ABSTRACT
My recent book, Elusive Kinship: Disability and Human Rights in Postcolonial Literature (Temple UP, 2022) argues that deployments of disability in fiction reflect and contributed to the emergence of global disability human rights. Looking at the work by such diverse authors as Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie, J. M. Coetzee, Anita Desai, Edwidge Danticat, Jhumpa Lahiri, Chris Abani, Petina Gappah and Indra Sinha, I find depictions of disability vary widely, but often add energy and metaphoric force to these works. In this article I extend my analysis by considering depictions of blindness by the sighted S. African author, J. M. Coetzee, and the blind Indian writer Ved Mehta. Their treatments reveal both the rewards and difficulties of representing blindness. In his writing, Mehta introduced many Western readers to India but seems less concerned with weighty questions of ethics than Coetzee.
