“From White Deaf People’s Adversity to Black Deaf Gain”: A Proposal for a New Lens of Black Deaf Educational History

This paper re-visits Bauman and Murray’s (2014) “Deaf Gain,” using the perspectives of Black Deaf history. Due to the enforcement of the Oral policy in U.S. educational system during 1890s through 1960s, the language transmission of American Sign Language (ASL) for many generations of White Deaf people were fractured (Gannon, 1981). During the segregation, approximately 81.25% of the Black Deaf schools maintained their signed education, which ironically provided better education than the White-only schools. Consequently, the language variation of Black Deaf people in the South, called as “Black ASL” (McCaskill et al., 2011), flourished due to the historical adversity of White Deaf experience. Thus, the sustainability of Black ASL empowered this ethnic group of American Deaf community, which I am re-framing to what I call “Black Deaf Gain” and presenting a different objective of the ontology of Black Deaf experience.

Transnational Interconnections in Nineteenth-Century Western Deaf Communities

A transnational approach to history brings new perspectives to nationally based historical narratives. In the case of deaf history, it uncovers new patterns of international interaction, resulting in a transnational deaf public sphere, which operated from the latter third of the nineteenth century. Through publications, travel by individual deaf people, and a series of international congresses that took place between 1873 and 1924, deaf Westerners exchanged strategies on how to live as deaf people in auditory societies. A central concern was the preservation of the right to use sign language in the face of ideologies that sought to remove this language from the education of deaf children. Deaf Westerners created transnational strategies of response to transnational ideologies of eugenics and normality. By doing so, they attempted to claim a space for “aberrant” bodies within nationalist ideologies.

Review of Greenwald, B. H., & Murray, J. J. (Eds.), "In Our Own Hands: Essays in Deaf History, 1780-1970."

Chapters in this volume offer new perspectives on how deaf Americans responded to and affected American debates on oralism, eugenics, religious life, state formation, and citizenship.

Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of deaf history in the Soviet context, and establishes the central themes – marginality, community and identity – that frame the monograph. It considers how deafness was defined in USSR, looking particularly at the intersection of medical and social models, and the impact of revolutionary ideology on Soviet approaches to deafness. It also discusses how Soviet deaf history engages with, and complicates, existing understandings of marginal identity in the USSR, and adds a new, socialist perspective to the growing literature on deafness and deaf history in the global context.

Review of In Our Own Hands: Essays in Deaf History 1780-1970

No abstract available.