Augustin Thierry and the Many Eyes of a Blind Historian

By Giorgia Vocino

Born in 1795, shortly after the end of the reign of Terror, Jacques Nicolas Augustin Thierry was an enfant prodige. Born in a modest family, delicate and often sick, he could not live off his family income nor start a military career, but he could count on his sharp intelligence to climb the social ladder. Graduate from the École Normale, in 1811 he started working as the secretary of Claude-Henri de Rouvroy, count of Saint-Simon. Vibrant supporter of the liberal party and close to the milieu of the Carbonari, Thierry began an independent career as a journalist, but was soon drawn to the study of history: in 1820 he published in the Courrier Français nine Lettres sur l’Histoire de France, while in 1825 the publication of the Histoire de la conquête de l’Angleterre par les Normands crowned him as a historian and won him a place among the most reputed scholars and authors of his time. It was in those years of hectic and passionate study that his health problems started to take a toll on his life and his work.

Signed copy of l'Histoire de la conquête (Bibliothèque Abbé Grégoire)

Thierry’s eyesight progressively declined and eventually left him blind. Thought to be the consequence of a work rhythm that was too demanding, he was dubbed the Homère de l’histoire by Chauteaubriand. The legend of a young and heroic martyr for science started to take shape. Blind and progressively afflicted with paralysis, the historian showed the symptoms of an undiagnosed syphilis that made it impossible for him to work without the assistance of others. Despite his condition, Augustin Thierry maintained a remarkably intense work routine that allowed him to publish new works and to restlessly revise his oeuvre.

Corrected Proofs of the Récits des Temps Mérovingiens (Blois, AD41_F_1946B)

For the following thirty years, Augustin Thierry was assisted by secretaries and other collaborators whose names remain in the shadows. The archives of the Thierry family still preserved at Blois are a precious testimony to the functioning of the group of people surrounding the historian and working with him and for him. Thirty notebooks, known as the Cahiers de la chambre, were filled in between 1836 and 1844 with drafts, excerpts of sources, reading notes and personal memos that give shape to Augustin Thierry’s intellectual and social small world. Available for consultation on the website (shelf-marks Blois, Archives départamentales des Loir-et-Cher, F 1576 and F 1577), these notebooks constitute one of the most interesting, yet enigmatic documents in the Thierry archives digitised by the ArchAT project (Université d’Orléans – IRHT CNRS, project blog). Many hands can be spotted in their pages alongside one another, hands whose identification is a challenging operation that has never been attempted.

The Cahiers de la Chambre (Blois, AD41 F 1576 and 1577)

Among these hands one can find Augustin’s official collaborators: his personal secretary Charles Cassou as well as Martial Delpit, a graduate from the Ecole des Chartes salaried by the government within the frame of the national project of the Monuments du Tiers Etat supervised by Thierry. Scholars themselves, both men assisted Thierry in the study of the sources that laid the foundations of his history writing, chiefly the Récits des Temps Mérovingiens, and helped him with the revision of his earlier works and the drafting of new publications. The impossibility to lead his research autonomously casted a shadow on the originality of Thierry’s works already in his lifetime, as it is proved by an article published in 1837 in the Revue des Deux Mondes in which Désiré Nisard openly acknowledged the role of collaborateur for Augustin’s secretary Armand Carrel (deadly injured in a duel in 1836), while Thierry claimed full and exclusive responsibility for his literary output.

Draft letter to the director of La Revue des Deux Mondes (Blois, AD41, F 1576 02)

As a matter of fact, the blind historian could count on many sets of eyes, first of all those of his wife, Julie Thierry, herself a literate woman and a novelist whom he married in 1831. Julie’s pivotal role in Augustin’s everyday life can hardly be underestimated, but her work as an assistant emerge clearly from the notebooks where her hand drafted letters and noted down the words dictated by her husband. Furthermore, less literate scribes can also be found in the Cahiers de la chambre: their faulty orthography and unpolished handwriting make clear that they were not salaried secretaries, but off-the-record assistants most likely chosen among the household help. Augustin’s footman was probably responsible for writing down Augustin’s thoughts and work instructions, and years later, in the 1850s, it was his personal physician Gabriel Graugnard who not only took care of the by-then completely paralysed historian, but also helped him in his scholarly work.

Handwriting of Augustin Thierry's Footman (Blois, AD41, F 1577 8)

The study of Augustin Thierry’s archives and particularly his notebooks thus allows us to get glimpses of the creative process behind the writing of an author who could not write. In particular, the analysis of the complex documents that are the Cahiers de la Chambre opens for us a window on the everyday work routine of a blind historian. The centrality of the spoken word and the practical, and yet crucial organisation of the writing thus come to the fore as key research areas. The nineteenth-century Homère de l’histoire was surrounded not only by his official secretaries, but also by informal and too often forgotten assistants whose existence and importance should not be overlooked. The ArchAT project therefore has the ambition to describe the wider scholarly network as well as the small domestic world in which Augustin Thierry conceived and worked on his oeuvre and more specifically on his masterpiece, the Récits des Temps Mérovingiens. This means reconsidering the boundaries of authoriality and highlighting the choral dimension of the writing of his best seller, the influence of which can still be observed on the ideas about the Early Middle Ages, understood as a dark and violent time, that are deeply rooted in the collective imaginary.




Giorgia Vocino is a post-doc in the ArchAT projet (University of Orléans – IRHT-CNRS).
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Recommended citation
Giorgia Vocino (2019): Augustin Thierry and the Many Eyes of a Blind Historian. In: Public Disability History 4 (2019) 11.

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On Blindness in Poetry

By Reja-e Busailah

I am told that I lost my eyesight during the seventh month of my life. I was educated in boarding schools, in schools specially for the blind, and in public schools. I taught the blind when I was still living in Palestine, where I was born in 1929, when I lived in New York City, when I worked in Kuwait; and I hold a master’s degree in special education. Still, I should be embarrassed to admit that studying in a scholarly fashion the phenomenon of blindness (“disability”) has never seriously interested me. I have a Ph.D. in English Literature from New York University, and I taught literature for some thirty years. I am now a retired professor emeritus. I have enjoyed poetry all my life, writing it in Arabic when a child and later in English. I may say I have used poetry to react to all things that have interested me including, of course, the phenomenon of blindness, not academically, but as a poet. I have lived with blindness all my life, and have become accustomed to the ways and means, so to speak, of the phenomenon. To a large extent this “disability”, then, is only one of the phenomena of ordinary life, to be dealt with as an aspect of life, with, if you like, what most sighted people would judge with special consideration. I have lived so long with the phenomenon. I do not consider it special.

Reja-e Busailah with his latest publication Poems of a Palestinian Boyhood.

As I have said, I am a poet. I am a poet first and foremost, and my poetry is a reaction to as many phenomena of life as I am aware of: personal and general, emotional, social, political, and so forth. Needless to say that all these phenomena interact and influence each other. They give to each other and take from each other. My poetry deals with all of this and more. I write poems about blindness with as much comfort as I would write poems about “the honeysuckle, that divine commoner”, the call of a bird, the behavior of a politician, or the face of a girl as conveyed to me by her voice. Yet they are poems which, in a sense, focus on a specific phenomenon, the phenomenon of blindness, some directly, some not so directly, while still others deal with the theme from quite a distance. Moreover, these poems are all taken from a manuscript, Poems Out of Sight. Blindness, in one way or another, to assert once more, is in each of my poems, though none of them was written with the purpose of exploring the theme. They were written only in response to the dictation of the circumstance prevailing about the time of the writing.

