The Paris Banquet and the Swedish Deaf Movement, or: A Signed Room on Stage

By Jenny Schöldt
Translated by Ylva Söderfeldt

On May 3, 1868, a group of Deaf gathered together with a few hearing friends – today, we would probably call them ”allies” – at the Manilla Deaf-Mute Institute in Stockholm. The three initiators were the school’s hearing director Ossian Borg, the Deaf teacher Fritjof Carlbom from Tysta Skolan (“The Silent School”, another Stockholm Deaf school), and the artist Albert Berg. Carlbom had paid a visit to Berlin and, inspired by the Deaf club there, had decided to start something similar in Sweden. On this day, twenty-two Deaf and five hearing persons agreed to form the Deaf-Mute Society, Dövstumföreningen, predecessor of today’s Swedish Deaf Association. This remarkable event, a milestone in Swedish Deaf history, celebrates its 150th anniversary this month.

It was the actor Joakim Hagelin-Adeby, chairman of the Stockholm Deaf Society, who came up with the idea to stage a play in honor of the history of the Swedish Deaf movement and the banquets that were held in Paris in the 19th century to celebrate Sign Language. The title was going to be Parismiddagen – the Paris Banquet. His suggestion prompted Tyst Teater, a theatre company that has been performing in Sign Language for more than four decades, an audition for Deaf writers. The framework was in place, and now prospective playwrights were free to be creative.
When I found out about the idea, I immediately envisioned a table in a room, with two Deaf persons seated, signing: artfully, quickly, humorously, like I’ve seen my Deaf friends sit and sign so many times before, and like I’ve done myself. I often think of Sign Language as something that goes on in the room where it is ”spoken”, that can’t be translated or captured. Sign Language is a language without tenses, consisting, put simply, of lexical and non-lexical signs. The non-lexical signs are descriptive verbs that are modified (signs are not inflected) according to context, or created as a result of the syntax. Very much like what happens on a theatre stage.
To write a script in one language that is supposed to be performed in another one, because the latter lacks a written form, is a problem that has been discussed over and over again within Tyst Teater and the rest of the Deaf artistic community.  In the past, for a different project, I had tried writing in a modified Swedish that made it clear how the lines were supposed to be signed. But this solution killed the creativity of the actors, and impeded the artistic work of the director.
I realized that I can’t decide how another Deaf person has to express themselves.
That has to happen in the room. In the conversation.

Actors Joakim Hagelin Adeby and Mette Marqvardsen on stage, seated across from each other at a long table set for a banquet, dressed in historical costumes and signing. Photographer: Urban Jörén

So this is why I wrote the play in Swedish. I was fortunate to know the previous work of the director, and to some extent the style and skills of the actors. The fact that they had to work with translation and interpretation gave the piece a dimension I now find invaluable.

Writing a play about a movement that is still ongoing, as a person who is part of that movement, is a strange and exhilirating meta-emotion, and perhaps something historians can relate to. A piece of history, alive, that I am observing and part of creating. Myself, and other Deaf. This was my intellectual starting point. I wanted to use my perspective on Deaf history, as it appears when I ask myself the question: what is Deaf history? Milestones such as the French signed education, the deaf schools, the official acknowledgement of Swedish Sign Language by the state in 1981, the Swedish Deaf movement. I want to be clear that I am concerned here with Nordic Deaf history, with a few links to other European Deaf communities and the US.

One table. Two signers. Leaping from one milestone to the other.

Actors Mette Marqvardsen and Joakim Hagelin Adeby on stage, Marqvardsen with a pipe, Hagelin Adeby with glasses, shaking hands and cheering. Photographer: Urban Jörén

Then I started reading and exploring, somewhat, these milestones. I soon found myself annoyed at how most of the documented history of the Deaf dealt with the schools, or consisted of dull summaries of club proceedings and such. This gave me reason to reflect on why this is what the sources look like, questions that I incorporated in the piece. In this manner, I brought myself onstage, and I hoped that the audience would be able to identify with my experience, even if their questions weren’t exactly the same. Speaking of documentation, we are among the peoples that lack historical records, since we didn’t have written language, and since we are not born into our group. We are born into another linguistic community, and grow up among the hearing. In order to sign, we need other Deaf people. An somehow, we always seek out and find each other, and somehow Sign Language always finds us.

