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  • A Rhetoric of Remnants: Idiots, Half-Wits and Other State Sponsored Inventions by Zosha Stuckey
  • Licia Carlson
Zosha Stuckey, A Rhetoric of Remnants: Idiots, Half-Wits and Other State Sponsored Inventions. Albany: SUNY Press, 2014. Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4384-5302-6, $24.95. 176 pp.

In 1854, the doors opened to The New York State Asylum for Idiots, the first public institution for individuals broadly classified as "feeble-minded." It was intended to house, train and teach "idiots," a concept that ran counter to the dominant view that these "half-wits" were incapable of learning. Its founders praised it as a "noble asylum," though there were no pupils present in the photos marking its grand opening. In its first three decades, the "asylum-school" delivered an education that was devoted to cultivating mind, body, and will, though its pupils were also put on display and their names left off most records. Some eventually pursued lives beyond the institution's walls, while others never left and died there, buried in unmarked graves. Eventually, the New York State Asylum succumbed to the fate of many other asylums in the early twentieth century: with the rise of the eugenics movement and the desire to segregate and eliminate "undesirables," these spaces became overcrowded warehouses, custodial facilities without any pedagogical or ameliorative aims. It would be many more decades before the horrors of these facilities were exposed, and legal, political and social changes led to their closure. The New York State Asylum for Idiots no longer exists, but what remains of the thousands of lives that passed through those walls? And why should this demand our attention?

In A Rhetoric of Remnants: Idiots, Half-Wits and Other State Sponsored Inventions, Zosha Stuckey provides readers with a window into the New York State Asylum and the beliefs of its founder, Dr Hervey Wilbur, during its first thirty years of operation. Her study has much to teach about the history of intellectual disability and special education, and will be of interest to scholars of rhetoric and disability studies. Yet her book is also a way of giving voice, of bearing witness. The themes of anonymity and erasure are woven throughout the book, and as the title suggests, the author engages in a process of recovery, an unearthing of remnants.

Though much has changed since the New York State Asylum opened in [End Page 233] Syracuse, this book appears at a time that is equally complex and rife with tensions when it comes to disability. Today, the voices of people with disabilities are increasingly present. The field of disability studies is burgeoning in a broad range of disciplines, including my own—philosophy—where I have argued that intellectual disability is often presented as "the philosopher's nightmare" (Carlson). And within disability studies itself, intellectual disability has become less marginalized, with critical disability scholarship moving in new directions (see Bérubé, for example). Still, many people with intellectual disabilities experience significant isolation, oppression and violence. Through advances in genetics and reproductive technologies, medicine is now improving some disabled lives and preventing others. And just as the cloud of eugenics loomed over Wilbur's institution, the emergence of a new "liberal eugenics" has raised concerns about the resurgence of pernicious forms of eugenic rhetoric (Agar; Garland-Thomson).

Stuckey is not the first to devote attention to the history of intellectual disability in the United States, nor is hers the first book to treat "idiocy" as a social construct or an "invention" (Trent; Noll and Trent; Carlson). What is distinctive, however, is that she offers an original rhetorical history grounded in a variety of methodologies (including "historical ethnography, revisionist historiography, feminist and Afra-feminist rhetorics, and feminist disability studies,"), and her rhetorical lens is aimed at a single institution. Through what might initially seem like a narrow focus—the first three decades of the New York State Asylum, the men responsible for its curriculum (American superintendent Dr Hervey Wilbur and French physician Edouard Seguin), and the correspondence surrounding one pupil—Stuckey achieves impressive breadth. Thus, the story of this particular "asylum-school" exposes features of other similar institutions; Wilbur's curriculum reflects older texts on rhetoric and Enlightenment...

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