H-Dirksen L. Bauman (2008) (Ed.) Open Your Eyes: Deaf Studies Talking.

Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minnesota Press. 360 pp. ISBN 978-0-8166-4619-7

Reviewed by Donna West

Open Your Eyes is a collection of essays from a group Deaf and hearing academics from the US,
Norway and the UK, though predominantly from the United States. The publishers promote the
book as an introduction to key debates and concepts within the field of Deaf Studies. This
collection, the editor informs us in his preface, grew from the Deaf Studies Think Tank in 2002,
where academics in the field gathered, prior to Deaf Way II, at the Gallaudet Research Institute
(GRI), to discuss the history and the way forward for Deaf Studies.

No sooner had the Think Tank symposium begun, than an electrical blackout threatened to end it,
with participants being plunged into darkness. The desire for light—vital for sign language
communication—that led the discussion to be reconvened at the nearby Washburn Art Building,
provides the perfect analogy for the reading of the essays in this book. Open Your Eyes urges the
reader to see Deaf people, Deaf culture, and Deaf Studies in a new light.

The introduction, Listening to Deaf Studies, also by Bauman, orientates the reader by providing a
history and context for Deaf Studies. His aims are threefold: to revisit the histories of Deaf people
as fundamentally misunderstood, marginalised, disempowered and in need of a vehicle by which to
promote their cultures both to the hearing world and to their own Deaf communities; to describe
Deaf Studies in terms of how far it has travelled, what it has been talking about, and the meanings
and possibilities for Deaf Studies in the twenty-first century; and to provide an overview for the
reader of the essays included in the rest of the volume.

Bauman takes the reader on a journey from a ‘pre-history’ of Deaf studies—a dark field, lit up by
fireflies, with ‘scattered moments of illumination’—where we visit, among many, Plato, the Topkapi
Palace in Constantinople, and Pierre Desloges, whose writing on Deaf Parisians and sign, Bauman
claims, laid the ‘rhetorical foundation for Deaf Studies some two hundred years later’. We are led
further, and discover nineteenth-century Deaf Americans gathering together in residential schools,
clubs and associations, creating newspapers, art and—by the early twentieth century—films, as ways
of promoting and preserving what would later come to be known as ‘sign language.’ As the
twentieth century rolled on, organisations such as the US National Association for the Deaf (NAD)
began campaigning for Deaf people’s civil rights. Yet all these actions, Bauman reminds us,
remained beyond hearing, mainstream society’s view, in the periphery. Enter Deaf Studies. We are
given a short tour of the first Deaf Studies departments in America, including that of Gallaudet, an
important site of Deaf activism (such as the Deaf President Now movement where students and staff
protested at the hiring of a hearing president). We see the numbers of Americans learning, or signing
up to learn ASL ever rising. We count the numbers of publications on a range of Deaf-related
topics, such as Deaf history and the philosophy of sign language. And yet, Deaf children are
increasingly discouraged from using ASL in schools, and academic journals such as the Journal of Deaf
Studies and Deaf Education focus in the main on education, rather than on the cultural and theoretical
dimensions of Deaf lives. As Bauman tells us, it would be unthinkable for African American Studies
or Women’s Studies journals to focus almost exclusively on empirical educational research. Deaf
Studies is therefore engaged in a critical struggle over the content of Deaf Studies.

This struggle has passed through many landmarks. Bauman reminds us of the journey: rewriting
‘deaf’ as ‘Deaf’, concepts of ethnicity, biculturalism, identity politics, questions over homogeneity and
critiques of essentialism, Deafhood, audism, colonialism, eugenics, global sign languages and
contrived communication systems, bilingual education, literature and textuality. Open Your Eyes, and
the essays contained therein, invite the reader tune in to this wide array of topics.
The volume falls into six parts: Framing Deaf Studies; Deaf Perception & Community; Language & Literacy;
Places & Borders; Intersections & Identities; and The Question of Disability. The Postscript, once again from
the editor, describes the recent protest events (2006) at Gallaudet University. The final pages of the
book comprise brief biographies of the contributors. This is followed by a fairly comprehensive,
nine-page index. What the volume does not contain is a full bibliography. References appear, with
notes, at the end of each essay.