Actors Joakim Hagelin Adeby and Mette Marqvardsen on stage, standing behind the table holding up a banner that reads, in Swedish: "TO BE. DEAF. SIGN LANGUAGE FOR ALL." Photographer: Urban Jörén

Words come and go, but the Deaf are here to stay.

Parismiddagen is currently on tour in Sweden. Some of the performances are accompanied by seminars on Deaf culture and history. See https://tystteater.riksteatern.se/parismiddagen/

Recommended Citation:

Jenny Schöldt: The Paris Banquet and the Swedish Deaf Movement, or: A Signed Room on Stage. In: Public Disability History 3 (2018) 7.

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I Am an Independent Blind Historian

By Alida Boorn, PhD

Although I have been blind for two decades, I am new to academic Disability Studies.  For a number of years my primary area of interest has been North American Indigenous peoples studies.  My main areas of focus are Show Indian culture and transnational material culture.  I was introduced to Disability Studies by Dr. Miguel Juarez when he approached me to participate on a Panel at the October 2018 Western History Association Conference to be held in San Antonio, Texas. Our panel will research and present papers focused on Ageism, Ableism, and Advocacy. Dr. Miguel Juarez from the University of Texas at El Paso will serve as our Chairman; Dr. Robin Henry from Wichita State University will serve as our diversity expert; and Dr. Bonnie Lynn-Sherow from Kansas State University will serve as our Commentator.  I will offer my insight of what I can contribute to the history profession as a blind senior citizen just entering the field.

As research for my Western History Association paper I posted a call on H-West and H-Disability for blind historians to contact me to share their experiences.  I received four contacts.  These informants have been very helpful. How people approach disability in their education and career pursuits reflects commonalities, as well as unique individual strategies for navigating the world.  It is important to emphasize that there is a broad spectrum of different levels of visual acuity.  For example; being legally blind does not necessarily mean that a person cannot see light, friends faces, or large font print.  People with low vision can see color or a world that resembles a Monet painting. Then, there are blind persons as myself who have no sense of sight. Blind and low visioned people rely heavily on listening skills to navigate the outer world. Tactile skills provide reading using braille and examining art in museums, such as looking at sculpture with one’s hands. It is wonderful to note that museums now provide technological devices and cell phone aps that deliver audio tours of exhibition spaces.  When I was a young low visioned person this technology was not readily available in the museums that I love so much.

Ageism, ableism, and advocacy in the history profession is a relevant subject that deserves continuing and fresh attention to learn from diverse History communities. I bring to this discussion the perspective interpretation of a blind woman who pursued her PhD in history after completing the first half of her lifecycle.  I argue that the History profession will always need historians from all ages and periods of careers that include a late in life encore career as a choice to begin a new career as a professional historian.  In addition, there is room for a myriad of new historians with audio, visual, and physical challenges.  The history profession needs to push out a larger welcome mat to widen the scope of teaching and research in the history and museum professions.  I compliment the Western History Association (WHA) for encouraging and supporting budding and continuing historians. In this paper and panel, I hope to showcase what more can be accomplished in the History Profession populated with all ages and varying types of abled persons. I fought a battle with glaucoma for decades that I lost.  I began and completed my PhD as a totally blind person.  Not only faced with that challenge, I was sixty-four years old when I completed my PhD.  Having the desire to be a historian and being allergic to people who told me “no” I tarried on.  I was truly fortunate that Kansas State University took a chance on admitting me into their brilliant Graduate History Program.

I utilize adaptive technology to work.  For example; I read and write on my lap-top computer using an audio program called JAWS.

JAWS software

I also read much of the multitude of historiography books that have been converted into audio form on my Victor Stream.  My Victor Stream also has adaptive technology so that I can study foreign languages via audio lessons.  Because I must rely on my hearing to learn, I rely on people, such as my husband to describe visual culture in archives and museums.  Certainly museums are now having more sensitivity to the blind and low visioned visitors and, thus, provide audio tour devices, braille pamphlets, and large type exhibit literature.

