Must The Subaltern Speak: Edwidge Danticat, Feminism, and the Right to Silence

An Incident and Its Context

These reflections focus on a series of texts written in and about Haiti and circulated throughout the literary and cyber spaces of the global so-called First World. ¹ The first text is a November 2010 letter written by a Haitian woman who survived a brutal gang rape in one of the twenty-two IDP camps set up for earthquake victims in Port-au-Prince. Drafted by hand, in Haitian Creole, it reads as follows:

Ou pa gen dwa pale de istwam nan
Ou pa gen dwa pibliyem nan la près
Paske se pa mwen ki te ba ou otorizasyon
Ou pa gen oken dwa, mwen pat pale ave ou
Ou di bagay ou pat dwa di
Mesi

You have no right to speak of my story.
You have no right to publish my story in the press.
Because I did not give you authorization.
You have no right.
I did not speak to you.
You have said things you should not have said.
Thank you. ²

This letter was addressed to American human rights journalist Mac McClelland, who had accompanied the woman and her mother to the hospital immediately following the rape. Along the way, the American reporter live-tweeted the experience. She revealed the woman’s name, the details of her assault, and the specifics of her medical treatment, among other things. Some months later, a feature-length article describing the reporter’s time in Haiti ³ appeared in Mother Jones, a US-based liberal political magazine. Ostensibly in deference to the rape survivor’s wishes, the article omitted any identifying details. But then in June 2011, seven months after receiving the Haitian woman’s letter, this same journalist published an online essay for Good ⁴ in which she described her own battle with post-traumatic stress disorder following her experience with the Haitian rape survivor she had tweeted about in 2010 – the woman who had made it so clear that the story of her rape was not this reporter’s to tell: “Paske se pa mwen ki te ba ou otorizasyon.” (Because I did not give you authorization.) In the essay, the journalist revisited the rape whose aftermath she witnessed, peppering the account of her own trauma with details from the Haitian woman’s experience.

The piece provoked an immediate and heated response from thirty-six women – primarily Americans working in Haiti as NGO/aid workers, lawyers, activists, filmmakers, or journalists themselves – in the form of an open letter that appeared on Jezebel. ⁵ Afro-Haitian-American ⁶ writer Edwidge Danticat was one of the thirty-six signatories on this open letter and, just a few days after its publication, she posted an individual response on Essence. ⁷ It was in Danticat’s essay that I first read the sobering words of K’s letter. Whereas the signatories took issue with what they argued was the American reporter’s sensationalist and decontextualized portrayal of Haiti as “a heart-of-darkness dystopia,” Danticat foregrounded issues of witnessing and consent. Having met and become a trusted confidant of the woman (who she names “K”) whose suffering now served as background and backdrop to the American reporter’s experience, at issue for Danticat was the journalist’s appropriation of the rape victim’s story in the service of her own narrative – her effective eliding of the Haitian woman’s trauma. Danticat recognized, of course, that the negative stereotyping of Haiti and the silencing of this Haitian woman are profoundly linked phenomena, but nonetheless sought to draw attention to the injustice of this survivor’s continued exploitation.

I do not bring up this series of events with an aim to prolonging the discussion in this forum of that particular journalist’s actions. Rather, what most interests me in all of this is the subtle but nonetheless significant connection between Danticat’s protective gesture toward the traumatized Haitian woman at the center of this controversy, and another, equally protective, much earlier gesture: her appending of an “Afterword” to the 1998 edition of her poignant first novel Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994). The novel is a first-person narrative told by Sophie, a Haitian immigrant to Brooklyn who has suffered in the long and short terms the humiliation and lasting trauma of having her virginity “tested” daily (via digital vaginal penetration) by her mother – a mother who herself had been viciously raped as a teenager in Haiti. As Danticat explains in “Walk Straight,” the second chapter in her 2011 essay collection Create Dangerously, the maelstrom of celebrity that surrounded her after the selection of Breath, Eyes, Memory in 1998 for inclusion in the taste-making, sales-boosting Oprah’s Book Club brought with it quite vitriolic backlash from the Haitian diasporic community. As Danticat explains, “Maligned as we were in the media at the time, as disaster-prone refugees and boat people and AIDS carriers, many of us had become overly sensitive and were eager to censor anyone who did not project a ‘positive image’ of Haiti and Haitians.” ⁸ Danticat found herself accused of betraying Haitian women by depicting the practice of mothers’ sexual inspection of their daughters and, more broadly, accused of exploiting the whole of her culture for financial success and celebrity in the world of privilege accessible outside of Haiti.

