A Feast for the Eyes: ASL Literacy and ASL Literature

All languages and cultures have literatures through which they pass down stories and transmit the experience and values of a group of people. In the late 1960s, linguistic analysis of American Sign Language (ASL) documented that the language of Deaf Americans was bona fide. By the 1980s, cultural descriptions of the DEAF-WORLD began to appear in publications. In more recent times, the literature of ASL has been recognized and celebrated. Perhaps one of the more formal celebrations of ASL literature has been the 1991 and 1996 National American Sign Language Literature Conferences at Rochester, New York. With the recognition of ASL literature, literary and linguistic analyses of the emerging canon have arisen as academic fields of study (e.g., see Bauman, 1996; Krentz, 1996; Neumann, 1995; Ormsby, 1995; Peters, 1995; Rose, 1992; Rutherford, 1993; Valli, 1994; Wilcox & Sweetser, 1996, among others). In addition, justification for the inclusion of ASL as a language for foreign language credit at secondary and postsecondary institutions has required recognition of ASL literature (Frishburg, 1988). But what does it mean to be literate in a signed language? What is ASL literature?