Part I, Framing Deaf Studies comprises three essays—from Tom Humphries, Paddy Ladd (the only UK
contributor), and Frank Bechter—which reflect on the current situation of and future for Deaf
Studies. In Talking Culture and Culture Talking, Humphries evaluates not only the ways in which Deaf
people have been talking about their culture, but also the ways in which their ‘coming to voice’, and
of going public about private lives, are infused with both pressures and constraints. These include an
underlying mistrust of hearing researchers, who do research on Deaf people, and a somewhat
restrictive, inflexible, text-based genre of life-writing as the only publicly acceptable, and therefore
legitimate, means to talk publicly about one’s life. The challenge of coming to a collective voice is in
meeting the demands of the viewing public who desire visible artefacts as living proof of culture.
While the gathering and cataloguing of Deaf cultural artefacts is a necessary part of the process,
Humphries identifies the need for a far more critical examination of such artistic cultural processes.
Deaf art and literature can and should be about more than public consumption and self-definition.
In doing so, Deaf culture, as ‘culture talking’ (as opposed to Deaf people ‘talking culture’) can extend
outwards, and teach the world about human relations. As Humphries neatly sums up, rather than
asking “How are we different?” Deaf people can ask, “How are we being?”

The idea of the ‘second phase’ for Deaf Studies is explored in Paddy Ladd’s chapter, Colonialism and
Resistance: A Brief History of Deafhood. Ladd frames this phase as the search for more explicit Deaf
epistemologies and ontologies, via concepts of postcolonialism and Deafhood. Ladd’s key text on
Deafhood, Understanding Deaf Culture (2003), is revisited as we are invited to view the histories of Deaf
people through a colonial lens. The most useful and striking question posed for the reader, “What
would the Deaf world be like if oralism had never happened?” takes us back through time to Deaf
‘pre-colonial’ times, late eighteenth-century France, and the Paris Banquets. From these early
examples of Deaf discourses, Ladd guides us through examples of Deaf resistance in the early
twentieth-century (1001 small victories, pub rebels and the Deaf Resurgence of the 1970s and 1980s)
both as a way of re-visiting Deaf culture as minority culture and of working with theories of post-
colonialism. In terms of the second phase for Deaf Studies, then, Ladd reveals important areas for
consideration, in order for the field to become a more conscious model for Deaf-centred praxis.
These include international, or transnational Deafhood, as well as specific-nation Deafhood as ways
of recognising global and national patterns of Deaf experience. This, coupled with a need to turn the
twenty-first century Deaf Studies gaze in a more philosophical and ontological direction, will facilitate
ongoing processes of decolonisation that are vital for the survival of Deaf communities and Deaf
Studies.

The final essay in this first part is Frank Bechter’s The Deaf Convert Culture and Its Lessons for Deaf
Theory. In it, he argues for the need for a Deaf public voice. Bechter’s essay centres on Deaf story-
telling and narrative analysis, which, rather than simply appealing to those of a more artistic bent, lies
at the very core of Deaf Studies, ‘grounding all other political considerations and providing the logic
by which Deaf Theory and Deaf Studies can understand itself.’ For Bechter, Deaf narratives reveal
Deaf worldviews—which see the world as made of Deaf lives. The major aim of Deaf Studies now
should be the collection, cataloguing, aesthetically effective translation and ready distribution of Deaf
narrative materials. This pursuit of Deaf public voice, a voice to be reasoned with, is a threefold task
for Deaf Theory. It should focus inwards, on the realities of Deaf life. It should also focus
outwards, and model the nature of public voice in general. It should finally be reflexive, and
interrogate its own role in facilitating Deaf public voices.

In Part II, Deaf Perception and Community, the reader is urged to consider Deaf people as visually and
spatially orientated. Ben Bahan’s Upon the Formation of a Visual Variety of the Human Race opens with a
story of peripheral vision and identification among Deaf people. A father and daughter are ‘people-
watching’ from a café, trying to spot any Deaf people from the crowds outside. This vignette leads
us into a story, or history, of visual perception, and visual-gestural language, as far back as Socrates
circa 400-350 BCE. The remainder of the chapter goes on to demonstrate the significance of vision
to Deaf people. Bahan gives examples of eye behaviour such as saccadics—or rapid eye movement—
in providing linguistic information when signing, the importance of dynamic gaze in a Deaf
classroom for fluent discourse, and the ability of the eye to convey distance through widening and
narrowing of the eyelids. He goes on to summarise key findings from studies on perception,
language, peripheral vision and spatial processing and concludes that ‘Deaf people make better use of
vision.’ Shifting gear slightly, Bahan relays his own experiences, together with some of this father’s,
concerning peripheral vision, and Deaf people’s reading of the world, or ‘hearing’ with the eyes.
Finally, we are introduced to some of the ways in which these ways of perceiving permeate Deaf arts
and literature. Bahan provides some beautiful and funny examples from Deaf personal narratives,
where eyes, doors, windows, light and night are symbolically woven into stories, poems and jokes.
Deaf people inhabit a ‘highly visual sensory world’. This chapter lights up ideas on vision, visuality
and the perceiving body.

