Beyond Islay: A Brief Literary History of Deaf Utopia and Dystopia

Abstract:The idea of a sign language town, or a Deaf utopia, where Deaf and signing people can come together to live in a geographical or figurative homeland has long persisted in US Deaf life, letters, and literature. In the wake of the Milan Congress of 1880, Alexander Graham Bell's alarming rhetoric concerning "a deaf mute variety of the human race" and the "campaign against sign language," the idea of a homeland, and a Deaf commonwealth took on additional resonance. However, in the absence of geographical sign language towns, utopian and figurative homelands then became an important possible alternative through a communal shared space formed through language, culture, and customs. Homelands for Deaf people can extend to both physical spaces like Deaf schools and Deaf clubs or metaphorical and creative spaces, as in Deaf literature itself. Additionally, this article uses the proclaimed "first Deaf culture novel," Douglas Bullard's Islay: A Novel (1986), about a fictional Deaf republic, as a brief case study of several different overlapping cultural, social, artistic, and literary movements; written Deaf literature before and after this novel is, in some ways, markedly different, and in other ways, much the same due to the ways in which language and modality schemas are invoked in imaginative literature written in English. This study provides additional literary and cultural context for Islay as well as a brief history of Deaf creative writing in prose in relation to key mid-to-late twentieth century Deaf cultural and social movements.