Let me comment on a specific aspect of the many consequences of blindness. Much of the experience an ordinary blind person gets is through the ear, through sound and through the complexity of sound which produces the word. Space does not allow here for an at length discussion of touch. The blind person hears of a vast field and of a limitless sky, and the acquisition of this experience does not stop with hearing. The blind person has been given the word, and words are pregnant with concreteness and an infinity of growth, concepts, and connotations. Thus a word becomes the repository and vehicle of our intellectual growth, of civilization itself. A blind person, then, has the benefit of the word. Blind people are capable of participating in most of the social activities of the sighted. You find them engaged in all sorts of activities theoretical and practical, scientific, technical, and philosophical, in education, in politics, and so forth. I cannot forget the two blind men in Kuwait who came to learn Braille, the three R’s and so forth while still keeping their job of earning their daily living. After class or before it, they would swim to anchored ships to bring ashore in large leather sacks the sweet water the country needed then. This is why segregating the blind from the rest of society is a bad mistake. Integrating them with the rest of society is very beneficial to both.

Reja-e Busailah reading poetry for his YouTube channel.

Let me select only a few of the manifestations of the interaction between blindness and the world of sight or society as I have experienced it in action and in reflection. I will present the examples of these manifestations only as they are treated in my poetry. Blindness in the poems is not primarily the focus. The focus is on the poem and only an aspect of the phenomenon is used or mentioned, sometimes seriously, sometimes humorously, and so forth.

It has long been held that blindness is a mystery with supernatural roots and origins. Blindness is a curse or a blessing from God or from some mysterious power. Two superstitions emanate from this in “The Four Branches”: the husband who opens the day with rage and anger on glimpsing a blind person crossing his way, and the wife who ends the day pleased and contented because the blind person is the first to enter her store, which brings her so much business this day long. The blind person is aware only of

the morning greeting
of the sapling of a child
[which] reaches the blind ears,
hesitant yet resolute,
unaware of the cares of sight,
innocent of the confusion
on the awakening of the soul.

In “Journey of a Curse”, this attitude is given a clearer expression. The blind child throws a rock at the old man, who responds by

he panted up the hill,
he paused at what he saw,
he cursed under his breath:
“No wonder God smote you blind!”
He spat on his left,
his footsteps echoed into the dusk.

At the end of the poem, though, the blind boy has acquired some education, and is able to repeat to his interlocutors:

“When man is good,
he is higher than the angels;
when he is not good,
he is lower than the beasts.”
The couple listened with wonder and humility,
“God blessed the blind for reasons
man’s ken may never probe!”

In “Virgil and Beatrice”, the emphasis is on something that happens pretty regularly everywhere, and on the humor with which it is treated:

So normal was that day,
“normal,” you know what I mean
that you couldn’t but think of the cliché
which pops up into the blind mind’s remembrance
upon such a day:

“Does your dog bite?”
“You bet he does.
Virgie would love to have a hunk
of your flesh for his dinner!”
After all, if it had to be so,
let it be him, not me!
I would be lying,
if it were the reverse.

Or upon another such day:
“What’s your dog’s name?...
Isn’t he adorable?...
He’s your best friend, isn’t he?”

“To tell you the truth, he isn’t.”
This bemused the poor woman,
shocked her into a strange silence,
staring as a blind man thought
until he enlightened:
“Betty is my best friend,”
touching his wife’s arm.
After all, wasn’t she the one
who was going to pacify his hunger that night?

“To Whom” is a commentary on factual events pretty common in life and quite similar in sound, and shall I say, looks too. The poem concentrates on violence. The blind child is a member, an essential member, of a community similar in fate and the workings of fate. The dog is helpless while being clubbed to death because he is tied. The blind child (actually the author) is lashed and lashed until his feet are bloodied and swollen when he is thrown on his back with his feet gripped tight. The girl is also held down on her back with the boots of two men on her hands, “that the third may thrust and thrust and thrust,” while the AK-47 is impatiently waiting to complete the job. Now, the fate of these three is the same as the fate of Palestine when Great Britain for thirty years held the people violently down in order to give the country to the foreigners. And this she did with great success, accompanied by dark horrors either unknown or wantonly ignored.

The speaker knows (mentally) that his wife sees with her eyes in the poem “Her Eyes.” But he does not see. How does he circumvent the frustration?

If the sound of her voice is the spark
which puts out the old stars, which inflames the dawn
and makes thirstier with the dew the beams of the sun
forever young
forever old;
if the sound of her voice is the start
which ripples through the day
hour by sparkling hour
and tipples in the bright and the red
before it comes ashore;
if the sound of her voice is the birth and the breath
and the pulse in the soul
and the spirit of the pulse—
I wonder what is left for the light of her eyes!

Far-fetched? Maybe, but there is an adequate substitution for the absence of sight, however subjective or arbitrary it may be. Sound, or the word here, has supplanted sight. In “Two Airs”, you may say the picture is reversed. The author would perhaps paint the sound of the cardinal were he not blind. Instead he imagines a parallel to the sound of the cardinal. Here the two songs of the bird resemble two objects, the carnation standing on its stem and a flourishing bell:

Two airs of a cardinal
(he has quite a few in his repertoire)
a cardinal who is either fully oblivious
to the world, or wholly of it.
Like children scaling up and down a fragrant dream,
one air scales up
the other scales down
the length of a white carnation
standing on its stem,
An air flushed starting downward
from the brim of a cup of sunlight,
another blushing as it flourishes
upward towards bell’s bloom.

Again, this may sound too far away from the “disability” blindness. All the same, blindness remains related to the poem. “A Note on Touch” best exemplifies the highly subjective, arbitrarily subjective, treatment of something physical with imagery acceptable perhaps only to its author. One aim is to reject the attitude among the sighted that touch replaces vision. Space is too narrow for discussing the poem at length.

The face of the sick child shocks the mother,
she sees it as a hard-boiled egg!
The child runs a blind hand
over the face of the peeled egg,
it is smooth and soft, it is delightful:

Touch, therefore, when shielded from the representations
of the sense of light,
grows its own garden of realities,
solid facts
as a matter of fact,

anchored outside the domain of vision.
The fallacy, therefore, of assuming
that hand and eye are relatives
only breeds the falsehood that the dynamics
of, say, a fish’s mouth

in either’s hold are similar
if not the same;
(but let us first dispose by way of footnote
of the man who out of touch with sight
once marveled greatly at the marble mouth1

all misled by its smoothness from its severity,
or of the goddess of beauty who short-touchedly
mated with a bandy-legged bore2):
to the touch pure and free
the mouth of that primary beast

becomes a mermaid’s
transported into a summer’s nigh-haze
composed of mist-moistened sun,
and a vase in her hand
gleaming through the morning

the special mouth beaming
as on a crystal range
the clarinet’s scale in bloom—
visual sensibility tamed fantastic
if you like by the alchemy of touch.