Joseph Murray in his Coequality and Transnational Studies: Understanding Deaf Lives builds on Bahan’s
notion of Deaf people as visually oriented by positing Deaf ways of being in the world as
transcending national boundaries. Taking the reader back through Deaf history, to various
international Deaf gatherings and congresses of the late nineteenth century, Murray echoes Ladd’s
suggestion regarding transnational Deafhood by proposing that, rather than focusing on differences
between Deaf people from different nations, the task of Deaf Studies should be to seek out
commonalities. The danger of difference, he explains, is that it leads to a discourse of ‘development’:
which nations have achieved certain milestones, and which need to ‘catch up’. However, rather than
simply regurgitating a hearing-centred notion of essentialised Deaf homogeneity, what Deaf Studies
should uncover is Deaf transnationalism as positive collectivity. The key to the transnational
phenomenon is the increase in Deaf people’s global mobility. That Deaf ‘translocal’ spaces are
temporarily created (congresses, camps and cafés) not only represents Deaf people’s transnational
identity, but it also reinforces Murray’s belief that, despite a wealth of difference, Deaf people are, as
Amos Draper says in the introduction to this chapter, united by ‘one touch of nature.’

The final chapter in Part II continues the exploration of concepts of community and belonging. In
Sound and Belonging: What Is a Community? Hilde Haualand proposes that traditional, anthropological
understandings of community are inherently phonocentric, and stem from the confusion of language
with speech. Uncovering metaphors in albeit closely linked European languages where ‘hearing’ is
closely equated with ‘belonging’, Haualand posits that this dominant conceptualisation of community
excludes Deaf people’s translocal, transitory and globally-networked experience of community; one
which is not based on a proximal experience of hearing same but on embodied ways of perceiving,
mapping, seeing, and learning about the world.

Part III, Language and Literacy, opens with Dirksen Bauman’s On the Disconstruction of (Sign) Language in
the Western Tradition: A Deaf Reading of Plato’s Cratylus. In it, he proposes a reading of Cratylus through a
Deaf lens. In doing so, it is possible to uncover and to see more clearly the genesis of Western
denigration of sign languages. Bauman brings to life Plato’s struggle—through Socrates’s dialogue
with Hermogenes—to find a language where ‘names embody and reveal the nature of the referent’;
where a name is in direct relation to a thing’s being. This language, surely, is one that is visual,
spatial, kinetic; a manual rather than a spoken language. Socrates asks: “If we hadn’t a voice or a
tongue, and wanted to express things to one another, wouldn’t we try to make signs by moving our
hands, head, and the rest of our body, just as dumb people do at present?” However, as Bauman
goes on to explain, this moment of insight is merely a brief flash of light in the ‘phonocentric
blindspot’ of Socrates’s thought; signs are considered only as poor imitation of speech in its absence
or loss. If only he had pursued this line of inquiry by engaging with Deaf Athenians. Socrates,
Hermogenes and Cratylus, in their conversations about naming, never gave serious consideration to
sign. This early disconstruction of sign language, Bauman reminds us, sheds light on attitudes towards
sign languages even today.

The idea of disconstruction of language extends to literacy. In Marlon Kuntze’s essay, Turning
Literacy Inside Out, the reader is invited to consider, and reconsider, the ways in which the term literacy
has so far been connected only with reading and writing, thereby rendering sign language literacy an
oxymoronic term. What Kuntze shows us, however, is that, by closer examination of the analogic
and digital properties of oral and signed languages, it becomes possible to get to the heart of the ways
in which literacy is more about higher order thinking and reasoning skills, such as making inferences,
than about reading or writing. ASL, and by extension, sign languages generally, contain rich analogic
representations, and provide and require high levels of cognitive processing and inference-making in
the performer and the audience. Visual literacy is required; sign language stories and performances
can be recorded, and ‘read’ in the same way as a written text. Such ‘reading’, Kuntze tells us, fosters
the development of critical thinking, and, crucially, provide opportunities to help children’s literacy to
flourish, while they learn to grapple with written language. Our basic definition of literacy can be
turned on its head and understood in a radically new way.

