“EVERYTHING IS BEAUTIFUL”: CRIPISTEMOLOGY, EMBODIMENT, AND THE POLITICS OF SURVIVAL IN SAAD T. FAROOQI’S WHITE WORLD

Abstract

This article advances a cripistemological reading of Saad T. Farooqi’s dystopian novel White World (2024), arguing that the text centers disabled and non‑normative bodies as sites of knowledge production and political resistance against the ableist necropolitics of the Pakistani state. Drawing on Alison Kafer’s concepts of “crip time” and “cripistemology,” alongside Achille Mbembe’s framework of necropolitics, the analysis demonstrates how the novel systematically represents the state’s production of disability through military violence, economic exploitation, and spatial segregation, most explicitly in the Badlands, a death‑world where “wasted lives” are abandoned. Yet the novel also insists that disability generates alternative epistemologies: Doua’s blindness enables her to become the revolutionary leader “Ash,” navigating the surveillance state through sound and touch; Jahan’s transition (Nirvan) represents a cripistemological reclamation of embodied selfhood against biopolitical classification; and Kanz’s deterioration embodies a crip temporality that challenges normative life cycles. The article concludes that White World refuses both the ableist futurity of “New Pakistan” and the despair of disability as tragedy, instead offering a vision of crip futurity in which survival, collective knowledge, and the building of new worlds emerge precisely from those the state sought to eliminate. By bringing cripistemology into conversation with postcolonial dystopian fiction, this study fills a critical gap in disability studies scholarship, which has largely focused on Western texts, and contributes to emerging conversations on disability, biopolitics, and speculative fiction in South Asian literary studies.