It was in the wake of this angry response that Danticat penned her addendum to the second edition of the book. In an elegant, humble, page and a half-long coda to Breath, Eyes, Memory, Danticat directly addresses her novel’s heroine. She writes:

I write this to you now, Sophie, because your secrets, like you, like me, have traveled far from this place … Tired of protesting, I feel I must explain … I have always taken for granted that this story which is yours, and only yours, would always be read as such. But some of the voices that come back to me, to you … respond with a different kind of understanding than I had hoped. And so I write this to you now, Sophie, as I write it to myself … thanking you for the journey of healing…that you and I have been through together. ⁹

Faced with the criticism of many in the Haitian community for having narrated Sophie’s traumatic experience and exposed to the eyes of “outsiders” in the First World a practice that would make all Haitians look bad, Danticat effectively sets out in this postscript to answer her critics with a message of clarification and of gratitude.

I recall feeling somewhat disgruntled on reading Danticat’s “Afterword” by what seemed to me to be its unwarranted concession. I was uncomfortable with the idea that some force or forces had, to my mind, guilted a writer of fiction into defending her right to tell a story. How narrow-minded, I thought, of those readers to suggest that any constraints be placed on Danticat’s voice. How cynical of Danticat’s editors to oblige this conciliation. However, the more recent controversy surrounding the American journalist’s tweets, article, and essay brought me back to Danticat’s “Afterword.” For despite the vast difference that separates the real, lived trauma that K experienced and the fictional trauma that Danticat’s character experienced, at issue in both contexts was a Haitian woman whose body and story had ended up at the center of a drama ongoing among those whose access to voice and to choice was, relatively speaking, unconstrained. As the signatories of the open letter so rightly acknowledge in their denunciation of the American journalist’s actions, “most Haitian women are not offered escapes from the possibility of violence in the camps in the form of passports and tickets home to another country.” Always at issue, they remind their readers, is the fact of the geo-political borders that circumscribe the bodies and the voices of the most marginalized.

It is through this lens that I have since come to understand that it was Danticat’s sensitivity to the material reality of borders, not unwarranted personal remorse or the cynicism of her publishers, that motivated the appending of that afterword to Breath, Eyes, Memory. It was perhaps her recognition of the fact that, while Haiti is a place where she feels very much at home, the position she occupies as an Afro-Haitian-American, and a celebrated one at that, grants her the exceptional right and profound privilege of crossing borders between multiple geographies – of “traveling far from this place,” as she puts it, and being counted among those whose voices matter. ¹⁰ It was likely her awareness of the extent to which, as Nick Nesbitt suggests, “the act of aesthetic representation draws her away from the immediacy of social and historical fact, calling into question her right to speak in the place of others.” ¹¹ What I suggest, then, is that both of these incidents – the response to Danticat’s first novel by Haitian diasporic readers and Danticat’s subsequent handling of that response; the American reporter’s response to the Haitian rape survivor and Danticat’s subsequent handling of that response – are embedded in the broader issue of boundedness. They call into question the real obstacles to a meaningful and respectful integration of certain, often women’s, postcolonial bodies into a global citizenry that is hierarchized, ultimately, in accordance with the values, interests, and fears of the First World.

A Question of Voice: Can the Subaltern Speak?

