Blindness, Deafness, and Cripping the Grounds of Comparison in Comparative Literature

Abstract

While migration and the movements of people have created multilingual, multicultural societies, this dissertation attempts to show the cultural and linguistic diversity of two disabilities, deafness and blindness, and how they generate new expressions of multilingualism and multiliteracies that challenge the longstanding opposition between metropolitan literatures and periphery literatures by being both cosmopolitan as well as hyper-local. Blindness and deafness upset reliable comparative categories in comparative literature and creates illegitimate filiations in their attempts to demarcate disability, nation, and belonging in webs of translational and abled/disabled articulations. I contemplate how the languages and literatures of deafness and blindness complicate linguistic nativity and cultural identification, as well as how some writers embrace multi- and inter- mediality to nuance traditional visual and linguistic paradigms of disability and culture. I look at the effects of incorporating sensory difference as formal elements of their work, and what implications for local, global, or ‘worldly’ approaches towards disability and social imaginaries can be theorized from it. I also bring attention to less-considered comparative elements such as contact zones of translanguaging or inter-medial contact where the transition between different modalities occur, such as from written to oral, or signed to touch.