Postcolonial Performativities

• In Event: Doing Things with Performativity

Abstract

My presentation focuses on the performative force of silence: on what I will characterize as the “political genius” of silence as a performative disruption. Gayatri Spivak famously theorizes subaltern silence as a problem of subordination. She describes situations in which people cannot speak, their attempts to speak are not heard, or those attempts are systematically misunderstood. In such cases, “the subaltern cannot speak.” This is a very insightful analysis of many pathways of subordination; however, it also masks many cases in which the subaltern does not want to speak, but chooses instead to be silent. Here silence in an active achievement, an attempt to distance oneself from subordination and instead to be left alone.

Silence, in such cases, has a great performative force. It articulates a kind of pure performativity that substitutes for speech. It performs what Édouard Glissant might call opacity: a refusal to be known, to be legible, to participate. This performative force is often registered in epistemological and affective terms, exercising a potently disruptive and problematizing effect. It unhinges colonizing projects and subverts forces of subordination. To misquote Judith Butler (whose phrase is “performativity’s social magic”), I believe that these performativities display a kind of political genius. They perform a symbolic politics that has potent disruptive effects.

I draw these observations from several decades of Haitian postcolonial history, 1793-1844, in which rural Black populations were marginalized, excluded, coerced, and conscripted by the new Haitian national project. Their response was a richly patterned, performative assertion of silence that had great disruptive force. To theorize the performative character of these disruptions I largely depart from J. L. Austin, instead modifying insights of Judith Butler, Édouard Glissant, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Pierre Bourdieu.

Author

• Kevin Olson, University of California, Irvine