Blindness then is the deprivation of sight. In such poems as we have just mentioned mixed imagery is resorted to, not perversely, but in reaction to the pressure of necessity. The visual experience which is absent here is expressed by, or translated into, the experiences of the remaining faculties. It is hoped that this arbitrariness is still compensated for by these new experiences. But it is the reader who will have the ultimate judgement on the treatment of the theme in the poems as well as their artistic quality.

The “disability” of blindness, then, occupies much more of the human concern than do other disabilities. As we have seen, this is due to the nature of the impairment of the disability. It so lends itself to varieties of interpretations, expansions, modifications, and so forth. No wonder, then, that Jose Saramago devotes a whole novel to blindness as a metaphor in which a whole city goes blind.

Reja-e Busailah accepting the Palestine Book Award for Best Memoir 2018 in London.

Reja-e Busailah’s latest publications are In the Land of My Birth: A Palestinian Boyhood (Institute for Palestine Studies 2017), winner of the Palestine Book Award (2018) and Poems of a Palestinian Boyhood (Smokestack Books 2019). He enjoys sharing his poetry with others especially reading his poetry on his YouTube channel. 

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Recommended citation
Reja-e Busailah (2019): On Blindness in Poetry. In: Public Disability History 4 (2019) 10.

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"From the darkness to the light": Memoirs of blind Canadian veterans of the First and Second World Wars

By Corinne Doria

On June 7 1917 Private James H. Rawlinson of the Ontario 58^th Infantry Battalion of the Canadian Expeditionary Force was blinded by a fragment of shrapnel. He entered the St. Dunstan's Institute for Blind Soldiers and Sailors in London for rehabilitation; there he learned Braille, typing and carpentry before returning to his native Ottawa. In 1919 he published Through St. Dunstan’s to Light, a book in which he describes the drama of his wound, his rehabilitation, and his return to the civilian society.

Rawlinson, James H. (1919). Through St. Dunstan’s to Light.
Toronto: Thomas Allen., front page

James Rawlinson is one of the several hundred Canadians who lost their sight in war, and one of the few who decided to tell their story in an autobiographical work. We can also mention Blind Date (1962) by John Windsor, and Wings of Courage (2000) by Neil Hamilton, both of whom fought in the Second World War. Born in Calgary John Windsor was an officer of Lord Strathcona's Horse, a light cavalry regiment that fought during the Second World War as an armored unit. During an operation in Italy a shell fragment destroyed his eyes and blew away half his face. After a long stay in hospital and several reconstructive operations, he went to the training centre in Church Stretton, a St. Dunstan's facility opened in 1940. Neil Hamilton, was born in 1920 in Regina (Saskatchewan). In October 1941 he entered the Royal Canadian Air Force. In November 1943 he suffered a haemorrhage of the eyes during a training flight, which left him with only 10% vision in each eye. He attended the Canadian National Institute for the Blind (CNIB), an institution created in 1918 on the model of St. Dunstan’s to assist Canadian blind veterans, where he was trained in Public Relations and management, obtaining a job as manager at the CNIB Calgary’s branch.

C.N.I.B. (Canadian Institut for the Blind), facility in Toronto Durflinger, Serge Marc (2010). Veterans With a Vision. Vancouver/Toronto, UBC Press, p. 108

These books narrate individual journeys ‘from the darkness to the light’; they provide insight into the experience of blindness and what it means – from a psychological and a practical viewpoint – to be suddenly deprived of sight as an adult.

Portrait of John Winsor, Windsor, John (1963). Blind Date. Sidney, BC: Gray’s Publishing Canada, p.2 (left picture); Hamilton, Neil R. (2000). Wings of Courage: A Lifetime of Triumph over Adversity. Calgary: Nacelles, p. 1 (right picture)

This post aims at presenting the organizations of support to Canadian blind veterans of WWI and WW2, and to analyze the impact of blindness on individuals through the study autobiographical accounts.

At the beginning of the 20th century Canada had almost no training institutions for blind adults. There were only three schools for children born blind (in Brantford, Halifax and Montréal) providing mediocre education. The question of social and professional reintegration for the blind arose because of the Great War. Some 140 Canadian servicemen returned home blind, and nearly 1,300 with severe visual impairment. The Canadian National Institute for the Blind (CNIB) was founded in 1922 by Edwin Albert Baker, an electrical engineer from Collins Bay (Ontario) who was injured in the Ypres Salient in 1915, at the age of 22. In April 1922 was also set up the Sir Arthur Pearson Association (SAPA), a social club and veterans’ advocacy group. These associations were committed to provide assistance to blind ex-servicemen and to pressure the federal government to organize assistance at a national level. Their actions had a measurable impact. At the end of World War I, Ottawa voted the covering of the accommodation and re-educational programs undertaken by CNIB and SAPA in the aftermath of war. The Second World War raised the public profile of blind veterans even further. More than 200 soldiers were blinded in that war. By that time the CNIB expanded, opening offices in Calgary, Vancouver, Regina and Ottawa. In 1956 pensions for war blinded were increased and their widows could continue getting a full pension for one year following their husbands’ death. In 1970 was voted the Exceptional Incapacity Allowance, that entitled blind ex-servicemen to an attendance allowance of 3,000 dollars/year.

Rawlinson, Windsor and Hamilton depict the loss of sight in the first place as a trauma. The very moment of the injury is recalled in dramatic detail. “I felt a slight sting in my right temple as though pricked by a hot needle – and then the world became black. Dawn was breaking now, but night had sealed my eyes, and I could only grope my way among my comrades” (Rawlinson). The awareness of blindness provokes horror, panic, and the desperate hope that it is only a temporary situation. Then, when they realize that there is nothing more that can be done, comes despair. “My life, the worthwhile part of it, seemed to end at that moment leaving nothing but a husk, filled with despair and inner hurt” (Winsor).

These men describe losing their sight as the end of life as they knew it. But if blindness is in one way compared to death, it also represents the beginning of a new life. Blindness obliges them to learn everything anew, as if they were new-born. “[The blinded man] at first has much to unlearn. All his old methods of work have to be forgotten. He is, in a sense, a child again, born the day his sight is taken from him” (Rawlinson).
All three authors present blindness as a condition that can only be understood by the blind, and it is impossible for an able-bodied individual to apprehend. The authors’ narrative is sometimes “elitist”: they patronize and even complain the sighted and even complain for their lack of understanding. “One of the annoying things to a sightless person is to have some sighted friend sit by him at a play, describing costumes and scenery. The blind have no need of such aids” (Winsor). Spending time with people in the same condition reinforces blindness as an identitarian factor. Rawlinson and Winsor have several pages on St. Dunstan’s inmates and the spirit of solidarity and companionship they experienced during their stay. By making the acquaintance of other blind people, learning their histories and sharing their own they start to feel they belong to a different group, and to distance themselves somewhat from “sighted” society.

