Althouse: Black American Sign Language, or BASL... "relies in a unique way on body language and rhythm." The "signing became almost sensual."

January 8, 2023

Black American Sign Language, or BASL... "relies in a unique way on body language and rhythm." The "signing became almost sensual."

"'It was totally different from everyday conversational ASL. It became a lot more emotive... There was a lot more feeling in that.'"

From "How These Sign Language Experts Are Bringing More Diversity to Theater/As productions increasingly include characters and perspectives from a variety of backgrounds, deaf and hearing people who translate the shows for deaf audiences are trying to keep up" (NYT).

42 comments:

Iman said...: Are they in the Ossie Davis/Ruby Dee school?

Or Ellen Cleghorne?; 1/8/23, 12:46 PM
Kate said...: This is true of any subset of ASL. The woman who translates for rap and metal shows is internet famous for her interpretative energy. A translator can be an artist, so it's great to match up their style with the needs of the show. Although I don't speak ASL I love watching. Even with the English overdub, I get more meaning when I see the signing.

I'm a bit leery of the word "sensual", though. Will the anthropologists at the NYT start marveling at the primitive jungle ritual they observed and how it awakened forbidden longings?; 1/8/23, 12:51 PM
Ann Althouse said...: "'m a bit leery of the word "sensual", though. Will the anthropologists at the NYT start marveling at the primitive jungle ritual they observed and how it awakened forbidden longings?"

Me too, but the article is quoting a black actress, Michelle Banks, who "has served as a DASL on shows including Camille A. Brown’s Broadway revival of “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf,” which starred Alexandria Wailes, a deaf and mixed race actress, and incorporated ASL into the fabric of the show."

“I worked with Deaf actors, but I also worked with hearing actors,” Banks said of “For Colored Girls.” “So it’s not just Deaf culture that I brought to the production, but also the Black Deaf culture. And I did that with signing that showed that specific culture that is specific to the Black Deaf community.”; 1/8/23, 12:59 PM
JaimeRoberto said...: This could make a funny SNL skit, if they had any guts.; 1/8/23, 1:05 PM
rehajm said...: “Excuse me. I speak jive…”; 1/8/23, 1:09 PM
West TX Intermediate Crude said...: A bit OT, but I have wondered if the whole sign language business is a grift. The signers are seen only during government announcements and speeches. Computers do a reasonable job of converting speech to written subtitles in real time, at minimal cost. Professional signers are employed primarily due to government regulation, not because of a particular need by a substantial part of the population. Other places they are seen are medical facilities and schools, not in the private sector. A bit of well directed and greased lobbying, I suspect.; 1/8/23, 1:10 PM
Michael Fitzgerald said...: Hand Jive.; 1/8/23, 1:10 PM
Michael K said...: Does it include jive talk?; 1/8/23, 1:11 PM
Balfegor said...: Re: Althouse:

Me too, but the article is quoting a black actress, Michelle Banks, who "has served as a DASL on shows including Camille A. Brown’s Broadway revival of “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf,” which starred Alexandria Wailes, a deaf and mixed race actress, and incorporated ASL into the fabric of the show."

My experience is that an awful lot of diversity consultants and activists kind of lean into the exoticising stereotypes. That's one reason you end up seeing them peddling nonsense like punctuality and thinking about the future being "White." The specific example that comes to mind is a woman Asian diversity consultant talking about how as Asians we all understand meditation (or something like that -- it was a weird assumption about all of us following cultural meditation practices).; 1/8/23, 1:17 PM
rhhardin said...: Blacks are so much more sincere than whites.; 1/8/23, 1:27 PM
Rabel said...: The sign language people I see on TV can't get much more emotive without going full-bore, Robin Williams maniac.; 1/8/23, 1:30 PM
loudogblog said...: Yet again, the New York Times is preaching racial segregation instead of racial inclusion.; 1/8/23, 1:52 PM
Jupiter said...: Yeah, it's interesting. The same thing happened to "debate". Once the blacks got into the competition, it became "sensual". I think they now give points for twerking.; 1/8/23, 1:57 PM
madAsHell said...: Black American Sign Language......ebonics for the deaf.

Does this explain the South African sign language interpreter that was provided to Obama, but nobody could understand??; 1/8/23, 2:06 PM
Ted said...: "As productions increasingly include characters and perspectives from a variety of backgrounds..."

Are they really introducing new characters and perspectives? Of the shows mentioned in this article, "Jesus Christ Superstar" was first produced in 1971, "For Colored Girls..." is from 1976, "Sweeney Todd" is from 1979, "A Soldier's Play" is from 1981, and "The Lion King" opened as a stage musical in 1997. Only one -- "My Onliness," which ran for less than a month off-Broadway last year -- is recent.

Rather than constantly repurposing and recasting old material, maybe it's time to introduce new "perspectives" by writing new plays. (Of course, then the trick is getting people to see them.); 1/8/23, 2:30 PM
Iman said...: So much soul, it’s outta control!