[I]t is only political life that is truly lived in language, that can truly speak. Bare life is mute, undifferentiated, and stripped of both the generality and the specificity that language makes possible.
Andrew Norris, “Giorgio Agamben and the Politics of the Living-Dead” ¹²

It is, of course, telling that the victimized bodies made so visible in global media are most often those of women and children. The mediatizing of suffering women and children exemplifies what Liisa Malkki characterizes as “the institutional, international expectation of a certain kind of helplessness as a refugee characteristic.” ¹³ She continues, this “vision of helplessness is linked to the constitution of speechlessness among refugees: helpless victims need protection, need someone to speak for them.” ¹⁴ Women especially are configured within this rhetoric as de facto disempowered; their bodies are perceived to be weak, coercible, and excessively visible in situations of crisis. Presented primarily as victims, they are made to bear out assumptions about non-white womanhood – and personhood, more broadly. They embody, as Gayatri Spivak so pithily articulates, the phenomenon of “white men [and women!] saving brown women from brown men” – phenomenon by which, she argues, “one never encounters the testimony of the women’s voice-consciousness.” ¹⁵ If the subaltern woman is offered the opportunity to speak she should express, it is understood, her “gratefulness for being rescued.” ¹⁶ This is very much the frame within which the white American woman reporter engaged with K, and it is the tricky terrain that Danticat must always negotiate. Danticat must avoid falling, that is, into the trap of demonizing Haiti, Haitian men, and Haitian cultural traditions, while at the same time allowing herself the freedom to imagine and narrate possible paths to individual healing. And so there is a broader point to be made here with respect to the multiple, internationally circulating texts evoked here above – a point that concerns the relationship between trauma, testimony, and the Afro-female body.

The circulation of the helpless-victim trope that marks perceptions of Third World women’s bodies exists concomitantly, I would argue, with an equally prevalent narrative of endless resilience that makes palatable the deluge of information regarding the physical, often sexual, brutalization of black women and girls. We have been trained to believe that these abject bodies are in fact exceptional in their capacity to endure misery, and so are encouraged to discount the trauma experienced by individual women, thus implicitly denying them “the authority to give credible narrative evidence or testimony about their own condition.” ¹⁷ Writing of Houston Baker’s essay “Scene… Not Heard,” trauma theorist Jennifer L. Griffiths evokes the concept of “silent display,” a phenomenon by which black women’s bodies “enter the public consciousness without a voice, silent objects whose bodies-as-texts conform to fit seamlessly within a cultural script that already marks them as ‘Other.'” ¹⁸ Baker’s context is the nineteenth-century northern US abolitionist rally, in which slave women were made to turn their backs to the spectators so as to display the stripes left by the overseer’s whip, but his analysis very much holds as regards the images of Afro women’s bodies from postcolonial or “Third” spaces that circulate in the present moment.

It is in thinking pointedly about the possibilities and pitfalls inherent in literary – and therefore privileged – representations of the postcolonial Afro-female body that I implicate Breath, Eyes, Memory as I think through the controversy surrounding K’s story. There is a real trickiness to telling fictional stories of misery without turning that misery into spectacle. Given, that is, that suffering and violence remain facts for Black women in the modern world, how can those facts be represented by writers who, for the most part, are members of an elite, unbound class and so, for the most part, are removed from the bodily suffering they describe in their works? How can writers both write responsibly and also make responsible those to whom they expose the abject material condition of those they represent? How can writers avoid the trap whereby “in speaking of suffering, in representing it aesthetically, [they] participate in a theft in which images are taken from the living and … [are] merely represented?” ¹⁹ I argue that Danticat takes up this challenge in Breath, Eyes, Memory, a novel that in many ways sets the template for her later prose fiction. In this first novel, as well as in subsequent works, Danticat relays narratives of Haitian women’s traumatized bodies without falling into clichés of superhuman resilience or subhuman abjection. She succeeds in avoiding such stereotyping, first, by having the “I” tell its own story and, second, by insisting on the impact of trauma on the bodies and the minds of her characters. Her configuration of the novel’s female protagonists, Sophie and her mother Martine, foregrounds Afro material being in ways that contradict fundamentally the trope of the at once ontologically broken and preternaturally unbreakable Black female body.

