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

Abstract

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.