S0887536719000096jra 123..142


INDIGENIZING AND DECOLONIZING FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

Questions of Silence: On the Emancipatory Limits
of Voice and the Coloniality of Silence

Martina Ferrari

Department of Philosophy, University of Oregon, 211 Susan Campbell Hall, 1585 E 13th Ave, Eugene,
Oregon 97403
Corresponding author. Email: mferrar2@uoregon.edu

(Received 30 September 2018; revised 1 May 2019; accepted 6 May 2019)

Abstract
This article begins at a (historical) crossroads; it straddles the difficult ground between the
recent public outcry against sexual violence (a protest that, as championed by the #MeToo
movement, seeks to break the “culture of silence” surrounding sexual violence) and con-
cerns about the coloniality of voice made visible by the recent decolonial turn within fem-
inist theory (Ruiz 2006; Lugones 2007; Lugones 2010; Veronelli 2016). Wary of concepts
such as “visibility” or “transparency”—principles that continue to inform the call to “break
the silence” by “speaking up” central to Western liberatory movements—in this article,
I return to silence, laying the groundwork for the exploration of what a revised concept
of silence could mean for the development of practices of cross-cultural communication
that do not play into coloniality.

The Decolonial Turn is about making visible the invisible and analyzing the mech-
anisms that produce such invisibility or distorted visibility in light of a large stock
of ideas that must necessarily include the critical reflections of the “invisible”
people themselves.

—Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “On the Coloniality of Being”

We must, however, take a moratorium on naming too soon, if we manage to
penetrate there. There is no other way for you and me to penetrate there.

—Gayatri C. Spivak, in conversation with Jenny Sharp

In a New York Times article, American author and long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad
recounts her experiences of sexual assault, perpetrated in 1964 by her swimming coach,
who, it turned out, was a serial sexual predator (Nyad 2017). Like many testimonies before
and after hers, Nyad’s places great emphasis on finding one’s voice, on speaking up
vis-à-vis sexual violence as a means to regain power in the wake of shame and humiliation.
“We need to prepare coming generations to speak up in the moment, rather than being
coerced into years of mute helplessness,” she states. As the #MeToo campaign forefronts,
speaking up “takes something that women had long kept quiet about and transforms it
into a movement” aimed at revealing the pervasiveness and systemic nature of sexual
© by Hypatia, Inc. 2019

Hypatia (2020), 35, 123–142
doi:10.1017/hyp.2019.9

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5654-7396
mailto:mferrar2@uoregon.edu


violence while building solidarity through empathy (Gilbert 2017). In this vein, Nyad
concludes the article with a plea: “Tell your story. Let us never again be silenced.”

Testimonials like Nyad’s bring attention to the two interrelated assumptions operative
in much Western feminist theorizing about oppression and emancipation. First, they
affirm that coming to voice or speaking up about one’s own experience of, for example,
sexual violence is an empowering practice that breaks the silence to which harmful prac-
tices like sexual violence and the shame associated with it have relegated its victims.
Second, they attest that being silenced is “a punishment equal to the molestation”
(Nyad 2017); the silence induced by fear and shame associated with sexual violence within
a patriarchal culture further oppresses survivors. In this sense, Nyad’s testimonial brings
to focus the logic structuring emancipatory narratives according to which “voice” is asso-
ciated with empowerment and is juxtaposed to silence, which comes to be equated with
the silencing of oppression. As Aimee Carrillo Rowe and Sheena Malhotra point out in
the introduction to Silence, Feminism, Power, the binary logic of speech versus silence
and the almost commonsensical equation of silence with powerlessness and oppression
in the Western tradition from Aristotle to Audre Lorde presumes a political imperative:
for an individual or group to gain power and “to resist and transform the conditions
of their oppression,” they “must activate their voice” (Carillo Rowe and Malhotra 2013,
1, order of quotes rearranged). “Speaking up” and “breaking the silence” are thus
unequivocally appealed to as the imperatives necessary to counter displacement, oppres-
sion, and marginalization.1 After all, as Adrienne Rich puts it, “in a world where language
and naming are power, silence is oppression, is violence” (Rich 1979, 204).2

Given the harm entailed in these exclusions (the harm of being silenced) and the fact
that speaking up is lived as liberatory by many—as the aforementioned account indicates
—“speaking up” seems hard to argue against. And yet, I suggest, “voice” is too broad a
term; it is not nuanced enough to prevent its own deployment as an instrument of
oppression rather than liberation. In fact, when voice becomes the ubiquitous appeal of
liberatory movements, it abstracts from the concrete situations and lived experiences of
those who inhabit silences, transcending the concrete violences entailed by the normative
power of voice. Consider a memory from Ernesto Martínez’s childhood: His older cousin
Felipe, after having initiated sexual contact, grabs his throat, pushes him on the bed, and
repeatedly asks “¿Te gusta? ¿Te gusta?” (Martínez 2014, 239), all the while Martínez
remembers remaining still, silent. Within the dominant binary framework of voice versus
silence, silences like Martínez’s are eviscerated of their complexity and ambiguity, read as
instances of complacency or submission to oppression. In his silence, Martínez did not
comply with the “no te dejes” imperative (roughly translated as “don’t let them do that
to you” or “fight back”)—a demand that, similar to “speak up!,” has purchase on the sub-
jected, not the aggressors—and his silence or lack of struggle was read over and against
the positive, overtly explicit imperatives of voicing one’s dissent or physically rejecting
the aggression. Within this framework, his silence and passivity are read as indexing
oppression and, specifically, as failures or absences of sorts, as complacency. After all,
why would Martínez remain silent in the face of aggression?