Rawlinson, James H. (1919). Through St. Dunstan’s to Light. Toronto: Thomas Allen, p. 24

This sense of uniqueness is felt alongside a profound desire for normality. The possibility of becoming a worthy member of society again is what motivates their commitment to training. This aspiration to normality and social integration is also apparent in the desire to start a family (both Windsor and Hamilton married and had children). Another sign of the desire for “normality” is the constant concern to display masculinity. They have no intention to decline their male identity because of their impairment. This is evident from several signs, starting with the place accorded to war in their narratives. It is also highlighted by their determination to be the breadwinner, and the subordinate position of their wives.
The reason why Rawlinson, Windsor and Hamilton decided to write their autobiographies is to challenge existing stereotypes about the blind. At the beginning of the 20^th century a blind man was considered as an individual whose impairment excluded him from society. Blind people were frequently the objects of pity or derision. Their books are inspirational stories, depicting the overcoming of difficulties through an undefeatable will-force. Prejudices about blind people remain, however, throughout the 20^th century in Canadian society. Hamilton recalls how people generally were indifferent to the needs of the blind, and he often encountered cases where they were victims of abuse.

By describing the authors’ journey “from the darkness to the light”, these autobiographies illustrate the multiple personal and social issues that a blind veteran had to go face and remind reminding that disability is both a personal and a social concern.


Corinne Doria is Associate Research Fellow at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies, Columbia University, New York.
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Recommended citation
Corinne Doria (2019): "From the darkness to the light": Memoirs of blind Canadian veterans of the First and Second World Wars In: Public Disability History 4 (2019) 7.

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The blind - the special?

by Sebastian Barsch and Susan Krause

There is nothing to see in the Dialog-Museum in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, but there is much to hear, feel, smell and taste. The museum wants to show what it's like to be blind. The claim of the museum is that blindness is not simulated, but experienced as an adventure with (almost) all senses. The website says it clearly:

"In our exhibition blind guides lead small groups of guests through completely darkened rooms depicting different everyday situations. Without eyesight, the daily routine becomes a totally new experience. You will sharpen your senses. A role reversal is created: Blind people become ambassadors of a culture without pictures."

Entry to the Dialog-Museum in Frankfurt am Main.
(available under Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication).

The museum is not alone with this approach. Meanwhile, there are many offers that seek to enable sighted people to "experience" blindness. Dark restaurants advertise with their absolutely dark rooms. In these rooms, the senses of the visitors should change: the "invisible" should be made "visible" with their hands, their ears, their mouths and their noses. Another example: For a TV documentary, a reporter attempted to self-test what it would be like to be blind by wearing opaque glasses and trying to cope with a supposed everyday life.

Many historical museums take other paths when dealing with blindness. As a rule, they do not try to sell blindness as a happening. Rather, they create additional information offers to enable blind visitors to visit exhibitions. For example, the "Museum of the Senses" of the "Roemer and Pelizaeus Museum Hildesheim" has created an exhibition in which not only audio guides and Braille texts accompany the exhibition. In addition, they offer exhibits that appeal to the sense of sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste. For example, it can be "felt", "heard" and "smelt" as it might have been in ancient Egypt, ancient Peru or China.

Such approaches are important and good. Nevertheless, they raise some questions. Questions regarding the image of what seeing people make of people who are blind. It seems that these images are similar to the ideas children have when they shut their eyes and play "blindly". Often, the stereotype of a problematic exaggeration of the senses of blind persons is also revealed here, when it is said: If one cannot see, one can smell better. So the question is: Can seeing people really get a realistic picture of blindness?

Children playing "blind"
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Austria by Erich Schmid (talk)

Firstly, persons who are born blind do not have the reference of seeing. Therefore, they cannot compare seeing with blindness like sighted people pretend to do. For most of blind persons not using the sense of sight is a normal state. Of course, they get told that most of the people around them "see" and get explained what this so-called seeing means. They are raised in a visual culture where people talk a lot about how things look like and are visualized. So to imagine what it means to be blind sighted people would need the life-long experience and not a couple of hours or days to perceive the same way.

Besides that, there are also technical problems. No one knows how it smelled in ancient Egypt or what the sound of a city in ancient Peru was like. Such offers may revive what is actually outdated in historical science, namely the idea that "the past" could be revived.

It's a good thing that museums are trying to be inclusive as well, of course. But it will not be enough for non-disabled people to imagine how people with disabilities could perceive something "different". Sighted people will not be able to imagine how people who are blind from birth perceive the world. But if they make use of the idea that blindness could be simulated by eye-witnessing, in the end, they only strengthen their own stereotypes. Disabled people thus become objects of non-disabled again.

However, the stereotype of blind people having an increase of tactile or auditive sensitivity congenitally can easily be disproved. The developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky investigated blind children already 100 years ago. He defends that this is not a natural inherent process, like a kidney that takes the role of the failed one but rather this "indicated phenomenon […] proceeds along a very complicated and roundabout route of overall sociopsychological compensation, without substituting for or replacing the failing organ." (Vygotsky 1993: 99) He argues furthermore that their other senses seem stronger because blind persons need to do an adaption to the visual world. Therefore they practice them more. Through listening more closely or touch the Braille letters with their fingers those daily actions become more and more used to them. For Vygotsky, the biggest difference between the blind and the sighted is to be seen in their behaviour, rather than their biological disposition.

Another stereotype is that people who are blind do not have any visual images and that their world would be "dark". Referring to approaches from Neuroscience these could show that when imagining pictures, images or memories the same brain parts of both, sighted and blind persons are active. The neurologist Helder Bértolo did research on visual activations in dreams. His results show that congenitally blind persons have visual contents in their dreams and are even able to draw them. The experiment suggests the assumption that there can be visual imagery without visual perception. (Bértolo 2005: 173) So obviously there seem to be insights into the blind world of perception that sighted people are not able to see or experience.

"Blind subjects were able to represent graphically the oneiric scenes they previously described orally. No statistical differences were found between the groups." (Bértolo et al., 2003) 

Which ways would have to be gone? Inclusion can only be achieved through inclusive expertise. People with blindness should therefore not be questioned on a one-to-one basis as to whether particular offers from an exhibition are particularly important to them. Rather, they would have to be involved in the entire process of exhibition design right from the start.

As a good example, the DHM in Berlin offers special exhibitions for blind and visual impaired visitors since 2015 when developing a concept for an inclusive museum.  Before opening such an exhibition the museum educational service invites target groups to show them their projected conception. Inasmuch as pre-testing the exhibition for others they are involved in the planning process. Of course, it would be even better to include them right from the beginning. Nevertheless, it can be seen as a start in the right direction of participation and to support the idea of not talking about or planning for disabled people but of getting them on the table.

Ultimately, in the context of inclusion and thus a perspective of disability studies in museums, the question remains: do we have to continue to work with categorizations, even if categories are generally questioned? Or to put it another way: can there really be inclusive exhibitions without resorting to categories of disability? Of course, talking about the category "blind people" is not unproblematic. "Blindness" is a spectrum, and a lot of people who are said to be blind have some functional vision. To make it clear: The focus of our argumentation is on blindborn people with no visual experience. But even this group is diverse.

