Journal of Transnational American Studies

This essay builds a close-reading analysis of the television series Undone, whose treatment of race and disability suggests a framework that I call a “Mad migrant imaginary.” This imaginary is comparative and considers the racial, colonial, linguistic, and political environments in which ableism is situated. In doing so, such a framework considers colonial antecedents to the US nation-state which is simultaneously a site of struggle for accommodation of people with disabilities, while also problematizing the state’s centrality as a settler formation in disability analysis. My general claim is that without centering the racial–colonial, a disability analysis risks propounding the effects of the colonial and its inherent disabling effects. I also seek to attend to the ways that disability—which analytically tracks the distribution of vulnerability across difference—is vital for a comparative racial analysis of dispossession. I want to make it clear that disability analysis benefits greatly from racial analysis and that disability stands to enrich a critique of racism. I avoid positioning disability as a transcendent mode of difference which phases out race by implicitly assuming its parochial status for understanding the body and its differences. Instead, I suggest that attending to the generalized imposition of disablement across communities explicitly engages with the ways that race is a logic that rationalizes, promotes, and politically sanctions disablement as itself the prominent experience of being racialized partly as a function of access to citizenship, freedom of movement in the form of migration, and language sovereignty.