Posted by Mike Gulliver in Musings.
Tags: authorship, Deaf-Mute Banquets, politics, record
Just a quick note to let you know that I’ve started to post up the translations of the 1834 banquet.
If you want to follow it, you can refer to it at http://www.scribd.com/doc/56915230/1834-English-Unfinished
There are a couple of issues that this first real banquet account brings up… the most important really being the question of who actually wrote it.
Traditional wisdom says that because it was published by the Société Centrale, the organising group… that they wrote it.
However, that version appeared in 1842 in print… which is fine, except that the banquet was in 1834, and there are handwritten accounts from that time which show that it was actually written as a newspaper article (or a number, that were then conflated into a single account)… by hearing people – notably Eugène de Monglave and B. Maurice (of ‘having to use a pencil to talk to the heroes of the feast’ fame).
What does that finding change? well, not necessarily very much. Except that you’ve got to ask yourself – particularly when Mottez and others have pointed at this banquet specifically as representative of a political movement within the Deaf community – how representative it actually was.
What the record shows is that the history of the Deaf community – and particularly of its political evolution through the 1830s, 40s and 50s… is much much more complicated than previous research seems to suggest.
Anyway… more of that as the record becomes more available.
In the meantime, enjoy…
Posted by Mike Gulliver in Musings.
Tags: activism, Deaf space, politics, speed, Virtual space
Yesterday, I was writing to a friend in the US who also presented at the AAG in Seattle, and who is doing research on virtual spaces in gaming… her comment, in response to my question about her interest in connecting those virtual spaces and the DEAF community, is that she knows of little work that has specifically looked at the use of virtual space to mobilise a DEAF community, or Deaf politics.
The Italian bill episode is a good example of this kind of mobilisation. The Deaf activist site, Grumpy Old Deafies, that has been dormant since the 20th July last year when it published the outcome of the 2010 ICED meeting in Vancouver, exploded into life on the 21st May with information in LIS and English. There then followed information, petitions, postings in ISL (Irish sign), BSL, more LIS, DGS (German sign), letters to the Italian Government from academics in the UK and Ireland, responses from Deaf organisations in the UK and overseas, and new links to ongoing protests in the US…
This kind of mobilisation has been seen in the hearing world, using the Internet… but would have been completely unheard of in the DEAF community until recently.
Harvey’s shrinking world anyone…
