by Derefe Kimarley Chevannes
No leader can successfully lead this race of ours without giving an interpretation of the awakened spirit of the New Negro, who does not seek industrial opportunity alone, but a political voice.
— Marcus Garvey (1922)
I take this opportunity to offer some reflections on my project of revisiting and critically exploring the nature of political speech. Specifically, I engage with foundational intellectual historical discussions of why speech is essential to doing politics to consider the following questions:
What does it mean to speak politically and what are the corresponding requirements for being heard?
If one’s mode of communication cannot be recognized as speech, can one be a political subject or is one reduced to an object of another’s decision-making?
Consonant with the classic Aristotelian formula, in order to have a role in a polity one must participate in debates over what should be shared values, norms, and priorities. Through an exploration of Deaf, Afro-Deaf, and Black hearing subjects, I ask if narrowing our theoretical and practical understandings of speech to audibility or phonocentrism reduce political life. I contend that the answer is “yes.”
I explore this problem first through a focused study of Deaf people who do not engage in audible speech and are, therefore, in the dominant popular imagination of most contemporary societies, often thought to be nonspeaking. Once considered speechless subjects, they are thought of as intrinsically apolitical and deemed people who must be spoken for.
I begin with a historiographical outline of popular and legal debates surrounding the definition of who is Deaf and, once determined, how Deafness has been bounded in a liminal space of sub-human personhood. I then turn to subversive discourses developed by the Deaf themselves that dislodge an audist account of Deaf subjectivity. Their writings and reflections in the interviews I conducted offer a different account of what it means not to hear—or to hear via the ocularcentric modalities, that is, an account that does not turn on whether or not one’s ears function in the ways of the so-called “hearing.”
What emerges as the embodied voice of the Deaf is sign language or a distinctive political speech that is, as Owen Wrigley put it, “a visually linguistic modality . . . [that] threaten[s][existing] crucial anchors of language and social meaning” (The Politics of Deafness, 1996: 85). This visual voice challenges the very fixed norms about who can emerge as political subjects by virtue of their ability to speak.
Deaf people have long been viewed as apolitical and outside the parameters of politics. This results as the Aristotelian formula, with continuities in the model posed by Hannah Arendt, which essentializes speech as inherently audible. Audibility limits speech and, consequently, limits liberatory movements of the Deaf subject. We recognize this through the disciplinary practices of oralism that penalizes Deaf subjectivity by conscripting the Deaf person to partake in audible speech, often by denying the use of sign language. In other words, for Deaf persons to exist in the social world, they must exist with a borrowed register—a hearing register. In such a scenario, audism—which reduces the category of being human to one’s ability to engage in audible speech—enmeshes itself within the grammar of political speech.
If, as we know, what’s audible is tied to the social, or that which is of and in the social world, then to be a form of (hearing) human being, becomes the form of human being. In a word, the particular collapses into the general. Under such logics, to be human is defined as one that audibly hears; Deafness, as a consequence, is rendered speechlessness.
Given the questions posed by speech, it’s necessary to address what it means to be heard. Consider first some intellectual historical resources, specifically the centrality of the question of political speech in the works of Black hearing Africana thinkers such as Marcus Garvey, Walter Rodney, Steve Biko, Claudia Jones, and Frantz Fanon (among others). Oriented by the epigraph from Marcus Garvey, the question that readily emerges becomes: Why is having a “political voice” so crucial in the reconstitution of the black subjective self, or what Garvey dubs, “the New Negro”? Why must voice accompany or even be antecedent to the economic question?
Hegemonic societal refusal to listen to Black political speech has been the subject of ongoing reflection in historical Black political thought, in which it is framed as nothing less than a war on Black political aspirations. If what fashions political relations is the commitment to resolve internal disputes through speech and language rather than through force and coercion, to be outside of the domain of speech, entails a lack of political standing.
Consider Martinican revolutionary psychiatrist Frantz Fanon’s diagnosis: “To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization” (Black Skin, White Masks, 1967: 08).
What ensues when the only subjects who are thought capable of assuming this weight are white? What becomes of the words and ideas and cultures of Black people?
The implications, drawing on Fanon, would be that in societies that impede the capacity of subordinated peoples carrying the weight of a civilization, Blacks could make sounds—unintelligible utterances—but neither be the source of their own full-fledged language nor proper custodians of the tongues of others. If there is a refusal to listen and to hear what is said, do the unheard—despite their use of signification—speak?
Consider Anna Julia Cooper’s reflections in the opening pages of A Voice from the South. She writes that Black voices are like “an infant crying in the night…and with no language—but a cry” (1988: I).