On the other hand: it is not only the questioning of the use of categorizations but furthermore the criticism on how society deals with blindness as such we should focus more. The cultural model of disability accepts an impairment on the body side. But beyond that, it asks for the reactions within a predominant abled society when dealing with disabilities. Certainly, there is a dichotomy that is repeated over and over again. Sighted vs. Blind. If so contrasted blind persons often appear as either victims or superheroes. Both ways are not appropriate.

Something that sighted people could actually learn from experiments of playing blind is to question the massive priority that seeing has in our culture and to challenge the concept of ability as such.

Closing with a perspective change from H.G. Wells – The country of the blind: When the main character Nuñez climbed Ecuador‘s Andes and got lost out there coincidentally he found a country where everybody was blind from birth. After observing them for a while the first thing he wanted to do was to teach the blind population how to "see". But since they did not have a concept of seeing like he did they considered him being crazy. He tried to trick them by running away assuming they could not see and therefore follow him. He tried his best to convince them that they had a deficit and that a normal state would be to "see" the world through "eyes". But neither did they believe him nor where their special perception really deficit enough to let him escape from them. They made him obey and he had to follow. In their notion, he alone was abnormal because he seemed to have tumour-like shapes in his face and was constantly talking about this so-called "seeing" which they figured must have been some kind of mental disease.



Sebastian Barsch is professor for history didactics at the University of Kiel. Susan Krause is doctoral researcher at the University of Bielefeld.
_____________________________

References

Bértolo, Helder (2005): »Visual imagery without visual perception?« In: Psicológica: Revista de metodologia y psicologia experimental Bd. 26, p.173-188.
Vygotsky, Lev (1993): »The blind child«, in: Robert W. Rieber/Aaron S. Carton (Hg.), The collected works of L. S. Vygotsky Volume 2: The Fundamentals of Defectology. Abnormal Psychology and Learning Disabilities, New York/London: Plenum Press, p. 97-109.

Recommended citation:

Sebastian Barsch / Susan Krause (2019): The blind - the special? In: Public Disability History 4 (2019) 4.

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Blinde und Kunst celebrates its 25th anniversary

By Siegfried Saerberg

I. Darkness as the womb of “Blinde und Kunst e.V.” (BuK)¹

In the year 2018 the association “Blinde und Kunst” [BuK] - blind people and the arts - celebrates its 25th anniversary. BuK was founded in 1993 in Cologne as a nonprofit organization of blind, visually impaired and sighted artists, as well as blind or visually impaired people who are interested in the arts.

Audio:
Leslie Ann Hewitt sings “Lilac Wine”, recorded 2013 in Cologne

© Blinde & Kunst.

BuK includes musicians, composers, writers, actors, sculptors and those who are just interested in culturally [de]constructing/presenting blindness in a new way. Its rise coincided with and inspired the beginning of the “darkness-movement” in Germany. By this term I mean activities such as “dialogue in the dark” and several dark restaurants and cafés presented and organized by blind people.² Thus, guiding sighted people into the dark in order to get on equal terms with them was our initial aim.

We developed a dark show which we called “Black Out” including music, dance, theatre-play, literature, stand-up comedy and magic.

Audio:
Niko Valentino presents his dark magic show, recorded 1996 in Hamburg
© Blinde & Kunst.

[Description: You hear music from a violin and a guitar. Then Niko exclaims: “Good evening, I am the magician with the pony tail. I have dressed up for you – but I am not sure whether you have already realized this.”]

The dark show also contained everyday activities such as finding one’s seat, finding the washroom and the exit, ordering a drink and paying in an entirely dark social situation. In 1993 for the first time “Black Out” celebrated blindness together with sighted guests and blind and sighted artists in a little theatre in Hamburg called “foolsgarden”. By 2007, “Black out” had been hosted at more than 100 events all over Germany, Belgium and Austria.

II. Producing radio programs and exploring blind culture

In 1995, BuK started to produce an acoustic magazine first on cassette and then on CD that was only distributed among its members. It contained more than 30 samples with around 35 copies which were sent via mail to each member. Between 1997 and 2000, we worked together with a broadcasting company in the south-west part of Germany [SWR] with the idea of presenting radio plays in darkness. A radio play called “Café Finsternis” resulted from this project.

Audio:

Tommy Ahrens and his guide dog Kelly singing the blues, recorded 1997 in Freiburg.

© Blinde & Kunst.

[Description: Tommy talks to his dog Kelly, then he plays the harp, Kelly sings.]

In 2004, we started to produce radio programs on our own and we still do this today in a local radio station in Cologne called “Freier Bürgerfunk”. From 2010 to 2012, together with “Radiofabrik” in Salzburg [Austria] we took part in a European culture program called “Ohrenblicke” [Ear Glances] to develop our technical and journalistic skills. Such radio programs are intended to present elements of blind culture to a wider public.

III. BuK explores blind arts

Our next goal was to develop special expressions of art that could be appreciated in the dark in order to make it more accessible for blind and visually disabled people. Between 1995 and 1997, BuK conceptualized three exhibitions in total darkness in Bergisch-Gladbach, Hamburg and Cologne, together with local associations of artists and the local association of blind and visually impaired people. The exhibition was called “Sinnenfinsternis” [eclipse of the senses] which is a play on words of the German phrase “Sonnenfinsternis” [eclipse of the sun] – with a forthcoming cosmic event on 11th August 1999. Acoustic, tactual, olfactory and gustatory exhibits – and also ostensibly visual ones such as a colour-cabinet for the haptic sensation of colour – were presented in total darkness to a mostly sighted audience.

In 2010, BuK developed the exhibition “Blinde Flecken” [Blind Spots]. The exhibition featured 17 favourite places of blind or visually impaired narrators. Voices, sounds and other audible sources were tape recorded to create an auditory portrait. Visitors could listen to these voices and sounds in dark booths via headphones. These recorded sounds were also presented on CD. 

Audio:

“3541 Miles” by Robbie Sandberg, published 2011.
© Blinde & Kunst.

[Description: You can hear a lot of different sounds. Then the author asks, what it is that drives a blind backpacker away from home. He answers that it is just the same thing that leads all backpackers into the world: To discover new things experience other people and different cultures and the lust for adventure. “Every city, every region has its own impact on the senses”, he says. Now you can hear several sounds of public travel like London Underground, San Francisco Cable Cars or Hamburg S-Bahn. Then you can hear a soundscape from India. The author concludes: “To experience with my own ears a sound that you normally only hear by watching an animal film tells me how far I am away from home”.]

In 2013, we transferred our concepts from dark environments to a lighted context now focusing on art exclusively produced by blind or visually impaired artists. Every work of art could be touched, was audio-described and a guiding system led through the exhibition.

Photo:

“Tapestry I”. Fire screen, cutlery, gardening tools, 2012 by Marian Edwards for the exhibition “Art Blind” (17.5.2013 – 17.6.2013) im Stapelhaus, Cologne.

Photo: Victor Dahmen, © Blinde & Kunst 2013
[Description: The object is a Victorian fire screen, an article of daily use which is placed in front of an open fireplace to prevent sparks from flying into the room. Fixed to its surface are carelessly discarded gardening tools and rusty, tarnished, dented, and bent cutlery. The objects are arranged in a very symmetric pattern both next to and on top of each other. We find scissors, fish knives, a small rake, and a little shovel. Tea and tablespoons of different sizes are placed in a row. With two exceptions, their handles point upwards and their inner surfaces face us.
Those are items which remain behind when a house is emptied out or when the attic is cleaned. They are the remains which remind us of a bygone life.
The artist writes, "I am fascinated by the way the light falls onto these objects and how the colours of the tarnished silver and discarded metal change. How we deal with objects and how we combine losses and memories that way."]