The final essay in this section is Lawrence Fleischer’s Critical Pedagogy and ASL Videobooks. Here he
presents a correspondence between himself and the director of the Office of Clearinghouse for
Specialised Media and Technology, a company responsible for funding the ASL Videobooks project
at the California School for the Deaf, Riverside. The ASL Videobooks project was established as a
way to promote Deaf children’s literacy through ASL storytelling. Over $300,000 was spent in the
creation of three hundred videobooks. Unfortunately, as Fleischer—a native user of ASL—later
explains, the storytellers were not using ASL, but a more literal, and thus nonsensical, sign-for-word
translation of English texts. Fleisher’s subsequent communications with the director of
Clearinghouse, a selection of which forms the major part of this essay, tell the story of his attempts
to draw attention to the fact that these videotapes do nothing to engage Deaf children, to help them
understand stories, and to immerse them in the richness of ASL. Fleischer’s own offers to take on
the translation and production of new ASL videobooks as part of the Clearinghouse project in a way
which provides meaningful experiences for Deaf children and builds up their knowledge and critical
thinking skills as literate young people ultimately reveals the underlying aim of the project: a token
nod towards ASL, but conveying ‘the book’s meaning ... while simultaneously stimulating their
interest in reading and understanding the print version of the book’. Fleischer’s offer is rejected.
The ASL videobook, therefore, remains as an artefact for ASL language art activities, and not, as it
should be, a vital took for developing Deaf children’s literacy within a critical pedagogy of Deaf
schooling.

Part IV, Places and Borders begins with a familiar topic; the decline of Deaf Clubs. Carol Padden’s The
Decline of Deaf Clubs in the United States: A Treatise on the Problem of Place investigates the commonly held
assumption that the decline of the American Deaf Club is attributable to the arrival and ever-
changing nature of technology and assistive devices for Deaf people. Framing this essay within wider
concepts of ‘the problem of place’ in modern American society, and taking us through a potted
history of the American Deaf Club, Padden paints a picture of shifting identities, of changing
economic structures and of the rise of a professional Deaf class. Whereas at the height of the
American Deaf Club, memberships were based firmly on segregation (Black Deaf men and women
were excluded), or on sporting affiliation, Padden posits that twenty-first century Deaf identities—
advocates, mental health professionals, academics—exist in different dimensions to those in which
early Deaf clubs were built. What is required, therefore, is a greater understanding of community
spaces within a fast-changing world.

Padden’s essay is followed by Brenda Brueggemann’s Think-Between: A Deaf Studies Commonplace Book,
an exploration of the spaces between ascribed identities such as deaf, Deaf, hard-of-hearing and
hearing. Rather than drawing a line between the small d and the big D (and thus obliged to explain
this with endless footnotes in the text), Brueggemann wishes to reflect on the very real,
kaleidoscopic, postmodern and technologically affected experiences of Deaf Americans. In doing so,
she urges Deaf Studies to recognise the potential and the enormity of its twenty-first-century task: to
attend to the ‘rhetorical relationships between technologies and our identities’; to contemplate the
changing ‘shape’ of sign languages now that Deaf schools have been closed and children are being
sent to mainstream schools; to concern itself (as Bauman reminds us in his Introduction) with the fact
that, while more and more hearing people are signing up to learn ASL, deaf children are being kept
away from sign language; and to expand the philosophical, poststructuralist space between writing
and signing (see also Kuntze in this volume). In short, examining the spaces between worlds, words,
languages and cultures, Brueggemann believes, is the way forward for Deaf Studies in the twenty-first
century.

