ABSTRACT:

The idea that silence speaks louder than words has become a cliché, and yet, in our ‘all-hearing, all-speaking’ age, it is the fundamental right to silence that is so often undermined. On the one hand there is the need for minority or suppressed voices to be heard — the feeling that one loses ones political agency if one does not “speak up.” On the other, there is the understanding that having a platform does not necessarily equate to being heard, or worse, that saying something might put one in harm’s way. In such contexts, silence is political; it exposes the limits of representation and the conditions which ‘fail to listen.’ By lending their ears to such moments of pause — to the gaps, cracks, and fissures that constitute such silences — forensic linguist Lawrence Abu Hamdan and performance artist Gabrielle Goliath draw attention to that which cannot, or will not, be said, foregrounding silence, not only as a product of censorship or a form of withdrawal, but as a constitutive basis for political agency.