Yet, Martínez remembers, there was more in his passivity and silence than silencing,
than either complacency or forced submission. He recalls living that silence as an
expression of what he calls “joto passivity,” that is, “the seeming nonresponsiveness
of queer Chicanos in the face of violence” (238), which, contra (colonial) common
sense, was also felt as resistant behavior; his silence was also a practice of “radical mean-
ing making” from which he could envision and bring about radically different gendered
practices of resistance like nonmisogynist and nonhomophobic ways of performing

124 Martina Ferrari



masculinity (239, 241). To be precise, Martínez states that his “joto passivity” was not a
liberatory solution that removed violence from his life. Nonetheless, it was an “embod-
ied negotiation” that enabled him to “account for the contradictions” of his situation,
and that reminded Martínez that, as a queer man of color, he was “not consumed by
violence” (239, 245).

Dwelling, for a moment longer, in Martínez’s experience, more precisely, in the mis-
hearing or misreading of his silence, raises the following questions: If it is the case that
silence, as Martínez indicates, can be lived differently than as the mark of exclusion
from the subject position, inferiority, or oppression, why is Martínez’s embodied
response immediately read as submission? What are the structures and operations of
the dominant logic such that inhabiting Martínez’s silence otherwise is foreclosed?
And what would make reading and/or inhabiting Martínez’s silences otherwise
possible? Informed by Martínez’s experience, in this article I seek to make visible the
mechanisms that make invisible the depth and complexity of the phenomenon of
silence—what I refer to as deep silence—within a colonial context.3

The case for deep silence is, at least in part, a case for the limits of voice as a liberatory
concept. In the first section of this article, I draw from recent decolonial literature to
problematize the uncritical appeal to voice as emancipatory, an appeal that continues
to guide much of feminist theorizing reaching well beyond academia. (It suffices to
think of the recent public outcry about racial and sexual violence, in which the
#MeToo and #TimesUp campaigns are loud examples of movements that express the
necessity to “speak up” about and “break the culture of silence” surrounding one’s
own experience of racialized, sexualized, and gendered violence).4 By bringing into dia-
logue Jacques Derrida with decolonial insights from the modern/colonial research project
(MC henceforth), I seek to make explicit the ways in which the onto-epistemology repro-
duced by coloniality is, in fact, a racialized metaphysics of presence within which logos
and the field of presence are exclusive domains of the colonizer. Specifically, I suggest
that uncritical appeals to “speak up” or “come to voice” foreclose questions about the
normativity of voice, ultimately upholding modern categories of thought and being (logo-
centrism, to be precise) that reify the oppressive colonial apparatus they seek to resist.

In section II, I develop and problematize what I call the coloniality of silence, that is,
operations of power that eviscerate deep silences of their depth and complexity, flatten-
ing them to a transparent, mono-dimensional phenomenon indexing ontological
absence—what Frantz Fanon calls the “zone of non-being” (Fanon 2012, xii)—and epi-
stemic non-sense. This analytical tool, I argue, reveals that the evisceration of silence is
not accidental to coloniality. Rather, the specific historical formation of coloniality relies
upon and actively promotes the flattening of deep silence for its perpetration and legit-
imization—an operation of flattening that is actively concealed through the naturaliza-
tion of epistemic and ontological inferiority. The apprehension of the complexity and
multiplicity of deep silence and its being an inherent component of sense, thinking,
and being would undermine the epistemic, ontological, and temporal presuppositions
of coloniality.

I. The Coloniality of Voice

Initially informed by Derrida’s powerful critique of “voice” as the appeal of a metaphys-
ics of presence (Derrida 2011; 2015) and subsequently by postcolonial and decolonial
critiques of modernity, over the past two decades scholars have challenged the logocen-
trism of the West, bringing attention to the dangers of advancing liberatory discourses

Hypatia 125



not rooted in and attentive to the cultural specificity of the phenomenon one strives to
account for. Building on the Subaltern Studies Group, scholars like Trinh Minh-ha,
Gayatri Spivak, Cheryl Glenn, and Krista Ratcliffe have suggested that the role of aca-
demic left scholars (but also of those who hold power and public access to voice) is to
“learn to listen and to decode subaltern inscriptions” (Carrillo Rowe and Malhotra
2013, 8; see Trinh 1989; Spivak 1999; Glenn 2004; and Ratcliffe 2006).5 While acknowl-
edging that silence “has been a tool of marginalization and exclusion,” the contributors
to Silence, Feminism, Power, for instance, strive to “free silence from domination’s grip”
(Keating 2013, 32, 33), reclaiming it as a powerful site of resistance that allows “the free-
dom of not having to exist constantly in reaction to what is said” (Carrillo Rowe and
Malhotra 2013, 2).6