These exhibitions attempt to conceptionalize art and exhibitions beyond the limitations of the eye. They are also examples of the ways in which art exhibitions, from their initial conception, can be designed to accommodate the cognitive and perceptual culture of blind and visually impaired people. And moreover, they also represent a new and different experience for sighted people as well: the beheld object is not necessarily a visual one. It might also be an acoustic, tactual or gustatory one. So beauty does not only lie in the eye of the beholder. It also lies in the cognitive, perceptive and habitual procedures of the beholder’s body and mind.

IV. Conquering the citadels of art

From 2015 to 2017, we worked together with four major museums in Germany in a project called “Pilot Inklusion”. Together with Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn we worked on three exhibitions: “Japans Liebe zum Impressionismus” discussing the relationship between European impressionism and traditional art in Japan; “Pina Bausch und das Tanztheater” exploring the work of this extraordinary German choreographer from a bodily perspective, and “Wetterbericht”, dealing with the very subjective experience of weather as well as with global climatic changes. Besides implementing many tools to make the exhibitions accessible we presented works of art created by people with disabilities as a part of the exhibition.

Photo:
“Wolken, Textile, 2017 by Michael Gerdsmann, Die Schlumper (Hamburg) for the exhibition "Wetterbericht. Über Klimakultur und Klimawissenschaft" (7.10.2017 - 4.3.2018) in Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn.

Photo: David Ertl © Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn

[Description: You can see a woman touching some crocheted clouds hanging in the air. The clouds are in different sizes and made out of wool. They vary in colour between white and black. Behind the woman you see her guide dog laying on the exhibition floor.]

Photo:
“Welle im Auslauf” by Karla Faßbender for the exhibition "Wetterbericht. Über Klimakultur und Klimawissenschaft" (7.10.2017 - 4.3.2018) in Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn.

Photo: © Blinde & Kunst.

[Description: You can see a wave made out of alabaster. It is rather a smooth and soft wave than a big one. It feels like you lay your hand on the watery surface of the Northern Sea on a very calm morning.]

We also worked together with “KUNSTHAUS KAT18” in Cologne where many artists with learning disabilities produce their works. Widening our scope from blindness to disability in general, the project dealt with three major topics concerning the relationship between culture, arts and disability:

• Accessibility: All arts must be made accessible to disabled people. Not a single kind of art may be excluded. This needs to be done in a process of transformation.
• Multisensory [Tactile, acoustic and audio-descriptive] elements must be implemented
• The permission to touch original sculptures
• The availability of copies that are as close to the original in form, material and size
• Multi-cognitive strategies [simple language, diverse languages] must be applied
• Special guide services and guide systems should be available
• Professionalization so that disabled co-workers will be hired in museum-contexts as volunteer work may not be the appropriate basis
• Inclusion: The process of transformation should involve the communication of at least three groups: people with disabilities who should be the subject of transformation, the museum experts who know about the objects and their cultural context, and disabled artists who are best-equipped to encapsulate this process of transformation. This communication must be instituted within local, regional and national organisations: Every museum, every centre of arts should create a council to work together with groups and organizations within the disability community where this process of transformation can take place.
• Participation: art and culture in a broader social context should be embedded into the work of disabled artists. The artistic and cultural expression of disabled people should be encouraged, promoted and supported. And because these belong to human heritage, it must be made accessible for the whole of society in museums and galleries.

Accessibility, inclusion and participation should not be added to exhibitions in a second or third remove, but seen as an inclusive making of culture in general. Disability approaches should be embedded already in the first steps of conceptualisation. This also means, that exhibitions should represent disabled people, their arts and their culture. This is, because it is society which makes people disabled. So it is also society which can enable us again. Furthermore, society is also obliged to do so, because society is the overriding factor which enables or disables all human beings in the first place. We are social beings with our own unique culture which yearns to be represented among other cultures in public places such as museums, theatres and galleries. And we as members, producers and recipients of disability culture and disability arts should in the future be able to make our presence felt in mainstream culture and the arts.


Website:
www.blindeundkunst.de

---

^[1] I like to thank Leslie Ann Hewitt and Luke Hewitt for supporting the translation from German to English. Thanks also go to Eckhard Seltmann.^↩
[2] Siegfried Saerberg [2007]: The dining in the dark phenomenon. In: Disability Studies Quarterly, vol 27 no 3, summer 2007. http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/24/24^↩

Recommended Citation:
Siegfried Saerberg (2018): Blinde und Kunst celebrates its 25th anniversary. In: Public Disability History 3 (2018) 9.

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Music First or Disability First?

by Stefan Sunandan Honisch

Figure 1 Standing in the second row, fourth from left, is Imre Ungar, second prize winner of the 1932 Frederic Chopin Competition in Warsaw, Poland. Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2nd_Chopin_Competition_jurors_and_laureates.jpg

Many years ago, I was invited to perform in a building which dates from the late nineteenth century.¹ Since the building lacked an elevator to the recital hall, I was hoisted up the imposing staircase by several volunteers, an experience overly familiar to disabled musicians. I gave two performances that evening: as a disabled musician insisting on my right to participate in the concert, and as a musician with a disability performing for an able-bodied audience (Sutherland, 2005). And yet. My presence in that performance venue was the claiming of a right to be acknowledged on my own terms as a disabled performer, and as more than just the grateful recipient of the kindness of others (being carried up the stairs): as a disabled performer, I refuse to separate my disability from who I am, and could be, as a musician. Yet, as a performer with a disability, I participate in a normalizing framework which treats my disability as separate from my musical identity. That evening, so many years ago, I was both constrained and empowered by the structural barriers which would have excluded me from participation in that concert, and from inclusion in a community of able-bodied musicians, teachers, and a wider public.

My presence onstage for that evening’s concert, as both a disabled musician and a musician who happens to be disabled, raised a series of questions about the politics and aesthetics of musical performance that have reincarnated in my subsequent life as a disabled researcher. I address this research later, but a preliminary sketch of the conceptual terrain will be helpful.
Recently excavated histories of disability in the public sphere are shifting the ground upon which scholars, teachers, students, and activists have for so long ably moved. Wider publics engaging with these disability histories find personal meaning and shared identity. One such history is that of disability in international music competitions, a performance climate which provokes sometimes-heated disagreement often framed as a stark choice: whether disability is the most important or the least important consideration in responding to virtuosic, disabled musicians. Such disagreement, I would argue, requires each of us invested in competitive music-making based on our respective values and commitments to ask ourselves, and each other: what is the difference between being a disabled musician and an able musician who happens to be disabled? The title of this essay further questions whether it is necessary to choose between putting music or disability first.

