![]() ![]() It’s like, how often have you ever read a description of smell in a novel? We think that it’s a natural state, that it must be true that we are all more visual. Lots of self-fulfilling prophecies about this suggest, Oh well, we don’t know how to describe smell. If we’re not entertaining and studying all of our senses with equal vigor, then we’re missing out as a culture. So that’s where ocularcentrism is not just about individuals being in the position of being a lesser human being, because we can’t see or can’t see as well, but also how our culture at large tends to be ocularcentric, to the detriment of all. Ten years ago, nobody in Rosenblum’s field was interested in asking questions about smell or taste or touch. When I had a conversation with this perceptual psychologist named Lawrence Rosenblum, who’s also in my book, he said in his field of perceptual psychology the big questions were always asked about sight, maybe hearing. It also is about not just people, but our culture generally. And, if you’re not visual because you are blind, that you are in a lesser state of being. Ocularcentrism comes into being when you are not just visual but you think that being visual is the only way to be. Being a visual person is not the same as being ocularcentric. I don’t even think he coined it, but that’s where I first encountered it. Leona Godin: Critical, historical scholar Martin Jay uses the term ocularcentric in his book Downcast Eyes. The Rumpus: Ocularcentrism sounds obvious enough, thinking about its parts, but maybe we best break it down anyway, before proceeding: what is ocularcentrism? Why is the term one you use throughout There Plant Eyes to assist you in presenting your arguments? Godin’s virtual book tour, we had a fascinating conversation over Zoom about the difference between blindness as a perspective versus a subject the spectrum of light, dark, and dappled sight and ocularcentrism. ![]() Godin has launched a valuable online resource, also titled There Plant Eyes. Godin has written for the New York Times, Playboy, and a column in Catapult called “A Blind Writer’s Notebook.” She founded the online literary journal Aromatica Poetica, which examines the arts and sciences of smell and taste and accepts submissions from both blind and sighted writers. All this has led her to the writing of There Plant Eyes, a much needed text on the blindness perspective, published in June from Pantheon Books.ĭr. Godin immediately dove into writing and performing two one-woman shows: The Spectator and the Blind Man, which explored the invention of braille, and The Star of Happiness, about Helen Keller on the vaudeville stage. After finishing her dissertation on technologies of sight in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Dr. While pursuing a PhD in Early Modern Literature from NYU, she became interested in studying all about blindness and culture, and blind culture, as she learned to adapt to her own gradually evolving world of changing sight. Leona Godin is a blind writer, performer, and educator. It’s a handy guide, covering a wide array of voices through the many perspectives of science, philosophy, the arts, anecdotal highlights, and historical timeline and reflections.ĭr. John Milton’s classic poem, Paradise Lost, contains the quote from which springs There Plant Eyes: A Personal and Cultural History of Blindness. Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell ![]() Irradiate, there plant eyes, all mist from hence Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers So much the rather thou, celestial light, ![]()
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