ABSTRACT
Scholars such as Alison Kafer and Lisa Cacho have recently explored the co-formations of disability, pathologization, race, and criminalization; yet, the diasporic analytics around migration, queer feminism, and global finance remain as yet unarticulated. In this chapter, I read Bhanu Kapil’s hybrid poetry and poetics text, Schizophrene, to articulate an atemporal history of (as well as linguistically embodied resistance to) global finance capital’s racialized, gendered, and imperialist pathologization of subjectivities through dispossession of home. As this chapter argues, in Schizophrene, Kapil co-articulates mental illness with migration and South Asian diaspora to implicate how bodies are gendered and racialized through rhetorics of (dis)ability.
Beyond a critical historical intervention on dispossession narratives, this chapter also examines Kapil’s poems as creatively centering alternate embodied, historically situated livability beyond rooted, boundaried, land and property notions of “home.” Per Habiba Ibrahim’s, Gayatri Gopinath’s queer of color and disability critiques, Kapil’s confront language’s colonizing, gendering, and sexualizing methods through syntactic play and sensory-based depictions. Such embodied poetics illuminate how disability and dispossession, when co-articulated, harness poetry’s linguistic and sensory-based creative potential for creating new, livable worlds that extend beyond dominant, bounded notions of land, body, and property.