Victor Stream Reader, photograph by James Boorn

When I wrote my dissertation I discussed that Native American material culture is not and has never been static is not a new conclusion. Other Plains Indian material culture historians have also come to this conclusion.  What makes this work’s thesis new is how I supported the agreed upon thesis of the adaptive methodology of Indian and non-Indian people sharing and repurposing the same material culture.  I demonstrated the interconnections of Canadian, United States, and North American Great Plains Indigenous peoples’ histories by connecting material culture to politics, museum collectors, and tribal archives.  This work is a broad cultural study.  I examined the project from the perspective as a blind person.  I researched the material culture by employing audio description provided by computer generated audio reading of written text. Because I cannot physically see archival materials and other images I relied heavily on secondary sources, predominantly museum exhibition catalogs. I treated the catalogs as archives.  The catalogs contain a fountain of knowledge provided by essays written by academic experts.  I relied on memory of images, from when I once had eyesight, to describe the material culture examined in this narrative.  For example, I remember the essence of color.  I know that black can represent darkness, white can represent light, red can represent blood and life, yellow can represent warmth, blue can represent water, and green can represent grass. My support conclusions come from an academic interpretation that has not been attempted by others in the study of Indigenous material culture.  I concluded transnational changes in American Indian and Euroamerican material cultures are interdependent on politics, global events, and elastic adaptation.  Additionally, for the sighted readers, I have included images of many topics that I discuss, to include native and non-native works.

My unique method of interpreting this fascinating spectrum of material culture is based on listening, touching, and learning from others who have learned about the fact that blind people can actually understand visual constructs in art.  Both the sighted and blind persons possess the ability to know the material world through tactile perception.  For example, perception Psychologist John M. Kennedy determined that “If many properties are perceived by both touch and vision, then it is reasonable to conjecture that the tactile and visual perceptual systems share many of the same operating principles for perceiving the shape of our surroundings.”    Kennedy further pointed out that, “A table is both a visual table and a tactile table. And, if we share the same domain and are interested in the same properties—if touch and vision often use the same tactics in analyzing the world—then is it not possible that sighted and blind people can process depictions the same way?”  Because blind persons can understand the world of tactile perception, they, therefore, can understand enhanced understanding from sighted persons who provide audio descriptions of material culture and visual art. That is the reason that secondary sources such as museum exhibition catalogs were so important to the research for my dissertation.¹

Artist and art historian Judith Ostrowitz succinctly explained how influential North American Indigenous art became in the 19thCentury when “influential scholars” became interested in the Indigenous interpretations.  Because these images have been studied and described by scholars, the blind as myself, can understand the images and learn how to appreciate the colors and paints used in the creation of these works.  Ostrowitz said that, ”Volumes were written by anthropologists, collectors, and others who sought to know the nature and meaning of objects that originated in Native cultures, in what they considered a systematic and scientific way, and ultimately to share that knowledge with larger audiences, particularly in museum environments.”²

How to describe the difference between Indian art and artifact is not a simple visual determination.  It helps to understand if the piece is art if the creator can provide an oral description for the viewing audience, who might also have blind people wanting descriptions from audio text and/or tactile access, if possible.

A fine example of transnational sharing of artistic style can be seen in the 1833 painting by Mandan artist Mató-Tópe (Four Bears). Anthropologist John Canfield Ewers noted that the Mandan artist Four Bears and others studied Catlin at work drawing and painting over four hundred pictures of the Mandan people, village lifeways, and regional landscapes.³ Ewers noted that he saw distinct changes in Four Bears’ pictogram painting style.  Ewers described the changes he saw as the artist moving to a more realistic biographic style. He said that “Gone were the knoblike heads, figures, the crude proportions, the lack of detail. Heads were now painted in profile, the features sharply defined. Great care was taken in drawing a realistic human eye. The arms, legs, and bodies were well proportioned, and the details of headgear, ornaments, and body costume, and the moccasinned feet were delineated with painstaking care. Even though the colors of the original drawing are not known, some attempt at color modeling is suggested on the face and upper body of the warrior [on the painting].”⁴

Mató-Tópe (Four Bears), Battle with a Cheyenne Chief, 1833, watercolor and pencil on paper, Joslyn Art Museum, 1986.49.384

Karl Bodmer, “Mató-Tópe (Four Bears), Mandan Chief, 1834,” Joslyn Art Museum, 1986.49.383

I know that I am not the first blind historian, nor will I be the last.  My desire in this brief essay is to demonstrate that the history professions have room for all persons from both the disabled   and non-disabled communities. Through technology we can all create an informative transnational sharing and teaching base.

¹ John M. Kennedy, Drawing & the Blind Pictures to Touch, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 3.
² Judith Ostrowitz, “Full of Blood, Thunder and Springy Abandon – History, Text, and the Appreciation of Native American   Art,” in The Responsive Eye Ralph T Coe and the Collecting of American Indian Art, (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2003), 45.
³  John C. Ewers, Early White Influence Upon Plains Indian Painting George Catlin and Carl Bodmer among the Mandan, 1832-34, (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1957), 6.
⁴ Ibid., 7-8.

