eBook - PDF
Forbidden Signs
American Culture and the Campaign against Sign Language
- English
- PDF
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF
About this book
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
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
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Yes, you can access Forbidden Signs by Douglas C. Baynton in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Languages & Linguistics & North American History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Information
Publisher
University of Chicago PressYear
1998Print ISBN
9780226039640, 9780226039633eBook ISBN
9780226039688Table of contents
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1. Foreigners in Their Own Land: Community
- 2. Savages and Deaf Mutes: Species and Race
- 3. Without Voices: Gender
- 4. From Refinement to Efficiency: Culture
- 5. The Natural Language of Signs: Nature
- 6. The Unnatural Language of Signs: Normality
- Epilogue: The Trap of Paternalism
- Notes
- Index
- Gallery