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=k3N6zqBP2Tw; 1/8/23, 2:30 PM
Temujin said...: Just when I was considering going back into the theater.; 1/8/23, 2:45 PM
Political Junkie said...: I have known blacks that would say this is bullshit. That class and race are being confused.; 1/8/23, 2:50 PM
Enigma said...: A very very long time ago this would have been considered conventional wisdom: "Other races are different! Black people are born with rhythm. Let's segregate ourselves and go to different churches and different theaters and different live shows. Separate but equal!"

A very long time ago this would have been considered racism and the left would push for and end to it all. "I'm colorblind."

A long time ago the TV shows Saturday Night Live and In Living Color would have made jokes about it. "White men can't jump."

A long time ago Ebonics would hit the news, as both sincere and satirical mocking of "Black people's bad grammar."

Lefty media and politics in recent years has turned a blind eye to judging cultural differences as bad...when other than White people are involved. So now, BASL cannot avoid being a self-contradictory mishmash of racism-segregation-self-satire-tolerance-and-racial-virtue-ranking. End times for an ideology. I thereby predict a return to the standards of a very very long time ago: segregation and firm conventional wisdom that races are different.

The wheel turns. History repeats. Humans remain dumb animals. All of us.; 1/8/23, 2:58 PM
JAORE said...: In which scheme is the OK sign OK?; 1/8/23, 3:08 PM
Jamie said...: I think it's interesting to watch Babel being reintroduced and reintroduced, this time sort of by design. It's strange enough that ASL is such a different language from spoken English that it's in the "Languages Other Than English" department of our high school (I mean, how else? It's not as if a hearing person can watch something being signed and just magically understand it) - but now dialects within ASL are arising that will cause American deaf people to struggle to understand one another.

I guess it was inevitable...? There being innumerable dialects of spoken English throughout the English-speaking world, some of which are essentially incomprehensible to speakers of others? On the other hand, there's the "linguistic tragedy" of all the languages that are down to their last generation of native speakers and will shortly pass from the Earth.

So, a mixed bag, philosophically.; 1/8/23, 3:11 PM
Lewis Wetzel said...: The NY Times is proud to promote the idea that black people have inborn traits, aside from appearance, that mark their ethnicity, and that "sensuous rhythmic movement" is one of these markers.; 1/8/23, 3:58 PM
Saint Croix said...: I wish some of those black comics

would make fun of this shit!; 1/8/23, 4:23 PM
J. Farmer said...: This seems like a rather innocuous article, but people seem so bothered? Not only are there hundreds of different sign languages, but within each sign language, there are often many different regional dialects. In other words, there is no single, universal "American Sign Language." Since there is a dialect of black English vernacular, it makes sense that there would also be a Black American Sign Language. To what degree that two dialects are related, I don't know.; 1/8/23, 4:54 PM
n.n said...: NYT is signing in blocs.; 1/8/23, 5:52 PM
Jamie said...: McWhorter's The Power of Babel is interesting on this topic. I enjoy that guy.

Even families have unique vernaculars - most don't rise to the level of dialect, but it can get close! In my own family, it's intonation (in a family conversation, the kids and I all say "yes" very oddly, a deep monotone and quite elongated - whereas my husband resolutely holds out for normalcy and just says "yeah" like most people) and references more than changes to "regular" American English.; 1/8/23, 6:06 PM
tcrosse said...: Growing up in North Jersey, I learned a lot of Italian Sign Language, which is useful in traffic.; 1/8/23, 6:48 PM
J. Farmer said...: @Enigma:

So now, BASL cannot avoid being a self-contradictory mishmash of racism-segregation-self-satire-tolerance-and-racial-virtue-ranking.

I am not sure what about it is about Black American Sign Language that makes it any of those things. Although dialects are often described in terms of geographic range, it makes sense to describe a vernacular English peculiar to black people given that blacks were historically concentrated in the South, and thus in touch with rural southern dialects, and that even after their geographic dispersal, legal segregation kept black communities relatively homogenous.; 1/8/23, 6:56 PM
J. Farmer said...: @Lewis Wetzel:

The NY Times is proud to promote the idea that black people have inborn traits, aside from appearance, that mark their ethnicity, and that "sensuous rhythmic movement" is one of these markers.

First, the phrase "sensuous rhythmic movement" appears nowhere in the article. The article reads thusly: "She described one scene, for example, in which Wailes signs in Black American Sign Language, or BASL, which relies in a unique way on body language and rhythm. Onstage, Wailes’ signing became almost sensual, she said. “It was totally different from everyday conversational ASL."

What she is describing is the signing a deaf actress, Alexandria Wailes, did for one particular scene of a play. The differences being discussed were those between Black American Sign Language and "everyday conversational ASL." Nobody was ascribing those differences to the inborn traits of blacks.; 1/8/23, 7:17 PM
Leland said...: I await the remake of Airplane! with the Barbara Billingsley character using BASL.; 1/8/23, 7:20 PM
tcrosse said...: Makes sense. There need to be signs for the words that only black people are allowed to utter.; 1/8/23, 7:30 PM
Pauligon59 said...: I studied ASL for awhile. Part of that was learning performative ASL as opposed to spoken ASL. The deaf community has their own concerts where the music has an ephasized beat and the "signers" perform the lyrics of the song. Aside from the hand and arm motions, the performance looks like many music videos. Note that I had as much difficulty understanding the lyrics as performed by the ASL folks as I did with the music videos.

