Forbidden Signs: American Culture and the Campaign against Sign Language - Softcover

Baynton, Douglas C.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226039641 ISBN 13: 9780226039640

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 1998

Synopsis

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

About this title

Review

Douglas Baynton has written a learned history of the varied and sundry attempts that have been made to prevent deaf people from communicating with their hands. Forbidden Signs intelligently explores the cultural aspects of deafness, laying out the naturalness of a gesture-based means of communicating by deaf people, exploring the unique aspects by which meaning can be conveyed without the spoken word. In this context, the pseudo-scientific arguments for preventing the use of sign language which predominated for nearly a century are laid bare as the arbitrary and capricious biases of the hearing world. The rise of a quasi-biological notion of eugenics and genetic determinism as well as the construction of a standard of "normalcy" against which deaf people were measured explains both the means and the rationale for the suppression of sign language. The incredible story of the extensive attempts to isolate deaf people and to break up communities of signers that Douglas Baynton has recorded will likely be difficult to imagine by those who know little of the history of deafness in America. Unfortunately, it is likely a story too familiar to deaf people, even today.

About the Author

Douglas C. Baynton is professor of history at the University of Iowa, where he also teaches courses in the American Sign Language program.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0226039641
• ISBN 13: 9780226039640
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 235