Decolonizing Silences: Toward a Critical Phenomenology of Deep Silences with Gloria E. Anzaldúa and Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Datum
2021-11-23
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University of Oregon
Zusammenfassung
Motivating this dissertation is a concern for how Western philosophical, cultural, and political practices tend to privilege speech and voice as emancipatory tools and reduce silence to silencing. To locate power in silence and not exclusively in speech and voice, the dissertation grapples with the normative implications of coloniality vis-à-vis the phenomenon of silence at both the theoretical and sensible levels; it investigates how modern/colonial assumptions affect Western understandings of the phenomenon of silence and eventuate modalities of existence that preclude hearing the polyvocality of silences. To press Western culture beyond its negative affinities with “silence,” I develop and defend the concept of “deep silence.” Unlike “silencing,” which is understood as the opposite of speech and signification and, as such, as a matter of an already available utterance being smothered or unspoken, “deep silence” indicates a transformative power that generates meanings that have not yet been voiced and that, importantly, breaks with colonial norms and expectations. Deep silences, I argue, can be a powerful decolonizing tool.The main interlocutors of the dissertation are Gloria E. Anzaldúa and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. For these authors, silence is not the opposite of speech, or a matter of an already available utterance being smothered or intentionally withheld. Rather, it plays a central role in giving human beings sensible access to the world. Both thinkers, moreover, appeal to the aesthetic to express the otherwise-elusive senses of silence. Working closely with Anzaldúa’s decolonial mythopoetics and Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetic and ontological writings, I propose that the modality whereby one bears witness to experiences of marginalization matters to decolonizing endeavors. Mobilizing, rather than eliding, deep silences in one’s account decenters key assumption of Western thinking, opening onto modalities of healing often overlooked by Western legalism and Transitional Justice initiatives; it makes “visible” colonial historias without capitulating to specularization, i.e., rendering experiences of coloniality specular to and readily available for dissection and inspection by the colonizing gaze. My project thus not only offers a critique of discursive approaches to emancipation; it also provides a philosophically rich contribution to current debates about decolonizing methodologies and sense-making.
Beschreibung
Schlagwörter
aesthesis, decoloniality, deep silence, Gloria Anzaldua, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, phenomenology