Recommended Citation:
Alida Boorn: I Am an Independent Blind Historian. In: Public Disability History 3 (2018) 6.

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Emancipation and violence against people with disabilities in the past

By Paul van Trigt¹

In a recent tweet a psychologist was asking professionals and families to help clients with an intellectual disability to report to the committee of the Dutch government that investigates violence against youth in the postwar period.² The person that drew my attention to this tweet was critical: should the psychologist not ask the committee to communicate in a more effective and accessible way? And do people with intellectual disabilities really need help to report? This example shows in a nutshell the problematic position of persons with disabilities in the current investigation of violence against youth with a disability in the postwar Netherlands: the research seems – at least partly - to happen ‘about us, without us’. In this blog, I do not want to evaluate the still ongoing Dutch research, but to share some general considerations that transcend the Dutch case and that are hopefully relevant when it comes to dealing with the growing attention nowadays for violence against marginalized groups including people with disabilities in the past.

I want to take my starting point in what Cathy Kudlick wrote a couple of years ago, namely that disability history ‘will always come back to two core political ideas, both rooted in the disability rights movement: a need to challenge the prevailing assumptions about disability, and the importance of granting people with disabilities historical agency’. Kudlick’s statement challenges the current approach to violence against and abuse of people with disabilities in the past with the argument, that research about violence does not automatically undermine prevailing assumptions about disability or takes the voice of people with disabilities seriously. The following question can therefore be asked: does historical research of violence serve the emancipation of people with disabilities? I have no clear-cut answer to the question, but I think the following issues have to be considered.

Recently, 'broeder Tuck' (translated brother Tuck, alias Jeroen Zwart) passed away. As a disability activist he was always dressed like a monk, referring to the history of religious care for people with disabilities. With his nickname he toke the name of a monk that together with Robin Hood stood up for the poor. Therefore he was an excellent example of how disability activism can be related to the past without reinforcing prevailing assumptions about disability (Copyright Jan Troost)

 

In the first place, the attention to violence against people with disabilities in the last decades is part of a broader interest in violence against marginalized groups in the past. Historians like François Hartog increasingly tend to interpret this new interest in violent pasts as part of what they call a ‘new time regime’. The hypothesis is that the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War marked the end of the so-called modern time regime in which present and past were seen in terms of the future. The new regime that became dominant since then, subordinates the past and future to the present: ‘while the future has lost much of its luminosity, the past has more and more invaded our consciousness’. Especially ‘traumatic pasts’ like the history of slavery receive increasingly attention in (Western) societies and are approached with current standards like human rights, from postcolonial perspectives and from the viewpoint of ‘victims’.³ The new time regime is however not evitable. Whereas John Torpey argues that the changing time regime has replaced the ‘traditional rallying cry of historical militant labour – “don’t mourn, organize”’ by ‘organize to mourn’, Berber Bevernage has shown in the context of transitional justice that the future still can be leading: ‘the political function of the truth commission is first and foremost directed at managing a break with the past’. Torpey is thus critical about the disappearing visions of the future, but Bevernage asks if the vision of the future of truth commissions and their ‘turn to history in order to pacify the past may not also come at the cost of memory and justice’.⁴ So, I would suggest that it is not self-evident that the investigations as initiated by the government serve the emancipation of people with disabilities and that, at least, in every specific context reflection on this by different stakeholders is needed.

Related to that, my second consideration is in particular directed to historians: their professional practice did namely not necessarily serve the victims or survivors. Historians (including myself) namely unconsciously often follow a modern time regime in which they see it as their task to ‘historicize’, to recognize the characteristics of every era and to make distinctions between era’s and consequently between the present and the past. As argued by Bevernage, these distinctions are not set in stone and object of debate and negotiation. When it comes to historical injustice, historicizing can be helpful but also dangerous: it can be misused to close the past too early and even to legitimize impunity.⁵ Historians have to be aware of this. Moreover, scientific-historical research usually presumes a distance between the historian in the present and his object in the past. Piet de Rooy has pointed out in his response to the research report about abuse in the Dutch Catholic institutions, that historical research should be directed by analysis, not by condemnation. Therefore one could ask if historians are capable of giving recognition, let alone ‘full satisfaction to traumatised victims’?⁶

