Abstract: In this dissertation, I perform disability-studies informed readings of first-person accounts of debilitating illness in novels by Caribbean and African women writers dating from 1968 to 2000. The works I consider—authored by Haitian Marie Chauvet, Guadeloupian-Senegalese Myriam Warner-Vieyra, Guadeloupian Maryse Condé, and Senegalese writers Ken Bugul and Fama Diagne Sène—are explored not as explicit representations of women with disabilities, but as commentaries on the lived experience of women in various states of 'critical condition.' Situated in specific cultural and geopolitical contexts, these narratives expand traditional readings of illness and disability, not only within postcolonial worlds but across temporal, spatial, and cultural borders. Though not all of the novels to be studied here are conventional life narratives, they all tell personal stories about illness or disability, their own and others, all the while challenging those Western and local discourses which determine normalcy and normative health. As I argue, the texts should also be considered in critical condition, for they too are at once implicated in the processes of illness and perform important refigurations of such processes. Each chapter takes together two novels to theorize key phases in the literary trajectories of women in critical condition, phases which are intimately engaged with coincident disability discourses. In earlier novels by Chauvet and Warner-Vieyra, métisse protagonists marked as deviant because of sexual, racial, and psychic differences nevertheless participate in critical acts of staring and writing back. In periods of intense postcolonial reconciliation, novels by Condé and Bugul, while signaling a tension between the testimonial telling of chronic illness and those discourses of healing which demand cure, ultimately depict the composite, negotiated nature of health. Finally, more recent novels by Sène and Bugul reveal how narrative can transgress the processes of globalization which make abject and eliminate those bodies and subjectivities seen to encumber the smooth circulation of capital and power. Through these works we can begin to identify other possible figures of illness and disability in the postcolonial context which challenge dominant paradigms of women's bodily and psychic health that seek to exclude, deny, or eliminate their lived experiences.