Forbidden signs : American culture and the campaign against sign language / Douglas C. Baynton.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Baynton, Douglas C.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Deaf people--Means of communication--United States--History.

Deaf people.

Sign language--Study and teaching--United States--History.

Sign language.

Deaf people--United States--Social conditions.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (253 pages)

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1998, c1996.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Forbidden Signs explores American culture from the mid-nineteenth century to 1920 through the lens of one striking episode: the campaign led by Alexander Graham Bell and other prominent Americans to suppress the use of sign language among deaf people. The ensuing 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, Baynton found that although the grounds of the debate have shifted, educators still base decisions on many of the same metaphors and images that led to the misguided efforts to eradicate sign language. "Baynton's brilliant and detailed history, Forbidden Signs, reminds us that debates over the use of dialects or languages are really the linguistic tip of a mostly submerged argument about power, social control, nationalism, who has the right to speak and who has the right to control modes of speech."-Lennard J. Davis, The Nation "Forbidden Signs is replete with good things."-Hugh Kenner, New York Times Book Review

Contents:

Front matter

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

ONE. Foreigners in Their Own Land: Community

TWO. Savages and Deaf Mutes: Species and Race

THREE. Without Voices: Gender

FOUR. From Refinement to Efficiency: Culture

FIVE. The Natural Language of Signs: Nature

SIX. The Unnatural Language of Signs: Normality

Epilogue: The Trap of Paternalism

Notes

Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 164-215) and index.

ISBN:

9780226039688

0226039684

OCLC:

709551376