Orientalising deafness: race and disability in imperial Britain

Abstract

This article explores the conflations and connections that postcolonial and disability scholars have drawn between ‘race’, ‘colonialism’ and ‘disability’ from a historical perspective. By looking at the connections drawn between ‘race’ and ‘disability’ in the context of nineteenth-century imperial Britain, I hope to probe beyond them to examine the origins and implications of their interplay. I do so by focusing on ideas about deafness, an impairment radically reconfigured in the colonial period, and inflected with concerns about degeneration, belonging, heredity and difference. Disability, I argue, not only operated as an additional ‘category of difference’ alongside ‘race’ as a way of categorising and subjugating the various ‘others’ of Empire, but intersected with it. The ‘colonisation’ of disabled people in Britain and the ‘racial other’ by the British were not simply simultaneous processes or even analogous ones, but were part and parcel of the same cultural and discursive system. The colonising context of the nineteenth century, a period when British political, economic and cultural expansion over areas of South Asia, Australasia and Africa increased markedly, structured the way in which all forms of difference were recognised and expressed, including the difference of deafness. So too did the shifts in the raced and gendered thinking that accompanied it, as new forms of knowledge were developed to justify, explain and contest Britain's global position and new languages were developed through which to articulate otherness. Such developments reconfigured the meaning of disability. Disability was, in effect, ‘orientalised’. ‘Race’ I argue was formative in shaping what we have come to understand as ‘disability’ and vice versa; they were related fantasies of difference.

Keywords:

• deaf
• disability
• race
• colonial
• postcolonialism
• imperial Britain

Acknowledgements

All my thanks to Simone Borgstede, Erin Cullen, Daniel Grey and Onni Gust for their thoughtful reflections on this piece. My thanks also to the two anonymous reviewers who have helped me much improve the original text.

Notes

1. Many politically Deaf groups now argue that sign-language users are not a ‘disabled’ but an ‘ethnic’ or ‘cultural’ group. Here, however, I discuss deafness and disability together because, in the nineteenth century, the labelling of deafness as ‘infirmity’ was an important element of its construction.

2. Deaf activists have used ‘Deaf’ to indicate identity and ‘deaf’ adjectivally, a distinction which usefully illuminates the gap between ‘impairment’ and identity. I have not, however, used it in this paper as the grammatical distinction did not exist in the nineteenth century and applying them retrospectively requires a problematic assumption of identity, particularly as in this period many people identified with both or neither of the categories with which they may now be associated.