Valuing Deaf Worlds in Urban India by Michele Friedner (review)

Valuing Deaf Worlds in Urban India is an important contribution to the growing corpus of literature on disability in India and underscores the need to engage with multiple subjectivities and disability experiences. It narrates the stories of young deaf Indians grappling with issues of selfhood, sociality, mobility, and development in contemporary India. The book draws upon fieldwork conducted in the South Indian city of Bangalore (since renamed Bengaluru) mainly during the period 2008–2009, and on subsequent shorter visits thereafter. It is located against the backdrop of political and economic transformations unleashed by globalization, and analyzes the manner in which young deaf adults negotiate their embodied difference, social–structural barriers and the opportunities and challenges of a neoliberal economy. Bangalore, once a sleepy, salubrious “garden city” and now the hub of India’s booming IT sector, is emblematic of these transformations. It is also a key site for deaf education, vocational training, and employment and is reported to attract an influx of deaf people from other parts of India, even though such numbers are not given. Michele Friedner follows their trajectories as they pursue the goal of “deaf development,” circulating through schools, vocational centers, churches, and multi-level marketing businesses, producing deaf selves and socialities. Deaf development is defined as “the emergence of deaf-centered, and therefore sign language-centered, structures and institutions that help deaf people develop language, educational, economic, social, and moral skills for living in the world as both a member of deaf sociality and as part of a larger, normal world” (2). It includes the creation of deaf-administered schools, businesses, NGOs, churches, and old-age homes so that deaf people have a level playing field in a speaking and hearing world. The theme “deaf-deaf same-same” runs through the narrative, and indicates “deaf similitude or a shared experience of being in the world based on common sensorial experience, use of sign language, and an awareness that structural barriers exist for deaf people”(4). The author examines how young deaf people take “deaf turns” and produce “deaf orientations” by drawing upon knowledge, support, and comradeship from each other.

The book’s focus is not on the narrative of poverty and marginalization that characterizes much of the writing on disability in the Global South, but rather on “the emergence of disabled subjectivities in relation to the changing nature of state and civil society” (10). Deafness as a source of value (rather than just stigma) in the new economy and its potential for empowerment as well as appropriation is one of its key concerns. The growing visibility of disabled persons, international disability legislation, private–public partnerships, and corporate social responsibility initiatives have certainly created new opportunities and avenues. At the same time, the extraction of value from deaf and disabled bodies by new forms of labor organization based upon transient, low-paying, and unstable employment reveals the fault lines of the “new economy” and its inability to address the long term “for life” needs of young people in India, deaf or otherwise. In a sense, the deaf subjects in this work are representative of a vast number of young Indians grappling with the insecurities and vulnerabilities of a neoliberal economy.

Circulation is key to the methodology adopted by Friedner as she travels across Indian towns and cities visiting schools, educational programs, employment sites, and NGOs to get a sense of the educational histories and backgrounds of her respondents, as well as the history of deaf organizations and mobilizations around disability in India. The book’s chapters are organized according to the spaces and places through which deaf people circulate. Chapter 1, “Orienting from (Bad) Family to (Good) Friends,” begins with the family, the key site where disability is negotiated and managed in South Asia. Based upon her home visits and interviews with 29 families, the author argues that the family becomes a site of ambivalence and disarticulation on account of the “communication gaps” between deaf children and their parents. The emphasis on oralism and families...