Brother Tuck was involved in recent disability protests in the Netherlands, directed against austerity measures of the Dutch government and aimed at implementation of the UNCRPD - to which his blue UN helmet referred. (Copyright Charlie Loos)

My third and last consideration is that research about violence in the past makes clear that the perspective of the survivors of violence, to put it kindly, not always is taken into account.⁷ Survivors were often not approached as ‘genuine partners in conversation’, as Henry Greenspan has argued for, but as passive victims.⁸ Here is a form of inequality at work, of which scholars today become increasingly aware - as can for example be illustrated by a quote of anthropologist Joel Robbens: ‘it has often been the suffering subject who replaced the savage one as a privileged object of our attention’.⁹ Research about (sexual) violence in institutions in the past, despite good intentions, runs the risk to (re)present people with disabilities only as suffering subjects, or even suffering objects. Therefore, the insights of (new) disability historians are more than ever needed to complicate the results of such research. Rosemary Garland-Thomson for instance, has developed a helpful ‘taxonomy of four primary visual rhetorics of disability’.¹⁰ She makes a distinction between wondrous, sentimental, exotic, and realistic images that complicates a restrictive terminology as being either positive or negative. In particular relevant seems the alternative and by Walter Benjamin inspired conceptualization of time as proposed by Verstraete, who has argued that disability history cannot be understood as ‘a steady and linear progression’: ‘even the best intended solutions might have some less desirable side-effects that were not foreseen’.¹¹ This sounds perhaps as a pessimistic note to end with, but that is not necessarily the case. In this understanding of time is not only recognized that human possibilities are limited, but also that bad things can turn to the better. In my current research, consisting of making a genealogy of the CRPD, I see a lot of paternalistic humanitarianism in the disability policies at the UN level, but in the course of time people with disabilities became more and more subjects and agents of international law. So, hopefully the ‘storm blowing from paradise’ (Benjamin) makes the current attention to disabled pasts into something that serves the emancipation of people with disabilities in present and future.

About the author:
Paul van Trigt is postdoctoral researcher in the ERC-project Rethinking Disability: the Impact of the International Year of Disabled Persons (1981) in Global Perspective at the Institute of History, Leiden University (www.rethinkingdisability.net). He has published about the modern history of the welfare state, human rights, disability and religion. His monograph Blind in een gidsland (Blind in a guiding country) was published in 2013, he also edited and contributed to a special issue of the journal Social Inclusion about disability and ‘being human’ (https://www.cogitatiopress.com/socialinclusion/issue/view/54).

References:
¹ I want to thank the editors and Corrie Tijsseling for their comments on an earlier version of the blog text. ^↩
2 See for information about the Dutch investigations: https://www.commissiegeweldjeugdzorg.nl ^↩
3 Aleida Assmann, ‘Transformations of the Modern Time Regime’, in: Chris Lorenz (eds), Breaking up time: negotiating the borders between present, past and future (Göttingen 2013) 39-56: 41. Digital available here: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/36b1/ac544a01bae663f57d9d16087fd7a6e9f74c.pdf ^↩
4 Berber Bevernage, ‘Writing the Past Out of the Present: History and the Politics of Time in Transitional Justice’, History Workshop Journal 69 (2010) 111-131: 118 and 125. ^↩
5 Bevernage, ‘”Always historicize.” Over de ethische en politieke implicaties van een “historische” houding in de context van waarheids- en historische commissies’, Groniek 194 (2013) 17-36. Digital available here: https://biblio.ugent.be/publication/5765496/file/5910517.pdf ^↩
6 Piet de Rooy, ‘Verklaren en veroordelen. Enige opmerkingen over recent onderzoek naar seksueel misbruik’, BMGN-Low Countries Historical Review 129, 1 (2014) 77-87. Digital available: https://www.bmgn-lchr.nl/articles/abstract/10.18352/bmgn-lchr.9447 ^↩
7 Henry Greenspan, ‘Afterword’, in: Steven High (ed.), Beyond Testimony and Trauma. Oral History in the Aftermath of Mass Violence (Vancouver Toronto 2015) 351-356: 351. ^↩
8 Quoted by Sten High, ‘Introduction’, in: idem, Beyond Testimony, 3-28: 15. ^↩
9 Joel Robbins, ‘Beyond the suffering subject: toward an anthropology of the good’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19 (2013) 447-462: 450. ^↩
10 Rosemary Garland-Thomson, ‘The Politics of Staring: Visual Rhetorics of Disability in Popular Photography’, in: Sharon L. Snyder (ed.) Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities (New York 2002) 56-75. Digital available here: http://thowe.pbworks.com/f/politics.of.staring.pdf ^↩
11 Pieter Verstraete, In the shadow of disability. Reconnecting History, Identity and Politics (Opladen Berlin Toronto 2012) 52-54. Cf. Sebastian Barsch, Anne Klein and Pieter Verstraete, ‘The need for imperfection. Disability histories in Europe’, in: idem (eds.), The imperfect Historian. Disability Histories in Europe (Frankfurt am Main 2013) 7-13. ^↩

