions in Christology. Postscripts: The Journal of Sacred Texts, Cultural Histories, and Contemporary Contexts, 7(3), 311-334. https://doi.org/10.1558/post.v7i3.20305
