LAUSR

ABSTRACT Farid Boudjellal’s Petit Polio series (Soleil/Futuropolis, 1998–2012) is a bildungsroman that contests the narrative and aesthetic deployment of disability as prosthetic metaphor in the post-colonial context. In this series, the male, disabled, Franco-Algerian body takes on an allegorical yet violently embodied position. The intersection of disability and racial markedness here produces representations of bodies that might be considered ‘ravaged’, but in fact those bodies operate as carriers of cultural memory and sites from which a political discourse critical of French universalism can be launched.