Recommended Citation:
Paul van Trigt (2018): Emancipation and violence against people with disabilities in the past. In: Public Disability History 3 (2018) 5.

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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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Banners of the UK Disabled People’s Movement

By Gill Crawshaw

In 2016 I organised a disability arts project in Leeds, UK called Shoddy. The project centred on an exhibition of textile-based work by disabled artists and was a showcase for some fantastic artwork. The exhibition had a few themes, including protesting the government’s “shoddy” treatment of disabled people, with huge cuts to welfare benefits and other public funding that are disproportionately affecting disabled people. 

Shoddy is the name for new cloth created from woollen waste and recycled fabric. This original meaning is now largely unknown, and the word has come to mean of inferior quality, shabby, broken-down. Through this project, disabled artists challenged those assumptions that our work, and our-selves, are inferior, broken-down, second-rate or badly made.

Recognising the origins of shoddy, the project considered a number of issues and events that linked disabled people to textiles and cloth. As a member of DAN – the disabled people’s direct action network – in the 90s, I remembered how important our banners were in stating our case clearly and in instilling pride in activists. With this in mind, I pulled together some information about banners I was aware of that had been used in support of disability rights, which was published on the Shoddy blog. Here’s an updated version of the original article:

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Political banners, with their traditions reaching back through the labour movement, have something in common with the Shoddy exhibition. Being fabric-based is the obvious connection, with a skilful use of embroidery, appliqué and painting to convey a strong message. Banners usually carry a message of protest or resistance, but are as often about identity, pride, unity and justice.

DAN banner on the right, the only photo I can find of it.
Photo: Tony Baldwinson

We are familiar with trade union banners, the banners of the women’s suffrage movement and, of course, banners that are carried on demonstrations –  sometimes quickly and roughly made, but with something to say and aiming to grab your attention.

The UK disabled people’s movement has created some wonderful, attention-grabbing banners over the years, including the legendary banner that accompanied DAN, the disabled people’s direct action network, on actions during the 1990s. The slogan “to boldly go where everyone else has gone before” was the backdrop for DAN’s campaign for accessible public transport when activists boldly handcuffed themselves to buses and trains and stopped traffic for hours.

Banners have carried the messages of the disabled people’s movement since it began. “Not Charity But Social Justice” and “Justice Not Charity” appeared on banners carried by the National League of the Blind in 1920, demanding legislation to protect their rights and guarantee a minimum income for blind workers.

This slogan echoes down the years. It’s one of the foundations of the disabled people’s movement. DAN was formed after the Block Telethon demos of 1990 and 1992 demanded “Rights Not Charity”. DPAC (Disabled People Against Cuts) makes the same demand today, evidenced in their banner in 2015’s Art, Life, Activism exhibition at the Attenborough Centre, Leicester, which showed art informed by the politics of disability.

In the same exhibition, there was a later example of a banner from the National League of the Blind & Disabled, as the organisation later became.

Other UK disabled people’s organisations who have made banners for marches and demos include WinVisible, Mental Health Resistance Network and Black Triangle.

Not strictly a banner, the quilt made by supporters of the campaign seeking Justice for LB (“Laughing Boy”) or Connor Sparrowhawk needs mentioning. Connor died in 2013, aged 18, while a temporary patient in a specialist NHS treatment and assessment unit for people with learning disabilities in Oxford. He drowned in a bath following an epileptic seizure. An independent inquiry found that his death had been ‘preventable’ and the inquest in October 2015 concluded that neglect was a contributory factor in his death. The campaign seeks both justice and changes in the hospital system to prevent this happening again.

The quilt was made as part of 107 days of action taken by campaign supporters in 2014 and is a celebration of the life of LB. 