In her first-person telling of her story, Danticat’s Sophie implicates the reader in both the traumatic event and its consequences – she emphatically articulates the deepness, the incontournabilité, of the imprint that trauma has left on her body and soul. Sophie’s story is, in its entirety, the story of her attempts to survive what her mother did to her. Any and everything else in the novel can only be understood through the lens of Sophie’s fraught negotiations with her violated body. Damaged significantly and psychologically by her traumatic experience, Sophie’s immediate response to her mother’s assault on her sexuality is an unshakeable self-loathing: “I hate my body,” she reveals. “I am ashamed … Sometimes I feel like I should be off somewhere by myself” (123). This self-loathing ultimately becomes self-harm. After more than a month of the testing, Sophie brutally breaks her own hymen with a pestle, thwarting any further abuse by her mother and doing severe and lasting damage to her own body in the process.

While this self-inflicted violence is clearly misguided, it is also understandable. The reader can empathize: Danticat is clear to make Sophie’s desperate act recognizable as an attempt both to protect her body from her mother’s humiliating ritual and to gain a measure of control over the most intimate aspect of her material being. In spite of the agony of the auto-defloration, Sophie experiences it primarily as liberation: “like breaking manacles, an act of freedom” (130). Indeed, inasmuch as trauma can be understood at least in part “as an interpersonal violation of the boundaries of the self,” ²⁰ Sophie’s desperate move to reestablish and protect those boundaries, to demarcate her self – mentally and bodily – as inviolable (unrapeable, as this term resonates so meaningfully with the French), Sophie’s act must be appreciated as approaching the labor of recovery. I use the term “recovery” pointedly. For, despite the fact that Sophie has so severely injured her body that sex with her husband is agonizing, and despite the fact that she has internalized the trauma to such an extent that she ends up plagued by an eating disorder – despite these markers of bodily dysfunction – she remains capable of imagining healing. She understands that in order to break out of, or rather to transform, the prison her body has become, she must bear witness to its tragedy. What does this mean? It means that she must tell her story and so escape “the isolation that is at the heart of the traumatic experience.” ²¹ And she does just this. She tells her story to a therapist and to a healing circle composed of two other sexually traumatized women of color as part of a project-process of “personal or private emancipation.” ²² She confronts her mother with her story. In acknowledging her body’s violation, Sophie seeks “to make meaning from the chaos of her trauma.” ²³ Moreover, she fights not only for herself, but also for her infant daughter. Sophie comes to believe that the suffering encoded in her body must find its voice if her daughter is to be spared its haunting. She believes this because she has lived with and been victimized by her mother’s ghosts, her mother’s trauma. In fact, she herself embodies that trauma, as she is the product of her mother’s rape.

Sophie’s conclusions regarding her bodily relationship to a transgenerational trauma is made plain in a lengthy passage:

I knew the intensity of her nightmares. I had seen her curled up in a ball in the middle of the night, sweating and shaking as she hollered for the images of the past to leave her alone. Sometimes the fright woke her up, but most of the time, I had to shake her awake before she bit her finger off, ripped her nightgown, or threw herself out of a window. After Joseph and I got married, all through the first year I had suicidal thoughts. Some nights I woke up in a cold sweat wondering if my mother’s anxiety was somehow hereditary or if it was something that I had “caught” from living with her. Her nightmares had somehow become my own, so much so that I would wake up some mornings wondering if we hadn’t both spent the night dreaming about the same thing: a man with no face, pounding a life into a helpless young girl. I looked back at my daughter, who was sleeping peacefully. It was a good sign that at least she slept a lot … The fact that she could sleep meant that she had no nightmares, and maybe, would never become a frightened insomniac like my mother and me. (193)

