Crip Colony

In Crip Colony, Sony Coráñez Bolton examines how race, disability, sexuality, and mestizaje (racial mixture) were bound up together in the Philippines. He draws on literature, poetry, colonial records, political essays, travel narratives, and visual culture to show how disability politics worked alongside ideas of Philippine mestizaje.

His central argument concerns Filipino mestizo writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They used mestizaje as a racial ideology of ability, one that cast the Indigenous inhabitants of the Philippines as uncivilized and in need of uplift and rehabilitation. Mixed-race Filipinos who were heteronormative, able-bodied, and able-minded were presented as the model and the path for assimilation into the US empire. This let them, supposedly the superior group, govern the archipelago in collusion with American imperialism.

The book brings together disability studies, studies of colonialism, and queer-of-color critique. In doing so it extends theories of mestizaje beyond the United States and Latin America. It also shows how Filipinx and Filipinx American thought deepens our understanding of the colonial body and of the racial history of disability.