Jane Groom and the Deaf Colonists

Empire, Emigration and the Agency of Disabled People in the late Nineteenth-Century British Empire

Datos Bibliográficos

ID4493733
AutoresEsme Cleall (0000-0002-9745-6711, University of Sheffield, autor de correspondencia)
Año2016
Volumen81
Número1
Páginas39-61
Fecha de publicación2016-04-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaHistory Workshop Journal (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1363-3554 • E-ISSN: 1477-4569
EditorialOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/hwj/dbv037
OpenAlexW2343092415
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas1
Referencias citadas14

This article explores an emigration scheme envisioned by Jane Groom, a deaf woman, whereby deaf working-class people from the East End of London would be relocated to Manitoba. During the 1880s and 1890s about fifty families emigrated under Groom’s auspices. This article has three aims. Firstly, recovering the life of Jane Groom enables us to think about disabled activism and agency in a global arena: her activities were widely discussed both in the British Empire and in the US, and she undertook them as a disabled person because, not in spite, of her disability. Jane Groom’s life is an example of advocacy and activism in a period when we have few details about disabled figures, female ones still less. It also reveals a thriving deaf community which merits attention as a distinct social group. Secondly, her life allows us to think about the way in which disability connected with wider concerns: with, for example, the philanthropic milieu in late Victorian London, nineteenth-century anxieties about the body, and issues of emigration and settlement. Thirdly, it helps us to think about the relationships between different kinds of colonizing practice within the British Empire.

Aesthetics · Agency (philosophy) · Art · Emigration · Empire · Immigration · Period (music) · Political science · Settlement (finance) · Social science · Sociology · Thriving · Canadian Identity and History · Disability Rights and Representation · Gender Studies · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History · Law