Here, the reader comprehends that Sophie is traumatized not only by the physical violation of her body to which her mother subjected her as an adolescent, but also by the whole of her relationship with this broken, haunted maternal figure. Thus, Sophie lives and tells two stories – that of her own body and its suffering, and that of her mother’s battle with post-traumatic stress disorder. Herein lies the fundamental elegance of Danticat’s novel and the door it opens to multiple, nuanced, nonhomogenizing representations of realities. While the very fact of telling these stories can be read as part of what Danticat calls Sophie’s “journey of healing,” the intimate portrait of Sophie’s mother shows the reader what trauma can do even to a Black woman if left to fester in the body without ever finding its way out. Sophie’s mother never moves beyond the agony of the moment of her rape and so is condemned to relive it unendingly, a reality she acknowledges in response to Sophie’s demand for answers to help her decode her own traumatic experience. “I did it because my mother had done it to me,” her mother explains. “I have no greater excuse. I realize standing here that the two greatest pains of my life are very much related. The one good thing about my being raped was that it made the testing stop. The testing and the rape. I live both every day” (170). The weight of these traumas in her body eventually becomes too much for Sophie’s mother to bear, and her suicide is excessive in its violence, shocking in its intimacy; she stabs herself to death, even more brutally echoing the self-inflicted violence to which her daughter also resorted.

Breath, Eyes, Memory is, without question, a very sad story. If I have gone to the trouble here of describing in detail the fates of the novel’s women protagonists, it is because we can consider Danticat’s portraits of Haitian womanhood as a critical response to the ways in which Haitian women’s bodies in particular, and Afro bodies in general, have been represented by those able to circulate outside the island, particularly in the years following the 2010 earthquake. The very fact of the narrating “I” pushes against the reduction of Haitian women to nondistinction under the global gaze, allowing the “I” to foreground its body on its own terms. The “I” puts the woman into the world in an individuated way, crafting a single and singular story that will not lurk on the periphery but is its own center. It is an embodied and audacious “I,” one that is vulnerable, testifying, and thus inherently courageous. The intimacy of this “I”‘s self-telling provides the necessary platform for the reader’s empathetic identification with the specific contours of the individual struggles of the Other. Sophie and her mother’s stories insist that the Afro-female body is neither subhumanly wretched nor superhumanly capable of withstanding trauma – that the body’s tragedies can break a woman’s spirit. Their stories insist that the Haitian woman’s body and mind must be tended to in their individuality, and that Black women must be allowed safe spaces within which to bear witness to their own experiences and to tell their own stories, should they decide to do so.

Danticat’s novel suggests, then, that the experience of extraordinary violence might be overcome through processes of narrating and of being heard: “the traumatic event becomes known through the process of telling a story to a listener,” argues Griffiths. “Testimony, therefore, depends on a relationship and a process between the survivor and the witness, as memory emerges and reunites a body and a voice severed in trauma.” ²⁴ In other words, to move beyond trauma, the survivor must tell her story to another being who knows both how to listen to and how to hear her. She must find a sympathetic ear willing and able to acknowledge the traumatic event and to appreciate – without making a spectacle of – her suffering.

A Question of Silence: Must the Subaltern Speak?

Anguished by my own sense of guilt, I often reply feebly that in writing what I do, I exploit no one more than myself. Besides, what is the alternative for me or anyone else who might not dare to offend? Self-censorship? Silence?
Edwidge Danticat, Create Dangerously

There is no question but that voice is widely perceived as the most effective way to effect subversion in the context of inequality. There is a presumption that to speak is to engage in struggle, to participate in a political community, and to resist that community’s practices of disenfranchisement – its practices of literal and metaphorical silencing. By default, then, to remain silent is to be disengaged, made marginal. Much of the scholarship that is concerned with gender (in)justice and the human rights of women and children in the postcolonial world privilege speech and voice, for perfectly reasonable reasons, yet neglect to pay close critical attention to the distinction between being silent and being silenced. As Kennan Ferguson astutely affirms, while “disempowerment and oppression are the assumed political purposes of silence … [s]ilence … can also serve as a refuge from power”; it “can be used to create the self.” ²⁵

