“Anthropology, like other sciences, has been accused of perpetuating a “colonial attitude” in deaf research (Ladd 2005; De Clerck 2010) whereby “research subjects are reduced to objects, and indigenous knowledge of the informants is granted secondary status in the production of scientific knowledge” (De Clerck 2010:436).
I understand that the original shift from receptive to expressive writing had to do at least in part with Deaf users’ political resistance to being treated as objects of study.
(How) do you feel that adopting an expressive writing perspective has succeeded in making Deaf writers more clearly marked as subjects, rather than research objects?
That usefully characterizes what it’s like to write expressively. However, I’ve rarely heard people discuss the impact this has on reading “through someone else’s face” or “from someone else’s (spatial) perspective”.
How do you feel this affects the ways in which you read other SignWriters’ texts? What skills are involved in reversing the perspective to imagine that you are being addressed and/or in imagining yourself in the (literal and possibly figurative) place of the writer?
Does this possibly encourage readers to adopt the perspective of the writer in ways other types of writing systems might not?
Rather than see
expressive writing as allowing readers to take on someone else’s perspective John
Lee Clark, a deaf/blind blogger, frames expressive writing as making it more
possible to make the text “your own”. He
posted these comments about the future of ASL literature on his blog:
“Someone else’s voice. Someone else’s hands.
It’s not that we cannot enjoy ASL performances. Readings, videos, and theater
are still important. But there’s something about the abstract, bare symbols on
the page that invites our minds to engage, argue with, and absorb the language
before us. We cannot do these things as well when we are only spectators.
One of the most important things the new
developers did with written ASL was to make it a rule that writers are to
project themselves spatially onto the page. If the writer is right-handed and
says “Hello,” his hand, from his own point of view, moves right. He is to write
“Hello” in that way. He is not to write as if it’s someone else saying “Hello” to him.
Written ASL does not create a movie screen or a line of mannequins. Instead, it
creates space for us to say things as ourselves. And it creates space, when we
are reading it, to fall into the text. In that space, we are there.”
How do these
comments resonate with your experiences as a skilled SignWriter and reader? Are
these mutually exclusive ways of understanding the effects of expressive
writing, or just different ways of experiencing it?
“I
would read a book with intense emotions written expressively by the narrator to
make me feel in the shoes of the character. Then comes the mean
character, whom threatens my character that I read receptively.
There would be a tendency to make mean character left handed (even with a scar
on a hand). Until the identity of the mean character is known, no sign
would display a face...
Other narrators may write in the receptive perspective to keep a distance
from the reader, example an official report.
The view from above could be selected for a character like Spiderman...
Poetry would swap between left-right, expressive-receptive, even top view to
exploit shapes of the signs. The arab calligraphy use geometry
sometimes...”
As the range of genres written with SignWriting expands, what do you think about the possibility of adopting multiple visual perspectives in writing?
ADAM’S ANSWER 3 (transcript of captions): In your third question, you asked me if writing in SignWriting enters more genres, is there a possibility that there will be documents with multiple viewpoints. It is possible that may happen. I don't think it is likely, however. The norm of writing will be expressive writing. In a few cases, it might be possible that multiple viewpoints might be used. Most likely we would see that happen within the fiction genre, just like the story "Catcher in the Rye". There was the standard written form, as well as a phonetic form of writing. So I think that it is possible to have in fictional stories where it is used as an intentional literary device. I hope this answers your questions.