Promising responses to the question “what is the difference between being a disabled musician and a musician who happens to be disabled” will be found in concrete interactions between specific disabled musicians and their audiences, rather than abstraction. My own provisional response—that one need not be either a disabled musician or a musician who happens to be disabled, that one can modulate from one to the other—is informed by the incongruities of lived experience. Engagement with actual experience is required because, amid the ground shifted by disabled bodies making their histories public, disability arts and culture emerged as a generative site of politically engaged creativity. Historically invested in the difference between “disability artist” and “artist with a disability”, disability arts and culture bring into language, music, and art expressive identities which replace stark choice with uncertainty’s flexible strength.
A recent interview with the musician-activist Gaelynn Lea emphasizes this ambiguity in centering musical and disabled identities. Lea explains:

„I like to be able to choose when I talk about [disability], because I know, no matter what, just standing there is going to make people think. That’s an unavoidable thing and that’s good, I suppose, but I also just want to be seen as a musician, too. I realized I’m in a very privileged position to be able to talk about it, so when I can, when I think it fits, and I think it’s being used for the right reasons, I do like to connect my disability identity to the art and talk about what I think needs to change in our society.”

Profoundly intertwined with, indeed inseparable from the contested political and aesthetic significance ascribed to the distinction between “disability-artist” and “artist with a disability”, then, are larger discussions of disability-first and person-first language in which selfhood, the very right to claim a self, is at stake.

Disability-first and person-first language is not a choice between opposites. The political and educative work of reimagining disability experience cannot fall to disability arts and culture alone. Assigning this heavy responsibility solely to disability arts and culture would allow mainstream culture, beholden to history and tradition, to continue its unimaginative representations of disability as antithetical to technical skill, or its opportunistic effusions (relatively frequent) about disability’s emotional resonance, and (relatively rare), about the aesthetic value of disability.

My own exertions as a disabled musician frequently places me in between “artist with a disability” and “disability-artist” or what I might characterize as “music-first” and “disability-first” performance. Here I mean to identify a continuum rather than a polarity like the one described by Gaelynn Lea: disabled performers recognize that perception of difference is “unavoidable,” and may, indeed, express a certain ambivalence, as does Lea. In demanding that audiences also recognize us as creative, expressive, beings, we are not denying their right to perceive our disabled bodies, but rather calling upon them to allow both aspects free reign in their experiences of what we have to offer.
When I perform in public, my presence on-stage resists easy categorization. Western art music performance norms assume that a pianist sits on a piano bench while playing. I sit in my wheelchair, both while practicing on my own, and when performing in public. I do so for practical rather than political reasons, specifically to facilitate navigation of the keyboard. My wheelchair use in performance is not consciously shaped by desire radically to defy norms of appearance. Nevertheless, by refusing to conceal my wheelchair from the audience, and by operating the damper pedal differently from other pianists, I blur the line between disability-first and music-first performance and intervene in the visual and sonic conditions through which audiences engage with my music-making.
I have since found that questions of music-first or disability-first performance cease to be a choice between capitulation to mainstream ableism, and a forceful disability politics.

My current research situates these in the public sphere of international piano competitions. A host of pedagogical and cultural systems restrict competitive musical performance to what the normal body can do, positioning normal ability as the raw material out of which virtuosic bodies are fashioned.
To accept normal ability as the baseline for competitive virtuosity is to forget that a history of international piano competitions is, in part, a history of disabled bodies. The outer years of this history, still unfolding, are 1932 and 2009. Its protagonists, separated by historical time and geographical space, share common political and musical space as blind virtuoso pianists:

• Imre Ungár (1909-1972) won second prize in the 1932 Frederic Chopin Competition
• Edwin Kowalik (1928-1997) a finalist in the 1955 Frederic Chopin Competition
• Bernard D’Ascoli (1958-) took the top prize in the 1978 Maria Canals Competition, and the third prize in the 1981 Leeds Competition
• Judyth Whitman (née Walker) (1947-2009) participated in the 1973 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition
• Nobuyuki Tsujii (1988-) co-gold medalist in the 2009 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition
• Tamas Erdi (1979-) took part in the Cliburn competition the same year as Tsujii.

The available sources documenting their performances, their critical and popular reception, and in some cases, the pianists’ own writings, raise the stakes of answering the question posed at the outset, as to the differences between being a disabled musician rather than a musician with a disability. In competition, because the emphasis is on virtuosity, a non-normative embodiment like disability, the difference might seem irrelevant, replaced by the work of sorting out those pianists who are able from those who exemplify the virtuosic. A recurring theme in how several of these pianists have been received has to do with uncertainty and contradiction in how to place their blindness. Their critical and popular reception is awash with references to disability, providing ample scope for working through the complexities of what it means to be a “pianist who happens to be blind” rather than a “blind pianist.” While taking note of this, my current work charts a different course by theorizing “vulnerable virtuosity.”

Piano competitions dramatize the seemingly paradoxical relationship between virtuosity as corporeal invulnerability and disability as profound corporeal vulnerability. Juror Menahem Pressler acknowledges that he “had to keep from crying” when he heard Tsujii play the second movement of Frederic Chopin’s Piano Concerto in E minor during the final round of the 2009 Cliburn competition.

His discomfort may very well have had to do with the ethical demands of being a competition juror. Emotional vulnerability communicated to fellow jurors, or to audience members would be out of harmony with the professional codes which demand that jurors be emotionally and musically invulnerable.

Vulnerability and disability, like virtuosity, demand heightened forms of musical engagement, in which the aesthetic demands of music-first performance, and the political interventions of disability-first performance, are inseparable. What I characterize as “vulnerable virtuosity” demands not only musical, but also ethical and reflexive engagement, and resists normalizing the merely superhuman. This entails a move towards an inclusive and accessible account of disability as a form of virtuosity that welcomes both musical ability and human vulnerability to the stage. Without simply ascribing strength to virtuosity and weakness to vulnerability, vulnerable virtuosity challenges our modes of looking and listening to resist comfortable and familiar oppositions between human limits, and superhuman transcendence. As we allow ourselves to be moved by the sights and sounds of a disabled body in performance, we should simultaneously feel and understand that with great emotion comes great responsibility to the vulnerable, disabled other and to the other within ourselves. In my own case, as a student, I treated my disabilities as the other within myself. These days, however, as a disabled scholar and musician, I am not so sure. I feel more wholly and peacefully disabled. And yet…

¹ I am grateful to Ylva Söderfeldt, Pieter Verstraete, and Laura Kinderman, for their thoughtful responses to an earlier draft of this essay.

Stefan Sunandan Honisch is a disabled scholar, teacher, and musician based in Canada. In addition to pursuing research at the intersection of disability studies, music, and education, he serves as a Field Editor for the Public Philosophy Journal. This essay draws on talks he gave at Uppsala University; on September 7, 2017, for the Engaging Vulnerability research program, and on January 23, 2018, for the Department of Musicology’s Research Seminar. He has explored these questions also in his PhD dissertation and his postdoctoral research at Uppsala University in the fall of 2017. See also https://www.disabledwriters.com/profiles/stefan-sunandan-honisch

Recommended Citation:
Stefan Sunandan Honisch (2018): Music First or Disability First? In: Public Disability History 3 (2018) 4.