In 2015, to celebrate 800 years of Magna Carta, Parliament commissioned nine artists, three of whom are disabled, to produce banners for Westminster Hall. Jason Wilsher-Mills created banners inspired by the 1834 Tolpuddle Martyrs and the 1995 Disability Discrimination Act (DDA).

Jason Wilsher-Mills parliament banner.

Rachel Gadsden took the 1601 Poor Law and the 1829 Catholic Emancipation Act as her inspirations. Paula Stevens-Hoare marked The Great Reform Act of 1832, which extended the right to vote, and the 1967 Sexual Offences Act, which decriminalised homosexuality, with her banners.

The banners have now been gifted to different venues round the country. Jason Wilsher-Mill’s banner will be exhibited at The Art House in Wakefield later this year.

The final example of a powerful and moving banner that’s both protest and remembrance is the one created by Gill Thompson and Maggie Zolobajluk listing the names of people who have died due to benefit cuts and sanctions. Gill’s brother was David Clapson, an ex-soldier who died penniless and hungry following benefit sanctions (see short video). The banner was taken to the Government’s Dept for Work & Pensions headquarters earlier this year, along with a petition signed by 31,000 people, demanding changes to the sanctions policy. So far none have been made and the DWP continues to abdicate all responsibility for David and others’ deaths.

The work of one of the artists who featured in the Shoddy exhibition, Lesley Illingworth’s Story Telling Coat likewise remembers those who have died due to benefit cuts, pairing names of the deceased with Members of Parliament and warning that this is the ultimate price demanded from disabled people who are unable to comply with punishing work regimes.

Storytelling Coat by Lesley Illingworth.
Photo: Mat Dale.

Recommended Citation:
Gill Crawshaw (2018): Banners of the UK Disabled People´s Movement. In: Public Disability History 3 (2018) 3.

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Post-colonialism and the future of Deaf culture: impressions from my YouTube playlist

By Ylva Söderfeldt

The culture of sharing entertaining, brief videos on social media has in a short period of time introduced a number of genres never thought of before. The success of some, such as "unboxing" videos that let us share the experience of opening the package of desirable products, seem unexpected and bewildering at least to those of us who still remain in a 20th century mindset. The appeal of seeing cute animals, or people falling over, is perhaps more easily understandable, as they are connected to longer traditions in entertainment. Old or new, all of these genres however have an obvious common denominator: they are primarily meant to generate emotions. This is true also for the vast number of available videos and compilations showing the activation of cochlear implants (CI).

Usually but not always featuring small children, these videos can easily be found by searching for "hearing for the first time". The conventions are remarkably strong for being such a new phenomenon: in a clinic, a deaf patient is brought in, a doctor asks them or their parents if they're ready, and then the CI is switched on. Someone speaks, and the deaf child or adult shows immense happiness: laughing or crying from joy. Ideally, of course, the speaker is the child's mother, and now we can witness how the toddler can hear her voice for the first time.

It's a touching moment that compresses emotion-laden ideas about disability and gender, where hearing your mother's voice is not a matter of being efficiently reminded to wash your hands or do your homework, but a central part in bonding and love. It makes you a full human being. And because that's what it communicates, it also implies that deafness is a barrier to that experience.
The videos also send a positivist message about the advancement of high-tech medicine, producing miracles, in a seemingly instant and clean manner. We do not see the blood, the drilling through the skull, the scars, or the tedious training program ahead in these videos. A doctor flips a switch, and normalcy is enabled.

In many Western countries, as much as 90% or more of deaf infants are today equipped with CI. With this advanced hearing aid, and a large amount of special training, many of them grow up exclusively oral. This leaves the Deaf community with a pressing question: what will happen to them and their culture and language in the future? It looks like one of those great ironies of history: in the 1980's, the decade when activists were finally successful in their long struggle for the right to use Sign Language in schools, the first CI was developed. Will it undo what they achieved? Can anything be done to stop the development?

A couple of decades on, it's clear that parents of deaf children aren't impressed with the arguments against CI. It's also clear that those who have a CI aren't necessarily lost to the Deaf community: many do learn to sign and end up identifying as Deaf. Nevertheless, it's inevitable that the Deaf community will change.

Which brings me to Patrick. This teenager's story hasn't gone viral, but it does offer the viewer a rewarding emotional experience, very similar but also completely different from the CI activation videos. Patrick is deaf and lived for his entire childhood in linguistic isolation, only having a rudimentary system of home-sign to communicate with his father. In the video, we see Patrick going from near-apathy to joy and hope for the future when he gains access to Sign Language.

