The Writing and the Deaf.

Between representing, registering/recording, depicting and computing

Abstract

This review presents a book that addresses the subject of writing and its relation with the Deaf community from a wide perspective, both from a diachronic point of view, taking into account the development of several tecnhologies applied to grammar and language recording, as well as a synchronic point of view, regarding the broad range of techologies available to language users nowadays, which haven't traditionally been considered to be at the same level as writing. This work summarizes and groups several topics that have been present through the years in Leonardo Peluso's career as a teacher and a researcher, and at the same time sets the basis for new perspectives and practices beyond the field of Deaf Studies. Peluso aims to take distance from the commonly accepted idea that writing as it was conceived for spoken languages is the only technology around which a linguistic community may develop its own literary culture, something particularly relevant to Deaf communities, whose identities are usually built upon the fact of being users of a visual unwritten language.