| This study takes as its starting point the Bakhtinian concept of carnival and applies it to the festivities and festive forms of a largely popular, collective culture: Deaf Americans. The study shows how the interrelationship of the larger American society and the smaller Deaf American community is reflected in the texts of Deaf Americans' cultural forms: literary nights, drama, and American Sign Language (ASL) literature on videotape. The study also observes how the visual-kinetic vernacular of ASL disrupts the authority of a primarily aural and bourgeois mainstream society. The texts render an interplay of different value systems that inverts hierarchies and mingles opposites in a politics of laughter. In Deaf American discourse, polyphonic or dialogic forms reflect no orchestration or attempt to unify varying points of view.;Taking a cue from Peter Stallybrass and Allon White's The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, which expands upon Bakhtin semiotically, this study also probes the manner in which the human body, psychic forms, geographical space, and social formation are constructed within the interanimating categories of "high" and "low" in Deaf American culture. In this analytical framework, low forms are those of a popular, largely oral, and visually oriented culture; high forms are of a mainstream, primarily aurally oriented, and literacy privileged culture. The study shows a number of processes through which the low forms and activities trouble the high.;A large part of this disruption takes the form of a tricksterism whereby the Deaf American jester, as storyteller-cum-comedian, subverts the bourgeois and aural ethos of mainstream society and promotes a Deaf American identity and cultural cohesion. The author of Islay, Douglas Bullard, renders this tricksterism, as well as a heteroglossia, in perhaps the only Deaf American novel by a Deaf American writer that focuses primarily on the culture. |
