Deafening Modernism: Embodied Language and Visual Poetics in American Literature by Rebecca Sanchez (review)

These days, it's nearly impossible to be in a room full of disability scholars without someone remarking on what an exciting time it is to be working in the field. Indeed, as the still-young but no longer fledgling discipline gains footholds in more and more diverse critical conversations, there has been a marked expansion of the field's originary concerns. No longer is disability-focused cultural criticism limited primarily to questions of narrative representation (e.g., where do we see disabled figures in literature and what are they doing there?) or to projects aimed at recovering an archive of critically ignored artworks created by people with disabilities, though there is still important work being done (and left to be done) in these areas. But in recent years, the range of thinkable theoretical orientations and archives has opened up to new kinds of questions, namely about the ways disability might provide a useful critical framework for interpreting cultural products that do not proclaim an explicit relationship to disabled representation or authorship. That is, disability studies has begun to make bolder claims on the canon, asserting its relevance outside the archival categories and methodologies in which it previously has been contained.

In 2010, Tobin Siebers's Disability Aesthetics invited us to consider the ways in which disability played a hidden role in the history of modern art and art criticism, offering an aesthetic theory that was pointedly not "a matter of representing the exclusion of disability from aesthetic history—since such an exclusion has not taken place—but of making the influence of disability obvious." Five years later, modernism and disability studies scholar Rebecca Sanchez (Fordham University) has taken a fine-point brush to the broad landscape of disability aesthetics, asking specifically how Deaf history and language—a category with a historically uneasy relationship to disability—can provide new cultural context and fresh interpretive lenses for some of modernism and modernist studies' most fundamental questions. In her audacious and captivating new book Deafening Modernism, Sanchez dares her readers to go a step further than Siebers did, asking not where and how we might view disability in art where its significant influence has been obscured, but rather how a disability-focused epistemology can help us understand artworks that may actually exclude disability—in this case, how a mode of analysis informed by Deaf insight can illuminate texts for which deafness is not necessarily an influence at all.

If this sounds like a tall order, that's because it is, yet Sanchez's innovative approaches to reading the modernist canon rarely come across as tenuous or unconvincing. The book's success in this regard is due at least in part to the trust Sanchez cultivates with her readers by recognizing the wide range of scholarly perspectives—and skepticisms—from which readers will likely be approaching her theory. The author solidly situates her project as an interdisciplinary text by providing succinct but thorough overviews of the guiding questions of both modernist literary studies and disability studies, and positioning both in relation to the history of Deaf communities in the United States. In doing so, the book's opening chapter provides important grounding for the uninitiated in each field, while also introducing new cultural and historical context for those who are already familiar. The text traces the development of literary and artistic modernism alongside the rise of nationalistic and eugenics-influenced regulation of language in America, which Sanchez argues operated in similarly repressive modes in two specific institutional populations: Native American students in boarding schools and students in schools for the deaf. In both cases, students' use of their first or culturally specific languages—indigenous and signed, respectively—was discouraged through corporal punishment and the imposition of English language education. Importantly, there is no attempt here to make a claim for a causal link between the suppression of American Sign Language in particular and the production...