The final essay in this section, Places and Borders, is Robert Hoffmeister’s Border Crossings by Hearing
Children of Deaf Parents: The Lost History of Codas. Writing largely from his own experiences, as well as
from a small selection of CODA publications, presentations and academic texts (e.g., Preston, 1994),
Hoffmeister paints a vivid picture of the relatively unknown, borderland life of hearing sons and
daughters of Deaf parents, or CODA (Child of Deaf Adults). Negotiating borders and identities, this
essay raises important questions. Echoing Brueggemann’s plea for a closer understanding of the
spaces between the binaries of identity (Hearing and Deaf), Hoffmeister’s positioning of CODA
between the two not only troubles the binary, but also contributes to a discussion on attitudes,
membership and cultural transmission. The remainder of this essay is a collective autobiography of
CODA lives. We are invited to the Deaf club, the family home, the interpreting situation, and the
CODA organisation, as seen through the eyes of sons and daughters of Deaf adults. As Hoffmeister
reminds us, ‘there are no stories told by the Deaf of CODAs.’ Children of Deaf Adults, like their
parents, are searching for a space, a ‘place to locate their lives.’ This essay opens up the topic for
further consideration with Deaf Studies.

Part V, Intersections and Identities, begins with Genie Gertz’s essay entitled Dysconscious Audism: A
Theoretical Proposition. Based on ethnographic work undertaken for her PhD in 2003, Gertz adapts
Joyce King’s concept of ‘dysconscious racism’ for Deaf Studies by investigating the existence of
dysconscious audism: ‘not the absence of consciousness, but an impaired consciousness, or distorted
way of thinking about Deaf consciousness’. She does this by presenting a series of quotes from her
informants, eight Deaf people from Deaf parents, who gave their views on ASL, English and the use
of ‘Sim-Com’ (Sign Supported English in the UK), and on the importance of Deaf Studies in Deaf
education. Her conclusions are that a theorising of dysconscious audism is vital to an understanding
of the oppression and discrimination Deaf people face: ‘From a greater awareness of dysconscious
audism, an increasing power of Deaf discourse could result.’

In The Burden of Racism and Audism, Lindsay Dunn explores issues of racism and audism through an
imagined conversation with a White Hearing Male (WHM) protagonist. Through their dialogue,
interspersed with excerpts of Dunn’s own life-story, the reader is reminded of deep-rooted American
social attitudes towards race, disability and non-conformity. As we are reminded, ‘the condition of
blackness and deafness per se should not be rationale for unequal treatment or the denial of options
available in a democratic society.’ By drawing together theories of both Black and Deaf identity
development, and by continuing the dialogue on racism and audism, Dunn claims we can re-examine
outdated, discriminatory legislation, and work towards improving the civil liberties of all minority
groups.

The next essay in this chapter, Arlene Kelly’s Where Is Deaf HERstory? highlights the invisibility of
Deaf women in Deaf history, and of Deaf history in the mainstream. She traces the four stages of
‘writing women’s history’ (previously overlooked by male historians) and proposes that the
subsequent emergence of Women’s Studies and feminist standpoint epistemology can be beneficial
to Deaf Studies. The establishment of a Deaf epistemology can, Kelly writes, lead to the uncovering
of a ‘Deaf woman standpoint.’ Kelly lists for us various Deaf people who are absent from historical
texts and describes the lengths she goes to in order to bring Deaf women’s history, or herstory into the
academy. In the midst of all her questions on the subject (for which she apologises) she leaves the
reader with two proposals: that Deaf Studies learn from Women’s Studies, not only in terms of
recognising the importance of filling in the gaps of history but also of acknowledging the work of
people like bell hooks, Patricia Smith Collins and Angela Davis who wrote Black women into
Herstory; and to encourage Deaf women to contribute their stories ‘to the Gallaudet University
Archives or their state residential school for the Deaf’ so that a modern history of Deaf women in
America can grow.

The final essay in this part is MJ Bienvenu’s Queer as Deaf: Intersection which comprises stories of Deaf
and L/G (Lesbian Gay) life, interspersed with reflections on what it means to live at the intersection
of Deaf and L/G communities. Bienvenu rails against the common assumption that she should have
to choose to be either Lesbian or Deaf, and this leads her to an examination of the pressure L/G
Deaf people face, in coming out in their Deaf community, or struggling to have their voices heard
within L/G circles. Deaf Gay people find themselves low down in the hierarchy of power. The best
way to counter the double stigma of being Deaf and Gay, Bienvenu writes, is, like Kelly in the
previous essay, to develop resources for teaching about the Deaf L/G community. Endeavours such
as this can enrich and enlarge the discourses that Deaf Studies as a trans-discipline can contribute to
and embrace.

