Decolonizing Bodies

Decolonizing Bodies shows how mad, queer, trans and disabled colonized and racialized people survive multiple systems of oppression, actively resist colonial presents, and build decolonial futures through bodily praxes.

Decolonizing Bodies offers novel theorizations of how racial capitalism, colonialism, and heteropatriarchal violence erode the bodily schema and experiences of racialized and colonized populations, profoundly constraining their being in the world. The book invigorates embodiment studies by centering the experiences and struggles of Black, Indigenous, colonized, disabled, queer, and racialized subjects, showing how they live these displacements and disintegrations.

The volume powerfully demonstrates how racism and colonialism sediment in bodily and habitual registers that are active, ongoing, made and remade. Bodies, the contributors argue, powerfully register the impacts of colonial and racialized violence, but through practices of embodiment, they also digest, expel, and transform them. In centering non-normative subjective experiences and making space for different kinds of embodied knowledge, Decolonizing Bodies also takes a step toward decolonizing academic knowledge.

This exciting and urgent book offers readers new ways of imagining, choreographing and enacting the body. Beyond connecting distant geographies of harm, it celebrates polymorphous decolonial repertoires that record, creatively narrate, and heal.