Colonial Cartographies and the Disabled Body
摘要
This chapter is primarily focused on the colonial cartographies in the Pacific that completely changed not only the geographical space but also the Indigenous people's bodies, their identities, and their ways of knowing. By showing mapping as a tool of imperial domination and control, the chapter argues that European cartographic practices turned the Pacific Islands from a network of kinship and ecological knowledge into an empire with fragmented territories marked by racial, spatial, and bodily hierarchies. The colonial maps, through their visual codes, territorial splits, and classificatory systems, generated, on the one hand, categories of normality and disability, which were exercised through acts of dispossession, militarization, missionary intervention, and medical carcerality. The Indigenous bodies were rendered “abnormal,” unproductive, or pathological by these cartographies within the colonial frameworks, particularly as the Western biological and racial paradigms overran the Indigenous concepts of balance, reciprocity, and embodied relationality. The chapter also discusses how the mapping of catastrophes, outbreaks, and environmental changes as signs of Indigenous weakness served to reinforce the narratives of incapacity while, at the same time, erasing Indigenous resilience and adaptive knowledge. Through the use of post-colonial theory, critical disability studies, and Pacific Indigenous epistemologies, the chapter unveils how race and disability intermingled under colonial rule, producing the annihilation of marginalized groups that persist. However, it also points out Indigenous counter-mappings, such as the “Blue Pacific” vision, that not only reclaim oceanic connectivity and reassert sovereignty but also challenge Eurocentric notions of normality, embodiment, and care. Later, the discussion leads to the conclusion that disability in Oceania, on the one hand, is a colonial creation that still has modern impacts, and, on the other hand, is a place where resistance can be grounded in Indigenous views of interdependence, communal health, and toughness.