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Blindness and ‘The object of art-in-between’. Towards cosmopolitical encounters in museological settings

By Joyce Leysen

 

 “What I thought was funny … they didn’t see those little faces …”

“No, they didn’t see them, they didn’t know. They weren’t quite sure what they were for, and you felt, oh this is a little face.”

“And when she said that, I thought ‘Oh yes, look here, a little nose and …!’ and all of a sudden, the picture is more clear.”

“Those are such interesting things I think, you can’t see it, yet, you can feel it.”

(excerpt from conversation: three persons (with and without visual impairments) talking about their art experience in a Brussels museum, 2014, my translation)

The above quote comes from a conversation during a tour for people with visual impairments in a museum in Brussels (Belgium). Our group was, at that specific time, sitting in a separate room where the persons with visual impairments were allowed to haptically experience an ancient vase. Very much appreciated by the group.

A dip in the museum's history shows that for thirty years already the museum staff provides for activities that specifically target the group of people with visual impairments. Today the policy of this so called Museum for Blind People (my own translation) is changed from organizing activities in separate rooms to the organization of customized tours for people with visual impairments within the regular museum circuit (see http://www.kmkg-mrah.be/nl/blinden-en-slechtzienden-0, consulted October 8, 2017).

Great, you might think, especially if you consider the following quote of a woman with a severe visual impairment who often went to the Museum for blind people: "In itself, I don't like the idea: 'We are going to that room alone.' You could sit there, and touch things. But you didn't have the feeling of going to an exhibition."
(excerpt from group conversation, Leuven, 2014, my translation).

For this person, being able to touch an object of art in a separate museum room did not evoke the feeling of experiencing art in a museum sphere. Though she recognized some advantages of fully separate art activity, she did express a domain and relating to the museum's public exhibitions. In other words, she wanted to have the feeling of being a museum visitor, as all other (seeing) people coming to the museum for an exhibition.

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Meeting Hanada Shuncho: In Search of Disability in Things Japanese

By Kenny Fries

Fifteen years ago, when I first arrived in Japan, I didn’t know anything about disability in Japanese culture. I didn’t see many people with disabilities on the streets of Tokyo. Disability was not very public. I was told most people with disabilities were hidden away, a combination of lack of access and family shame. However, as I began to discover, disability has been an important, one might even say crucial, part of Japanese culture for a very long time.
When I arrived in Tokyo, I was told by a disability studies colleague about the work of Hanada Shuncho. Hanada-sensei had written about the centrality of disability to Japanese culture, especially the disability of Ebisu, one of the shichifukjin, the seven lucky gods. My colleague referred me to a website called “Ebisu Mandala,” but when I loaded the page all I received was an error message.
During my first stay in Japan, I had difficulty finding what I was looking for. But when I returned three years later things had changed. Not only were more people talking about including students with disabilities in “mainstream” schools but I also saw more people with disabilities on the streets of Tokyo.
And I finally met with Hanada-sensei. By the time of our meeting I had found more disability in things Japanese, especially the blind biwa hoshi.

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Seeing Our History – Outdoor Blind People in Edwardian Scotland

By Iain Hutchison

Seeing Our History is a Heritage Lottery Fund-supported research project conducted in 2014/15 by the Royal National Institute of the Blind-Scotland and aided in practical terms by Lothian Health Services Archive and the National Records of Scotland. The basis of the project was a Register of Outdoor Blind people living in Edinburgh and the southeast of Scotland between 1903 and 1910. The Register had been poorly compiled with many incomplete entries, but this gave added incentive to research volunteers in their quest to reconstruct the lives of outdoor blind people – people living in their communities and beyond the patronage of the Edinburgh Blind Asylum and its workshops.

Members of the Seeing Our History research team
(Photo: Iain Hutchison)

The project team, consisting of research volunteers some of whom have sight loss, Dr Iain Hutchison, the project research historian, and Dr Catriona Burness, RNIB-Scotland’s senior research officer, had several potential lines of enquiry from which to choose. With 1,170 entries in the Register, a quantitative study was attractive, but when the incomplete nature of many entries was confronted, and numerous duplications identified, a qualitative approach was seen to hold greater potential.

Selling matches in
Edinburgh's Old Town
(Photo: City of Edinburgh Council)

Several detailed case studies resulted from this qualitative strategy and as life stories were developed, the study extended well beyond the eight years during which entries were made in the Register. The Edinburgh Mission to Outdoor Blind, the first such mission in Scotland, founded in 1857, had the instruction of tactile print as its primary objective. It used the Moon system exclusively for four decades before also embracing braille. Its concern was that blind people living among the sighted population should not be deprived of access to religious works. The Edinburgh Blind Asylum was also guided by a strong religious ethos, but the workshops that were the core of its activities meant that it catered for productive and therefore ‘ablebodied’ blind people.
The outdoor blind tended to be those blind people ‘disabled’ from working, or who, if they did work, earned insufficient money for it to provide meaningful self-support. They included elderly people, people who had lost a trade due to accident-related blindness, married women and widows, paupers confined to poorhouses, and the Mission’s so-called ‘migrant class’ whose claim to independence was in reality a precarious existence in lodging houses and temporary accommodation.

The primary output from the project was a book entitled Feeling Our History. The title emphasised not only the role of tactile print to people with sight loss, but the emotions affecting individual lives along with their tribulations, successes, and diverse social relationships. The book presented the project finds in two ways. One was through a selection of themes tracing the work of the Missions to Outdoor Blind and the broader experiences of blind people in such spheres as employment, education, poverty, communication, religion and charitable intervention. The second approach was to showcase the lives of ten of the people whom our researchers had explored in detail.

The book was produced in five formats in order to provide maximum accessibility to people with sight loss, and included large print, braille, audio and e-book formats. An interesting discovery was that people with total sight loss, in addition to other options, also wished to have a standard print version of the book so that it could be passed around their sighted friends.

The project had also undertaken to produce six podcasts for Insight Radio (now renamed Connect Radio), the radio station of RNIB. The podcasts, each lasting about ten minutes, were scripted in consultation with individual researchers and combined their case study investigations with a chosen broader theme.

Lizzie Hoseason spent her final years in a
mental asylum where this image was taken.
(Photo: Lothian Health Services Archive,
Edinburgh University Library)

The podcast preparatory work opened up two unanticipated additional opportunities. The Missions to Outdoor Blind approved of certain occupations for the blind people in which it took an interest, but disapproved of others. It took a jaundiced view of street musicians whose activities, it thought, were akin to begging and might take them to unsavoury locations such as public houses. Street musicians were also free spirits and that didn’t suit the missionaries either. But what kind of music did they play? Music hall was popular among the general public and singer/songwriter Sarah Caltieri drew on music hall numbers to create the theme tune adopted for the podcast intros and to craft lyrics that told the story of Lizzie Hoseason, one of our characters, and her daughter, Sophie.

The second opportunity was to produce an additional, smaller book, which showcased the podcast scripts. It was entitled Hearing Our History.

The podcasts and the books can be accessed at: http://www.insightradio.co.uk/seeingourhistory.html#.V3PPjfkrLIU

Recommended Citation:
Iain Hutchison (2016): Seeing Our History – Outdoor Blind People in Edwardian Scotland. In: Public Disability History 1 (2016) 17.

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