He lives in Uganda, and in his case, a CI was never an option. This is often forgotten when we speak of the supposed CI revolution: it affects really only a small part of the world's population. It's an expensive intervention, not only the surgery and implant themselves but the intensive training needed for it to actually work in supporting communication makes it out of reach for people like Patrick. So the savior, here, is not a doctor, but a Deaf teacher.

The unequal distribution, thus, of power and wealth resulting from the era of European colonialism, figures in the history of cochlear implants in unexpected ways. As with many high-tech products, the CI contains mineral components that are extracted in countries where people are too poor to benefit from the end product. Thus, the "miracle" videos of white, Western babies having their CI switched on literally contain pieces of a post-colonial economy.

At the same time, contrasting these videos presents us with an intriguing vision for the future of a culture that has, too, suffered under it's own kind of colonial oppression. As we know, the views on colonized peoples and on the deaf share many historical connections and similarities, such as the idea of both as "men of nature" and "noble savages", the association of both with "racial inferiority", and often similar politics of suppressing minority languages and cultures. In a radical viewpoint, the CI is the latest in a succession of attempts by hearing people to assimilate or even eradicate Deaf people.
But taking a global perspective, we recognize a young generation of people like Patrick who are embracing Sign Language and a Deaf identity. I don't believe that Deaf culture will disappear in the West, but it does seem likely that it's global future will be based elsewhere.

Recommended Citation:
Ylva Söderfeldt (2018): Post-colonialism and the future of Deaf culture: impressions from my YouTube playlist. In: Public Disability History 3 (2018) 2.

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Disability History meets Teacher Education

By Sebastian Barsch

One of the possible ways to spread findings of disability history and reflections on disability in past and present is to teach them in history lessons in schools. Therefore, it could be useful to familiarize aspiring history teachers with the oppurtunities and challanges of disability history for historical thinking during their studies.

In Germany, most people studying history on university level are going to be teachers later in their career. This post presents a selection of works by students in a seminar at Kiel University in summer term 2017. In total, the seminar was attended by 15 students. In terms of content, the students dealt with disability history on two levels: 1) as an independent scholarly exploration of a specific historical phenomenon and 2) with regard to the question how lesson material could be developed for history lessons in schools. Both levels are challenging. Among other things, because there is hardly any teaching material on disability history for schooling (a few examples are here and here). Likewise, the topic tends to occupy a marginal position in the academic training of history teachers, much more marginal than other difference categories such as gender, class and race. However, it has rarely been so easy to teach disability history in schools. At least in Germany. Unlike a few years ago, the curricula in most regions now only require schools to work along meta-concepts of historical thinking instead of dictating specific content. The concrete content for history lessons can now be selected by the teachers. Therefore, disability history can serve as a wonderful example to address issues such as power and powerlessness, exclusion and emancipation, domination and resistance. In addition, the topic can illustrate how ideas of normality and deviation have grown historically.

Disability History can enrich the history lesson. However, school practice is changing slowly. Innovations are often not easy to enforce (see Tyack and Cuban 1994). At the same time, the perspectives of disability history and the critique on dominant ideologies associated with it are becoming increasingly important. History as a subject in schools is exposed to the pressure of political influence. With the rise of nationalist tendencies in many Western countries, it is also demanded to use lessons for building national identities among the school students (see Jaskulowski, Majewski & Surmiak 2017; Bernhardt 2016).

In the seminar, the students worked on issues of disability history and were asked to produce a popularized text. We are happy to present a collection of four works, which address disability history in a broad understanding:

• Julie Burmeister interviewed a "Lebensborn"- child and her experiences of being a "result" of Nazi ideology.
• Valerio Majer tells the story of "Jugendwerkhöfe", an institution for deviant young people in East-Germany.
• Clara Moltrecht asks if autism is a "fad diagnosis".
• Julia Bruns tells us something about left-handedness in past and present (the text is in German language only. Specific expressions were difficult to translate into English). 

We hope that you enjoy reading. If you're interested in more works from students of history on disability history you don't have to wait long. In a couple of weeks Bettina Alavi from University of Education Heidelberg will present blogs of her students.

Recommended Citation:

Sebastian Barsch (2018): Disability History meets Teacher Education. In: Public Disability History 3 (2018) 1.

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