The final Part of this volume deals with The Question of Disability, and opens with Harlan Lane’s
question, Do Deaf People Have a Disability? In it, Lane explains the origin of the term disabled as a
social construction designed to locate the problem of deviation from the norm within the individual.
The disabled person therefore becomes the site for legitimate intervention (surgery, technological
assistance) and the circle is complete: as Lane claims, disability does not lead to treatment, the
treatment leads to the disability. Technological intervention survives and thrives on the creation of
the category of disability. Lane goes on to give several reasons why Deaf people should reject the
disability label. What seems common sense to a non-Deaf person (deafness as hearing loss, inability
to hear) in fact makes little sense to Deaf communities who value their history, their languages, their
arts, their heritage, their visual ways of being in the world. This essay reminds the reader of a history
of non-Deaf people’s attempts to eradicate from society—through sterilisation, through cochlear
implants, through gene therapy—the disability of deafness. It also illustrates the social tensions and
ambivalence Deaf people must negotiate in order to have their cultural heritage legitimised while also
demanding access to public services, education, interpreters. Lane calls for Deaf communities to
challenge—not with light but with fire—society’s deep-rooted, common-sense constructions of
deafness/disability and all its inherent treatments, else they are in danger of witnessing the demise,
even elimination of their culture.

In Beyond Culture: Deaf Studies and the Deaf Body, Douglas Baynton examines the usefulness of both a
cultural Deaf model and a social disability model for interpreting and understanding Deaf people’s
lives. He highlights the limitations and inadequacies of a purely cultural model, in that it skates over
issues of sensory difference. It also blurs issues of cultural membership, specifically in relation to
hearing children of Deaf parents. Baynton is not suggesting that the cultural model be rejected, and
replaced by a social disability framework—the two are not mutually exclusive—yet he believes that
Deaf people’s rejection of the disability label (itself a relatively recent event) ignores the usefulness of
affiliation with other groups of people who have disability imposed on them by a normalising society.
In contrast to the previous essay, Baynton asks what harm there is in exploring the overlaps between
cultural Deaf experiences and a political, resistant, disability identity.

The final essay in this volume is Lennard Davis’s Postdeafness. In it, Davis counters previous
arguments for a Deaf ethnic-minority model of identity by offering a postmodern critique of
ethnicity as a useful concept. While ethnicity, as highlighted in the previous essay, is effective as a
counter to the ‘absolute biology of race’ by allowing the inclusion of cultural, religious and political
qualities for example, Davis believes that ethnicity and its inherent connection to identity, is an
outdated concept that remains historically tethered to essentialised notions of race, sexual orientation,
gender (i.e. bodily traits) that, by extension, are targeted for improvement and correction. A
postmodern identity discourse within Deaf Studies can not only challenge the neat binaries of
deaf/hearing, deaf/Deaf, but also, it is argued, place Deaf Studies alongside post-identity discourses
in Disability Studies and Queer Theory for example, and generate something other than a ‘parochial,
unbending’ and ultimately exclusionary ethnic category of Deafness. Davis recognises that disability
may not be a desirable position for Deaf people, but his concern is that a minority ethnicity position,
likely to be viewed by contemporary thinking as antiquated and unbending, is not the best place
either.

The editor’s Postscript: Gallaudet Protest and the Future of the Deaf Public Voice, places a wide-angle lens
over the 2006 Gallaudet protest where a coalition of faculty, staff, students and alumni demanded
that their new president be removed before taking office. This lens allows, urges even, the reader to
see Gallaudet as more than just a university, but as a site of ‘deep cultural connection’ for Deaf
people that should send the world clear messages about the value of ASL and of bilingual education.
Bauman sees in the eyes of the protesters a desire for a Gallaudet leader to embody Deaf education
through eloquent sign language, and to demonstrate not only why the US needs Gallaudet but why
the world needs Deaf people.

Open Your Eyes, as a varied collection of essays, is an attempt to amplify marginalised voices, to bring
Deaf lives out of the periphery, and to demonstrate the extent to which Deaf Studies can teach the
world about the great many ways there are to be human. The fact that it is largely focused on the US
(ASL, Gallaudet, American legislation, the education system, historical and socio-economic context
and so on), may be problematic for a non-US readership. Perhaps other volumes, from Deaf Studies
departments around the world, will follow. I hope so.