Touch the Future
A Manifesto in Essays
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A revelatory collection of essays on the DeafBlind experience and the untapped potential of a new tactile language.
Born Deaf into an ASL-speaking family and blind by adolescence, John Lee Clark learned to embrace the possibilities of his tactile world. He is on the frontlines of the Protactile movement, which gave birth to an unprecedented language and way of life based on physical connection.
In a series of paradigm-shifting essays, Clark reports on seismic developments within the DeafBlind community and challenges the limitations of sighted and hearing norms. In "Against Access," he interrogates the prevailing advocacy for "accessibility" that re-creates a shadow of a hearing-sighted experience, and in "Tactile Art," he describes his relationship to visual art and breathtaking encounters with tactile sculpture. He offers a brief history of the term "DeafBlind," distills societal discrimination against DeafBlind people into "Distantism," sheds light on the riches of online community, and advocates for "Co-Navigation," a new way of exploring the world together without a traditional guide.
Touch the Future brims with passion, energy, humor, and imagination as Clark takes us by the hand and welcomes us into the exciting landscape of Protactile communication. A distinct language of taps, signs, and reciprocal contact, Protactile emerged from the inadequacies of ASL—a visual language even when pressed into someone’s hand—with the power to upend centuries of DeafBlind isolation.
As warm and witty as he is radical and inspiring, Clark encourages us—disabled and non-disabled alike—to reject stigma and discover the ways we are connected. Touch the Future is a dynamic appeal to rethink the meanings of disability, access, language, and inclusivity, and to reach for a future we can create together.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
DeafBlind poet Clark (How to Communicate) serves up passionate meditations on the DeafBlind Protactile movement—which he suggests is characterized by a focus on establishing greater autonomy for DeafBlind people and "throw out many norms and values imposed by sighted society," such as taboos against touching others. In "Always Be Connected," Clark traces the movement's origins to a 2007 shortage of sighted ASL interpreters in Seattle that prompted DeafBlind community leaders to hold meetings without them, organically producing new means of communication. Clark notes that ASL posed difficulties for DeafBlind people, who would listen by placing their hands over a speaker's hands as they signed despite only 30% of ASL being decipherable by touch, so when the Seattle DeafBlind community decided to forge ahead without interpreters, they developed an ASL offshoot, called Protactile, that uses intricate systems of touch to communicate. Clark's bracing perspectives are sure to stimulate, as in "Against Access," where he argues that many so-called accessibility measures aim to replicate the experience of sighted people at the expense of usability, such as video transcripts that open with overly detailed image descriptions, which, for Clark, only serve as obstacles to reading the more substantial parts of the video. Lucid and incisive, this is not to be missed.
