This text explores American culture from the mid 19th-century to 1920 through the perspective of one episode: the campaign led by Alexander Graham Bell and other prominent Americans to suppress the use of sign language among deaf people. The metaphors and images used to describe the deaf - outsiders, beings of silence, innocence, and mystery, users of a language either of noble and ancient lineage or primitive and animal-like, a language of nature or of abnormality - provide a perspective for the examination of American thought and culture. The debate over sign language invoked such fundamental questions as what distinguished Americans from non-Americans, civilized people from "savages," humans from animals, men from women, the natural from the unnatural, and the normal from the abnormal. An advocate of the return to sign language, the author finds that while the grounds of the debate have shifted, educators still base decisions upon many of the same metaphors and images that led to the misguided efforts to eradicate sign language.
Ending with a discussion of recent changes in the images of deafness and sign language and a critique of the current state of deaf education, this volume should be of benefit to historians and those interested in the study of gesture and human movement, disability, sign language, and the American deaf community.
- ISBN10 0226039633
- ISBN13 9780226039633
- Publish Date 1 December 1996
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 28 February 2001
- Publish Country US
- Imprint University of Chicago Press
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 240
- Language English