Dreaming of Infrastructure: Crip-of-Color Critique, Octavia Butler, and Transnational Feminist Solidarity

You are warmly invited to an upcoming virtual event as part of the Transnational Feminist Solidarities CLA Initiative. Dr. Jina B. Kim (Smith College) will be giving a talk based on her forthcoming book, Dreaming of Infrastructure: Crip-of-Color Writing after the U.S. Welfare State (Duke University Press), which explores why we need literature + radical disability politics and aesthetics for navigating contemporary crises of care. 

“Dreaming of Infrastructure: Crip-of-Color Critique, Octavia Butler, and Transnational Feminist Solidarity”
Tuesday, March 26 @ 2:45pm – 4:15pm PST

Register for the event on Zoom here.

This talk provides an overview of a framework I call crip-of-color critique, an intersectional disability analytic that brings together feminist-/ queer-of-color critique with radical disability politics. Though I primarily ground this framework in the politics and narratives of 1996 major U.S. welfare reform, in this talk I look to Octavia Butler’s 1993 novel Parable of the Sower in order to articulate the relationship of crip-of-color critique to coerced migration and so-called free trade. In so doing, I connect my disability analysis of dependency and welfare reform to the narratives, effects, and practices of transnational capitalist restructuring, with the North American Free Trade Agreement as the nucleus event. I argue that the California freeway as a literary figure enables Octavia Butler to grapple with the transformative effects of structural adjustment and state divestment on both local and transnational scales. A longstanding emblem of social and spatial division, California’s freeways emerge in Butler’s novel as a multivalent site for engaging questions of movement and migration under the exigencies of transnational capitalism, as well as the differential production of mobility along lines of race and class. Her freeway narrative, in turn, highlights potential nodes of solidarity between radical disability analysis and transnational feminist critiques of globalization.

Jina B. Kim is a scholar, writer, and educator of critical disability studies and feminist/ queer-of-color critique. She is an assistant professor of English and the Study of Women and Gender at Smith College. Currently, she is at work on a manuscript titled Dreaming of Infrastructure: Crip-of-Color Writing after the U.S. Welfare State, which brings disability analysis to bear on women- and queer-of-color writing after 1996 U.S. welfare reform. Her work has appeared in Signs, Social Text, American Quarterly, MELUS, Disability Studies Quarterly, South Atlantic Quarterly, and The Asian American Literary Review. She can be found on Instagram at @emancipation_of_jiji

~This event is sponsored by the CLA Thematic Initiative on Transnational Feminist Solidarities and Comparative World Literature Program~

For accessibility requests and questions please contact crystal.lie@csulb.edu.