So, however much I have emphasized the continuities between Danticat’s relationship to Sophie and to K, it is important also to acknowledge the difference that separates the post-trauma strategy of the fictional character from that of the real-life rape survivor. To read – to really read – K’s brief but adamant reproach means recognizing that she in fact calls only and insistently for the reporter’s silence. She claims her story, asserts her ownership of her story, and refuses global circulation of her story. “Ou pa gen dwa pale … pibliye … istawm nan.” (You have no right to speak of … to publish … my story… I did not give you authorization.) K’s speech – what clearly she means to be a speech act – is clipped, unadorned, and definitive. It is a refusal to be spoken for and, as significantly, a refusal to speak. Not only does K take categorical possession of the narrative of her experience, but she also makes no claim to want to tell the story of what happened to her – at least not in that way (via Twitter, via the Internet), to that audience (the whole wired world). K’s reproach is a call for silence and, as such, it reminds us to consider – beyond whether or not the subaltern can speak – whether she wants to speak and, if so, to whom. K creates a particular version of herself in calling for silence, and so she poses an effective subversion of power – not merely the power wielded at one point by her rapists, or the power wielded by the international occupiers of her country, but the power of the ostensibly sympathetic First World woman storyteller who showed so little compunction about self-servingly appropriating and circulating another woman’s tale. In saying only, simply, firmly, “you have no right,” K presumptively thwarts the kind of “illocutionary disablement” ²⁶ that so often distorts or discounts self-telling on the part of global subalterns like her.

Very much integrated into – or, rather, accepted – by elite North Atlantic literary institutions, Danticat has long taken seriously the ethical accountability undergirding the privilege and power that come with unfetteredly transnational voice. It is clear in her work that she is acutely attuned to “the privileged role accorded to art when it comes to the representation and reification of that which modernity has excluded, abandoned and repressed.” ²⁷ Her protective gesture in 1998 toward a fictional character and, by extension, to a postcolonial Haitian community very reasonably concerned with its perception in a predatory and prejudiced international context prefigures her protective gesture in 2011 toward a Haitian woman who, having survived horrific violence, nonetheless managed to maintain the dignity needed to claim sole rights to her own story. In both instances, at issue is the question of who has the right to tell certain tales. In both the real and the fictional worlds Danticat engages, her reader is well aware of the distance – both metaphorical and geographical – that separates the author’s very fortunate body from the bodies of the spoken for and the bound she dares and is compelled to represent in her work, be these bodies bound spatially by bigoted immigration law or by degrading internationally circulating stereotypes. Offering stories of transnational Afro bodies that defy relegation to the ahistoric and quarantined holding pens of Agambenian nondistinction, Danticat puts forward a purposeful counter to the “center’s” practices of homogenizing dehumanization.

The evolution of her characters’ self-liberating voices is central to the ethical project that undergirds Danticat’s fiction. Yet, in thinking through Danticat’s novelistic rendering of sexual violence and its enduring trauma in the light of K’s unquestionably more brutal lived experience, I am led to wonder whether, in certain contexts, quiet might offer a powerful alternative strategy for combating global practices of marginalization. From this parallel reading of Danticat’s work in the overlapping contexts of the literary and the social emerges the possibility that freedom – though perhaps most often seized through self-narrating declarations – may also very well sound like silence. The question becomes, then, how best to navigate representation so as to avoid the “theft” of voice while remaining committed to voicing the unspeakable. When is it crucial and when is it cruel for an artist to write – to risk – that which she should not have said?

