Forbidden Signs: American Culture and the Campaign Against Sign Language.

In the historiography of the American deaf, nineteenth- and twentieth-century conflicts over education, and especially over language and pedagogy, have emerged as the central narrative. In 1817 the American Asylum for the Deaf, the first American residential school for the deaf, was founded at Hartford, Connecticut by Thomas H. Gallaudet, a Protestant minister. The asylum employed instructional methods developed in France, and it combined local American sign languages with a French sign language to create a classroom idiom. It became a model for similar, manualist institutions elsewhere. These would serve as embryonic communities, in which a process of group formation and the creation of a unique culture would take place. Central to this development was the evolution of the sign idiom used at the asylum into American Sign Language (ASL), eventually and still the vernacular idiom of the American deaf. In the late nineteenth century, however, a reaction against sign language and its use in the classroom occurred in the name of the integration of the deaf into the cultural mainstream. Increasingly manualism would be replaced in the institutions of deaf education by oralism, which taught lip-reading and speech, usually with poor results and at the expense of adequate early language development. By 1899, 40%, and, by 1919, 80%, of deaf students were educated by oralist methods. In their own social circles and organizations, deaf people continued to sign ASL. In the 1970s, amidst intense debate, the pendulum swung back in the other direction, and a synthesis of methods and intentions resulted. Many deaf students are mainstreamed in public schools, where hearing interpreters translate the teacher's speech using manually coded English and some ASL. Signed English also has achieved a significant position in the remaining schools for the deaf.

The hearing public knows little about these controversies beyond the largely symbolically related 1988 protests at Gallaudet University. But educationists, historians, linguists, and social scientists interested in deafness have extensively explored this history in recent decades. To varying degrees, this literature has been written in sympathy with the hearing manualists and with the claims of deaf culture and community and of ASL, and against the impositions of insensitive hearing oralists; and it occasionally seeks to draw conclusions relevant directly to contemporary debates about deaf education and sign language.

Until the final chapter of this superbly written study, Douglas C. Baynton avoids both polemics and partisanship, and succeeds in shifting the terms of the discussion. Focusing on the general American cultural history from 1850 to 1920, Baynton contextualizes manualism and oralism in order to understand the location of each within the central discourses of their times, and explains why it was that manualism and ASL fell into disrepute in deaf education. Appearing in his analysis are those hearing men and women - teachers, educational administrators, linguists, and politicians, who controlled the fate of institutions of deaf education, and whether inclined to manualism or oralism, adopted a paternalistic stance toward deaf people. For much of the book, the deaf themselves make only a brief. contrapuntal appearance, setting forth their claims for their language and community, and, in response to the successes of oralism, lamenting they do not have greater control of their own destiny. Recognizing weaknesses and good intentions in both positions, Baynton achieves a balanced and convincing analysis of the cultural construction of deafness by successive generations of hearing observers.

Manualists were products of evangelical Protestantism, romanticism, and classical learning. They aspired to employ sign language to lift the deaf out of their presumed spiritual isolation and make them Christians. Sign was conceived as God's gift to accomplish this elevated purpose. Sign's claims to respect also descended from the assumption that hand-coded languages preceeded speech, so that sign was closer to God and to nature, and from the view that sign, like a classical predecessor - Roman pantomime, might aspire to the status of an art form. Oralists rooted their ideas in the ethos of progress, efficiency, order, and national unity that accompanied modernization. As native-born American nationalists, they distrusted diversity, and hence sought to push the deaf into the mainstream. As evolutionists, they associated sign with crude primitivism. As professional educators sharing a functionalist conception of the school, they saw education less in terms of its intrinsic value than of the production of efficient workers. While manualist teachers were most frequently men, for a variety of economic and cultural reasons, women were a significant percentage of the ranks of oralist instructors. Baynton's sensitive discussion of the parallels between the modern woman's quest for a (symbolic) voice in social discourses and the desire of these women teachers to provide a (literal) voice for their deaf students may ultimately only create a neat metaphor, but it does open up for discussion the role of gender in the construction of deafness. The virtue of manualism was that it defended the language of the deaf, but it did so, as Baynton says, for "culturally transient reasons" (p. 163) that proved powerless to contest the authority achieved by the oralists in a changing social context.

In the brief final chapter, Baynton shifts the discussion away from historical analysis toward an intervention in the contemporary debate about the consequences for deaf children of mainstreaming and signed English. After asserting throughout a constructionist view, the reader is now given to understand that there is an irreducible physical reality about deafness that inevitably places the deaf in a different sensory realm, from which their experience of the world is shaped. ASL, Baynton tells us, is the most effective response for introducing deaf children to this unique experiential situation, for it provides a broader linguistic base for their exploration of the world. If we do not believe it, we are invited to listen to the testimony of deaf adults. True as far as it goes, but many questions seem begged. How are the deaf to live in a world in which the overwhelming majority of those around them hear and speak? Are they to seek inclusion, as oralists advocated; or, as manualists contended, are they to seek to improve themselves within the contexts of their own culture and community and to broaden the scope and scale of their cultural autonomy? In his criticisms of mainstreaming, Baynton briefly provides a critique of integration, but he is reluctant to pursue this beyond the schoolhouse. In the end, he does not offer us much in response to such questions beyond this invitation to listen to the deaf, which carries the implication not only that we accept the cultural authority of the deaf, which seems right, but also that the deaf are of one mind, which is difficult to believe. Even the meanings we may derive from the experience of deafness seem more tenuous today in light of the prospect that medical intervention may be able surgically to correct hearing impairment, a possibility denounced by some deaf activists as threatening to their community and culture. How do we come to terms with the possibility that for some or even many deaf people deafness may eventually be voluntary? Framing his advocacy here on essentialist grounds, moreover, Baynton resists seeing the cultural construction of his own position, which implies the influence of contemporary identity politics.

While this intervention is unconvincing, arguing with Baynton is nonetheless rewarding. In addition, his excellent historical analysis will interest not only specialists interested in deafness, but all cultural and intellectual historians.

David A. Gerber State University at Buffalo