I was also taught that the ASL vocabulary varies by region in the USA. Example, the sign for "beach" in the PNW differs from the signs in Michigan, Southern California and any other place where sandy beaches are common. PNW signs a heavy wave action splashing on a rocky coast while the sandy beach places mime relaxing in the sun on a beach chair.

I had not heard about BASL as a dialect but was informed that British Sign Language was very different from American Sign Language which is closer to the sign anguage used by the French.; 1/8/23, 8:52 PM
J. Farmer said...: I await the remake of Airplane! with the Barbara Billingsley character using BASL.

Even worse, what if they remake it as a British movie, and she uses British Sign Language. Or god help us, the characters are deaf Māori, so they opt for New Zealand Sign Language's Māori vocabulary.

Come to think of it, why do South African characters speak South African English while Irish characters use Irish English. Why did valleyspeak come from characters and stories set in and around the San Fernando Valley? Why did Fargo feature the Upper Midwestern dialect? Why do Italian-American characters in the Bronx speak with a New York dialect instead of the Appalachian holler? British actors playing American characters speaking an American dialect while American actors playing British characters speaking a British dialect. Cats and dogs sleeping together.

If the numerous English dialects and subdialects, with their varying phonology, vocabulary, grammar, and spelling, are legitimate, what separates them from black vernacular English? And what separates that from, say, the Cajun English dialect of southern Louisiana?

Remember, the last serious attempt to posh up American English and rid it of its regional variations gave us the absurdly affected Mid-Atlantic accent.; 1/9/23, 12:05 AM
B. said...: So this is pidgin for the deaf?; 1/9/23, 5:53 AM
Lewis Wetzel said...: J Farmer -
You basically agree with what I've written & then say that was wrong. I saying that black (anything) is more rhythmic and sensual than non-black (anything) racist or not?; 1/9/23, 7:21 AM
Christopher B said...: @J. Farmer

Nobody was ascribing those differences to the inborn traits of blacks.

Seriously? How else do you read "Black American Sign Language, or BASL, which relies in a unique way on body language and rhythm..."?

It really is amazing to watch the mental gymnastics people go through to avoid saying things are just flat-out stereotypes when doing so would disrupt the narrative that makes them the *good* people.; 1/9/23, 7:29 AM
J. Farmer said...: @Christopher B:

Seriously? How else do you read "Black American Sign Language, or BASL, which relies in a unique way on body language and rhythm..."?

Because discussing how dialects differ in terms of phonology, syntax, vocabulary, and grammar is not the same thing as discussing how those differences developed. Similarly, if I discuss the ways that British Sign Language is unique from American Sign Language, I am not making any claims about the inborn traits of British versus American people. Black American Sign Language also relies more heavily on facial expressions, makes much more frequent use of two-handed signs, utilizes more signing space, and is much more likely to place signs at the forehead. ]

Lewis Wetzel:

You basically agree with what I've written & then say that was wrong. I saying that black (anything) is more rhythmic and sensual than non-black (anything) racist or not?

Obviously not. Which sensations are more or less sensuous than others is a matter of personal taste and opinion. Many people believe French is a more sensuous language than German. That has nothing to do with believing French people are superior to German people.; 1/9/23, 9:50 AM
Lewis Wetzel said...: J. Farmer, the author used the words sensuous and rhythm describing a black woman performing what the the author called Black American Sign Language.
I literally cannot see how this can be seen as other than making a racist assumption about a dialect of sign language used by black Americans.
Imagine a serious article about "Italian American Sign Language" which incorporates stereotypes about Italians using more hand gestures as they communicate.; 1/9/23, 11:54 AM
Saint Croix said...: might be funny

You People; 1/9/23, 1:25 PM
J. Farmer said...: @Lewis Wetzel:

J. Farmer, the author used the words sensuous and rhythm describing a black woman performing what the the author called Black American Sign Language.
I literally cannot see how this can be seen as other than making a racist assumption about a dialect of sign language used by black Americans.

No, the author did not use the words sensuous and rhythm. The author was quoting Michelle Banks, a deaf black actress and director who provides consultation on American Sign Language for the theatre and has worked as a Director of Artistic Sign Language for different theatrical productions. From the article: “I worked with Deaf actors, but I also worked with hearing actors,” Banks said of “For Colored Girls.” “So it’s not just Deaf culture that I brought to the production, but also the Black Deaf culture. And I did that with signing that showed that specific culture that is specific to the Black Deaf community."

I literally cannot see how this can be seen as other than making a racist assumption about a dialect of sign language used by black Americans.

That's what happens when you're hellbent on being offended by something, no matter how innocuous. Getting triggered by an innocuous article in the Arts section of the NYT is bad enough. Getting triggered by an article you didn't even read is much worse.; 1/9/23, 5:53 PM
Paul said...: BASL... deaf version of ebonics...

Gad....; 1/9/23, 8:10 PM
PM said...: Would like to see the signing for
'Get outta my face' and a thousand others.; 1/10/23, 5:48 PM