Journal of Postcolonial Writing

Postcolonial Medical and Health Humanities: South Asian Literary Imaginaries and Epistemologies

Although sociopolitical, economic, and cultural factors crucially determine the conditions and notions of health, these aspects seldom receive adequate attention. The recent COVID-19 pandemic temporarily changed this by tragically illustrating the enormous inequities regarding access to healthcare and distribution of disease burden. Despite the widespread rhetoric of a global fight against the virus, these inequities had fatal consequences for many, and they revealed the highly stratified – and often neocolonial – logics which informed the fight against the virus. For instance, UN general secretary António Guterres’ call for a global approach to fight the virus soon yielded to pharmaceutical companies’ demands for patent protection, and the resulting unequal access to vaccines was reversely mirrored by the unequal distribution of the risks of clinical trials. At the same time, the pandemic prompted many forms of medical securitization, othering, and racism.

Under the labels of “decolonizing medicine” (Harris 2025; Morales 2025) or the critical medical humanities (Viney, Callard, and Woods 2015), a growing number of publications urge a closer attention to such health inequities, but the explicit and joint conceptualization of postcolonial studies and the medical and health humanities has yet to be fully realized (Ramone 2018; Howell 2018). This special issue seeks to do that: anchored in literary studies and with a focus on South Asia, it aims to bring together postcolonial studies, the medical and health humanities, and literary criticism to conceptualize the postcolonial medical and health humanities as a critical research perspective through which to analyse the material and representational co-constitutiveness of health and medicine. 

In order to do so, we invite both theoretical reflections on the postcolonial medical and health humanities, and literary analyses of cultural texts which engage with the intersections of health, coloniality, and postcoloniality in South Asia and its diasporic communities. In particular, we invite contributions which will address the following four intersecting questions:

• How do cultural texts from South Asia and its diasporic communities negotiate the colonial ramifications of health and well-being in general, and how do they address the colonial history of biomedicine and the coloniality of medicine more particularly? What role do non-hegemonic perspectives play in these negotiations?
• How do South Asian cultural texts address contemporary forms of stratification, discrimination, and exploitation in biomedicine and healthcare in postcolonial contexts? How are these related to colonial and neocolonial fault-lines, but also to regional and/or globalized forms of implication beyond the North–South binary?
• What role do epistemic and linguistic issues play in different literary imaginaries of health and medicine? That is, how do different texts address questions of knowledge production, in particular the suppression and recovery of medical and health epistemologies, and in what languages?
• Through what representational politics and poetics do different texts address these questions?

Topics may include but are not limited to:

• Theoretical and philosophical perspectives on the postcolonial medical and health humanities
• Postcolonial theory and the representational and material politics of (mental) health and disease: material, poetological, epistemological, and linguistic issues
• Postcolonial theory and the social construction of (mental) health and disease, as well as their sociocultural and economic determinants (for instance medical othering and racism, epistemic violence, re-biologization)
• The postcolonial medical and health humanities and related approaches (for instance the global medical humanities, the critical medical humanities, and calls to decolonize medicine)
• Literary negotiations of (mental) health, healthcare infrastructures, and inequities in South Asia and its diasporic communities (incl. biocapitalism, pharmocracy, medical racism, medical securitization, global care chains, the stratification of healthcare work, and philanthrocapitalism)
• Literary negotiations of colonial genealogies of biomedicine and their afterlives; medical colonialism, disease, and imperial expansion
• Indigenous oral and written epistemologies of (mental) health and medicine (incl. literary texts, oral storytelling, dance, body art etc.)
• Literary negotiations of (post)colonial geographies and spaces of/in health in South Asia: urban, rural, cosmopolitan, and diasporic contexts