“The Future Is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes and Mourning Songs”
by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-SamarasinhaIn The Future Is Disabled, Leah Laksmi Piepzna-Samarasinha asks some provocative questions: What if, in the near future, the majority of people will be disabled – and what if that’s not a bad thing? And what if disability justice and disabled wisdom are crucial to creating a future in which it’s possible to survive fascism, climate change, and pandemics and to bring about liberation?
Building on the work of their game-changing book “Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice”, Piepzna-Samarasinha writes about disability justice at the end of the world, documenting the many ways disabled people kept and are keeping each other – and the rest of the world – alive during Trump, fascism and the COVID-19 pandemic. Other subjects include crip interdependence, care and mutual aid in real life, disabled community building, and disabled art practice as survival and joy.
Written over the course of two years of disabled isolation during the pandemic, this is a book of love letters to other disabled QTBIPOC (and those concerned about disability justice, the care crisis, and surviving the apocalypse); honor songs for kin who are gone; recipes for survival; questions and real talk about care, organizing, disabled families, and kin networks and communities; and wild brown disabled femme joy in the face of death. With passion and power, The Future Is Disabled remembers our dead and insists on our future.
Review
The basic concept of this book is that we’d all be a lot better off if we learned how to care about each other and to take care of each other without getting caught up in our differences. Not that it’s ever easy – there’s a whole chapter on why even people with good intentions in the disability community doing disability justice work can cause harm to each other. But the basic fact remains if we worked together instead of fighting each other we be better off. The book was written during the first Trump presidency and the points made in the book matter even more now during the second.
It also makes the point that we often forget how vastly different our experiences can be. COVID impacted people very differently and while many people were stuck at home bored others were dealing with the deaths of friend and family on a near daily bases. COVID never actually ended and yet everyone wanted to go back to normal. Normal doesn’t exist and often disabled people are the first to learn how to adapt to a new world. Now is the time to learn.
Book Details
- Author’s Website
- Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
- Publisher / Date
- Arsenal Pulp Press, October 2022
- Updated 2023 edition includes a new chapter and afterword by the author
- Genre
- Memoir, Essay Collection, Disability
- Page Count
- 334
- Completion Date
- March 9, 2025