1. A version of this essay, titled “‘You Have Said Things You Should Not Have Said’: Trauma, Healing, and Treacherous Self-Telling in Stories of Haitian Women,” was first published in Francosphères 4, no. 1 (August 2015): 71–83. I thank Liverpool University Press for the license to reprint my work here.[↑]
2. The original Haitian Creole letter and its English translation both appear in Edwidge Danticat, “Edwidge Danticat Speaks on Mac McClelland Essay,” Essence, 9 July 2011, http://www.essence.com/2011/07/09/edwidge-danticat-speaks-on-mac-mcclelland.[↑]
3. Mac McClelland, “Aftershocks: Welcome to Haiti’s Reconstruction Hell,” Mother Jones, January 2011, http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/01/haiti-rape-earthquake-mac-mcclelland.[↑]
4. Mac McClelland, “I’m Gonna Need You to Fight Me on This: How Violent Sex Helped Ease My PTSD,” Good, 29 June 2011, http://www.good.is/posts/how-violent-sex-helped-ease-my-ptsd/.[↑]
5. “Female Journalists and Researchers Respond to Haiti PTSD Article,” Jezebel, 1 July 2011http://jezebel.com/5817381/female-journalists–researchers-respond-to-haiti-ptsd-article.[↑]
6. This is Danticat’s self-identifying construction of her dynamically transnational cultural self. Danticat, “AHA!,” in Becoming American: Personal Essays by First Generation Immigrant Women, ed. Meri Nana-Danquah (New York: Hyperion, 2001), 44.[↑]
7. Edwidge Danticat, “Edwidge Danticat Speaks on Mac McClelland Essay,” Essence, 9 July 2011, http://www.essence.com/2011/07/09/edwidge-danticat-speaks-on-mac-mcclelland.[↑]
8. Edwidge Danticat, Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work (New York: Vintage Books, 2010), 32.[↑]
9. Danticat, “Afterword,” Breath, Eyes, Memory, 2nd ed. (New York: Soho Press, 1994), 236, emphasis mine.[↑]
10. Of course, as I have noted elsewhere, while Danticat’s status as internationally acclaimed writer places her in an unquestionably fortunate position relative to the vast majority of Haitians, both those living in Haiti and those in the diaspora, and Danticat is very much aware of the bounds of this privilege. See Kaiama L. Glover, “Ordinary People,” Public Books, December 2013, http://www.publicbooks.org/briefs/ordinary-people.[↑]
11. Nesbitt, Voicing Memory, 202.[↑]
12. Andrew Norris, “Giorgio Agamben and the Politics of the Living-Dead,” Diacritics 30, no. 4 (2000): 38–58.[↑]
13. Liisa Malkki, “Speechless Emissaries: Refugees, Humanitarianism, and Dehistoricization,” Cultural Anthropology 11, no. 3 (August 1996): 388, emphasis in original.[↑]
14. Ibid.[↑]
15. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (London: Macmillan, 1988), 93.[↑]
16. M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 176.[↑]
17. Malkki, “Speechless Emissaries,” 378.[↑]
18. Jennifer L. Griffiths, Traumatic Possessions: The Body and Memory in African American Women’s Writing and Performance (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2009), 7.[↑]
19. Nesbitt, Voicing Memory, 207.[↑]
20. Linda Marks, “Narcissism and the Male Heart Wound,” Energetic Synthesis, http://energeticsynthesis.com/index.php/resource-tools/ascension-tools/clear-negative-ego/1776-male-heart-wounding.[↑]
21. Griffiths, Traumatic Possessions, viii.[↑]
22. Mimi Sheller, Citizenship from Below (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 90.[↑]
23. Griffiths, Traumatic Possessions, 2.[↑]
24. Ibid., 2.[↑]
25. Kennan Ferguson, All in the Family: On Community and Incommensurability (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 65.[↑]
26. Theorized by Rae Langton in “Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 22, no. 4 (Autumn, 1993): 293–330, “illocutionary disablement” refers to the “structural constraints” that deauthorize and/or pervert the would-be speech acts of particular social actors. It is a phenomenon by which the illocutionary intent of certain beings is obfuscated and/or rendered unspeakable.[↑]
27. Anthony Downey, “Zones of Indistinction: Giorgio Agamben’s ‘Bare Life’ and the Politics of Aesthetics,” Third Text (2009): 125.[↑]