Sound Reason

Phonomodernity conceptualizes a racial-ableist formation of modernity that naturalizes “sound reason,” that is, the capacity to hear and speak politically, as the epistemic and ontological basis of the human. Deafness is constructed within this order as “unsound” and therefore exiled from the domains of reason and politics. By linking reason to speech and audition, classical political thought, from Aristotle to Hobbes, naturalizes this phonocentric regime as a foundational condition of politics itself. Ultimately, these audist foundations of political society converge with racial domination, as witnessed in the plantation archive, where Black Deaf subjects are rendered doubly subhuman through the co-constitution of racism and audism. Yet enslaved Deaf fugitivity and performances of disability disclose alternative grammars of freedom that refuse the tyranny of sound reason. By insisting that human liberation be both antiaudist and antiracist, Deaf modernity emerges as an emancipatory worldmaking project that reconstitutes political subjectivity beyond a phonomodern world order.