There is no doubt that Black people speak among each other. Included in this discussion is an effort to explore how one engages in political reason in a fundamentally antiblack Euromodern world or one committed to foreclosing the nature of political speech from non-hegemons. The implication is that for Afro-speech to emerge as such requires nothing less than decolonizing the terrain of politics.
Along these racialized lines, I submit that political speech instantiates whiteness within the Euro-modern domain. Euromodernity, I contend, racializes political expression such that Black embodied political speech lacks legitimacy within the political, as white approbation become the standard for presentation and participation.
The South African Steve Bantu Biko’s discourse on Black Consciousness challenges this ethic. “Black Consciousness” he says, “seeks to talk to the black man in a language that is his own.” That language is one where the Black legitimates his or her own subjectivity (I Write What I Like, 1987: 32).
Black political speech is a shedding of the skins of falsification: of white superiority and of black inferiority. Indeed, black chattel slavery suspends this Afro-existential register by reducing the human being to a work-thing, to fungible property. Propertied interests, under this score, had no articulable political valence, but instead expressed only the prevailing white political discourse. Black political speech disrupts this normative paradigm through claims to a radical freedom that allows for the reconstitution of a Black life-world, one envisioned and actualized through what Swiss French political philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau calls generality—the common good. It is, in a word, contending and renegotiating the existing social order for one that makes possible Black futurity. This is all to say Black existential articulations, at the level of an embodied meeting—through appearance and participation—account for being within a social world, the world of human relations. Its telos directs a forging of Black political life with, and for, Blacks.
No doubt, for politics to be a portal of epistemic openness, fully reflective of all implicated by it, political speech must remain an open and critical object of reflection. Put differently, if occluding speech makes it seemingly impossible for categories of people to emerge as political subjects, its narrowing narrows the political future itself. More specifically, I contend that speech itself needs to be reconceptualized, perhaps even decolonized, not as audibility but as a condition of, and for, intersubjectivity and reciprocal communicability. Engaging in political speech involves positioning one’s self, and assuming a role, in the constitution of a political world.
We have come to realize that the question of speech, or more pointedly, that of its recognition, has been given added salience in hegemonic pop-cultural imagination. Blockbuster films such as The Shape of Water (2017) and even, more recently, Sorry to Bother You (2018), explore the relation between speech and politics, wherein the protagonists endeavor on a quest of human flourishing. In moments of true triumph in the face of seemingly foreclosed options, protagonists locate and actualize their true voice—lived experience—often aided by interlocutors who would ensure, and allow for, shared communicability. In other words, political life flourishes whenever political speech is heard. The question of Black or Deaf speech, the former heard in Sorry to Bother You and the latter seen in The Shape of Water, requires not its displacement or its dissolution as some re-articulation of a cherished normative ideal (either as a whitened or an aural disembodiment) but simply requires its centering as that which is wholly human beyond mere physicality and thus deserving of humanistic engagement.
Scholars of Deaf communities describe their members, however, as residing on the periphery of political speech because their voices are seen rather than heard. The form of their communication renders their expression not only inaudible but also unheard.
While the majority of Blacks do engage in phonocentric speech, when they are seen as speakers, their illicit appearance in antiblack societies tends to eclipse the content of what they are saying. While their voices could be heard, they are not listened to.
In both cases, the relational account needed for speech fractures. It raises an important issue for at least political theory: the call to re-examine classic discussions of political speech through investigating both intellectual historical texts by Deaf and Black authors and how contemporary Deaf, Black, and Deaf Black communities articulate the relationship between expression and political life. In so doing, we could begin to address the lacunae of histories of colonialism and contemporary neocolonial power regimes in the Global South that frame black existential articulations through modalities of silencing.
Derefe Kimarley Chevannes is completing his doctorate in the fields of political theory and public law in the Department of Political Science at the University of Connecticut at Storrs. Chevannes’s interests center on issues of racial liberation, questions of freedom and unfreedom. His doctoral research focuses particularly on a renewed conception of political speech and how the communicative practices of black subjects contribute to an enriched understanding of the nature of speech, politics, political subjectivity, and political agency. His writings include his recently published article, “Creolizing Political Speech: Toward Black Existential Articulations,” in The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 40, no. 1 (2018): 5–15.
Announcements
September 2018
On September 5, 2018, Liverpool Hope University is hosting a conference titled “The Legacy of Fanon: Contemporary challenges to Racism and Oppression.” Click here for more information.
Awards
Tommy Curry has been chosen for an Emerging Scholar Award by Diverse Magazine. This award has previously been won by Jelani Cobb, Eddie Glaude, Ivory Toldson.
Tommy Curry’s The Man-Not won an American Book Award.
Black Male Studies has been picked up as a book series by Temple University Press.
