Gestures of Belonging: Disability and Postcoloniality in Bessie Head's A Question of Power

This essay identifies and intervenes in the limitations of both the social and the medical models of disability in the postcolonial context, suggesting that those limitations may apply to theorizations of disability more broadly. It suggests that Bessie Head's novel A Question of Power, which represents mental illness and disability without positing a stable etiology for them, illustrates the inapplicability of these ways of thinking about disability under instances of extreme precarity. As such, Head offers a test case for how mental illness and disability writ large might be theorized without the suppositions implicit to the liberal subject.