Originally published in 1999, Sounds Like Home adds an important dimension to the canon of deaf literature by presenting the perspective of an African American deaf woman who attended a segregated deaf school. Mary Herring Wright documents her life from the mid-1920s to the early 1940s, offering a rich account of her home life in rural North Carolina and her education at the North Carolina School for the Deaf and Blind, which had a separate campus for African American students. Th...

WINNER OF THE 2015 ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE IN NONFICTIONWINNER OF THE 2015 DAYTON LITERARY PEACE PRIZEWINNER OF THE NAACP IMAGE AWARD FOR BEST NON-FICTIONNow a major motion-picture starring Michael B. Jordan, Jamie Foxx, and Brie Larson.#1 New York Times bestseller, and a widely acclaimed and multi-award–winning book, this is a powerful, true story about the pot...

The remarkable story of Helen Forrester, author of Twopence to Cross the Mersey, and how she turned tragedy to triumph.When Helen Forrester’s father went bankrupt in the 1930’s, she and her six siblings fell from a comfortable middle-class existence into wretched poverty. Later in life, Helen wrote a ground-breaking series of memoirs, starting with Twopence to Cross the Mersey, which told the harrowing account of her family’s struggles in Depression-era Liverpool. It was a story fi...

A study guide on sign language would essentially help readers to learn a completely different form of communication. It would reveal the appropriate hand movements for communicating with a non-verbal language. It would start with the basics and then move to complex techniques. More importantly, it would help readers learn social and cultural cues that are expressed through sign language.

What if you met your future soul mate, but were too busy living in the here and now to realize you'd found "the one"?That's what happened when Courtney B. Vance met Angela Bassett….They ran for years as friends in the same small circles. They had some hits, but mostly misses with other partners, and they shared one spectacularly dreadful first date together. And then, Courtney and Angela connected.Experience the up-close-and-personal, real-life love story of this in...

Photographs and stories of the legendary hostess's extravagant parties and glamorous guests in the final months before the Nazis invaded France.The American decorator Elsie de Wolfe was the international set's preeminent hostess in Paris during the interwar years. She had a legendary villa in Versailles, where in the late 1930s she held two fabulous parties—her Circus Balls—that marked the end of the social scene that her friend Cole Porter perfectly captured in his...

As an African American woman born in 1943, Maxine Childress Brown possessed a unique vantage point to witness the transformative events in her parents’ lives. Both came from the South -- her father, Herbert Childress, from Nashville, TN, and her mother, Thomasina Brown, from Concord, NC. The oldest of three daughters, Maxine was fascinated by her parents’ stories. She marveled at how they raised a well-respected, middle-class family in the midst of segregation with the added challenge of b...

Although it is commonly believed that deafness and disability limits a person in a variety of ways, Valuing Deaf Worlds in Urban India describes the two as a source of value in postcolonial India. Michele Friedner argues that the experiences of deaf people offer an important portrayal of contemporary self-making and sociality under new regimes of labor and economy in India.Friedner contends that deafness actually becomes a source of value for deaf Indians as they interact ...

While many deaf organizations around the world have adopted an ethno-linguistic framing of deafness, the meanings and consequences of this perspective vary across cultural contexts, and relatively little scholarship exists that explores this framework from an anthropological perspective.In this book, Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway presents an accessible examination of deafness in Nepal. As a linguistic anthropologist, she describes the emergence of Nepali Sign Language and deaf sociality i...

Drawing on philosophical reflection, spiritual and religious values, and somatic practice, Spirit and the Obligation of Social Flesh offers guidance for moving amidst the affective dynamics that animate the streets of the global cities now amassing around our planet.Here theology turns decidedly secular. In urban medieval Europe, seculars were uncloistered persons who carried their spiritual passion and sense of an obligated life into daily circumambulations of the city. Seculars l...

Shared signing communities consist of a relatively high number of hereditarily deaf people living together with hearing people in relative isolation. In the United States, Martha’s Vineyard gained mythical fame as a paradise for deaf people where everyone signed up until the 19th century. That community disappeared when deaf people left the island, newcomers moved in, married locals, and changed the gene pool. These unique communities still exist, however, one being the Akan village in Gha...

Theories of liberal multiculturalism have come to dominate debates about identity and difference politics in recent contemporary western political theory. This book offers a nuanced critique of these debates by questioning liberal multiculturalism’s preoccupation with culture and, just as important, its unintended consequences.Identity/Difference Politics switches the focus from culture to power. Issues of power are examined through accounts of meaning-making – those proce...