Imperial optics and colonial disability: missions to blind and deaf children in ‘the East’, c. 1880-1939

Abstract

This article explores missions to blind and deaf children in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century India, Sri Lanka, and China which were established by the Church of England Zenana Missionary Society. Manly staffed by women, these missions can be seen as innovative in the colonial treatment of disability in South and East Asia, pioneering the use of sign languages, tactile alphabets, and oralism as methods of special education in what they referred to as ‘the East’. In making appeals to British readers, missionaries emphasized the humanity of those with whom they worked. At the same time, their representation of disability, ethnicity, and gender were firmly rooted in longstanding colonial and Orientalist discourses which emphasized difference as much as they did universality. I argue that these representations were ambivalent, encouraging both affective connections between missionaries, their subjects, and their supporters back in Britain and defined by racialized and ableist othering. As such, the article aims to track their development and analyse missionary praxis and discourse in relation to disability and colonialism.

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Item Type:	Article
Authors/Creators:	Cleall, E.
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information:	© 2024 The Authors. Except as otherwise noted, this author-accepted version of a journal article published in Postcolonial Studies is made available via the University of Sheffield Research Publications and Copyright Policy under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
Keywords:	Missionaries; disability; race; education‌; gender
Dates:	Published: March 2024 Published (online): 14 March 2024 Accepted: 14 February 2024
Institution:	The University of Sheffield
Academic Units:	The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Arts and Humanities (Sheffield) > Department of History (Sheffield)
Funding Information:	Funder Grant number ARTS AND HUMANITIES RESEARCH COUNCIL AH/P003621/1
Depositing User:	Symplectic Sheffield
Date Deposited:	14 Mar 2024 15:59
Last Modified:	19 Apr 2024 14:59
Status:	Published
Publisher:	Taylor and Francis Group
Refereed:	Yes
Identification Number:	10.1080/13688790.2024.2320084
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID):	oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:210274

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Imperial optics and colonial disability: missions to blind and deaf children in ‘the East’, c. 1880-1939

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