Disability, the Environment, and Colonialism

Tatiana Konrad is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of English and American Studies, University of Vienna, Austria; the principal investigator of “Air and Environmental Health in the (Post-)COVID-19 World;” and the editor of the “Environment, Health, and Well-being” book series at Michigan State University Press. She is the author of Docu-Fictions of War: U.S. Interventionism in Film and Literature; the editor of Imagining Air: Cultural Axiology and the Politics of Invisibility; Plastics, Environment, Culture, and the Politics of Waste; Cold War II: Hollywood’s Renewed Obsession with Russia; and Transportation and the Culture of Climate Change: Accelerating Ride to Global Crisis; and coeditor of Cultures of War in Graphic Novels: Violence, Trauma, and Memory.

“Konrad has brought together a dynamic set of scholars who have deeply considered the very real implications of the environment crises and systems of colonial rule in relation to questions of disability justice. Disability, the Environment, and Colonialism is an important book that offers a unique contribution to disability concerns beyond the western canon.”-Karen Soldatić, Canada Excellence Research Chair in Health Equity and Community Wellbeing at Toronto Metropolitan University, and coeditor of Global Perspectives on Disability Activism and Advocacy: Our Way “Although colonialism is most often understood as geographical violence, this book demonstrates that such violence is equally, simultaneously, and constitutively bodily violence and that disability is not just an unintended consequence of the colonial enterprise but the very means by which a nation-state’s biopower is exercised and sustained. Training a disability lens on the history of green colonialism reveals just how much ableism has activated-and continues to activate-the racial ecology of imperial conquest. Disability, the Environment, and Colonialism fills a critical gap in that scholarship.”-Sarah Jaquette Ray, Professor of Environmental Studies at California State Polytechnic University Humboldt, and author of The Ecological Other: Environmental Exclusion in American Culture