Steeped in this tradition, this section strives to make visible and problematize the
assumption operative within liberal discourse that voice (logos broadly construed) is
key to emancipation, alerting us to the emancipatory limits of voice and shifting the
conversation toward deep silence. Specifically, I show how appeals to dialogical commu-
nication reify, by uncritically deploying logocentric tools such as “voice” as means of
liberation, oppressive colonial power structures that have predicated the exclusion
and oppression of those same people who seek emancipation through voice. I contend
that “voice” remains a vehicle of Eurocentric colonization because, within a colonial
context, voice—and, in turn, presence/being—is limited to the voice of the
Eurocentered subject of modernity.

On Coloniality and the Normativity of Voice

The first step toward understanding the ways in which uncritical appeals to voice reify
colonial structures is to take a step back—or, better yet, outward—to contextualize the
current critique of voice within the bounds of the specific historical formation of col-
oniality. Thinking through voice in light of coloniality raises important questions
about the normativity of voice that would otherwise be foreclosed. In fact, coloniality
is such that the rejoinder to Spivak’s infamous question, “can the subaltern speak?”
(Spivak 1999), is no: Within a colonial context, “speech” requires conformity to
Eurocentric standards that exclude subaltern communicative practices and being. As
such, the demand to speak places the subaltern in an untenable position. Were the sub-
altern to speak in their native languages, their speech (and their demands for normative
treatment) would lack uptake. But were they to speak in a way that was intelligible to the
colonizer, they would, on the one hand, subscribe to and be rewritten by a conceptual
and linguistic framework that inscribes their culture, language, and being as inferior,
while also, on the other hand, sacrificing their cultural specificity. As Trinh puts it in
Woman, Native, Other, this constitutes a “double mischief”:

unspoken and unable to speak, woman in exile with herself. Stolen language will
always remain that other’s language. Say it obliquely, use trickery, cheat, or fake,
for if I tell you now what I would like to hear myself tell you, I will miss it.
Words thoroughly invested with realities that turn out to be
not-quite-not-yet-mines are radically deceptive. Whenever I try my best to say,
I never fail to utter the wrong words; I weasel, telling you “hen” when I mean
something close to “duck.” (Trinh 1989, 20)

As this passage makes concrete, by deploying the language of the colonizer, subalterns
would cease being subalterns because the dominant group would not be hearing the

126 Martina Ferrari



subaltern in its idiosyncrasies, but, rather, a mere reflection of its own message and
image. “Stolen language will always remain that other’s language.”

Note that this no should not be taken to suggest (as critics too often have taken it to
indicate) a communicative or political paralysis. Rather, the no points to a fundamental
paradox at the heart of intelligibility. (As we will see in what follows, the paradox arises
when the desideratum of intelligibility is epistemic transparency). Given the seeming
impossibility of making sense of subaltern experiences without assimilating or distort-
ing their differences into familiar meanings, how are we to approach these differences?
Can this difference be addressed by engaging in dialogical exchanges that seek to min-
imize the incommensurability by providing as much meaning as possible into the plus
or translatable side of the exchange? Or are these communicative barriers the outcome
of historically and geographically specific patterns of power that displace the racialized
and colonized “other” from the subject position and locus of enunciation?

Decolonial thinker Gabriela Veronelli seems to think the latter, arguing that voice
and, more broadly, dialogical exchanges play into what she calls “the coloniality of lan-
guage and speech” (CLS henceforth) (Veronelli 2016, 408). Veronelli defines CLS as the
process of racialization of the colonized as communicative agents that began in the
sixteenth century, whereby the colonized are reduced to nonhuman status and their
language and ways of knowing are dismissed as expressions of their natural inferiority.
That is, by presenting the colonized as incapable of expressing themselves rationally,
their putative inferiority is naturalized discursively (409). Thus, CLS forecloses the pos-
sibility of any dialogical relationship between colonized and colonizers (but also
between colonized subjects) by erecting what are perceived as “natural barriers” to intel-
ligibility and communication; that is, coloniality vacates the colonized’s speech of the
possibility of being heard by making the colonized’s modalities of communication
and existence invisible to the colonizers. Pivotal to CLS is the joint operation of the
two axes of power, “coloniality of power” and “modernity,” structuring and sustaining
what Aníbal Quijano calls the “Eurocentered capitalist colonial/modern world power”
(Quijano 2000, 218). Attending to these patterns of power reveals as naïve any abstract
appeal to voice as liberatory and points to the imbrication of coloniality and voice, more
precisely, to how coloniality undermines the conditions of possibility of emancipatory
dialogues.7

According to Quijano, the axis of the “coloniality of power” refers to that “specific
basic element of the new pattern of world power that was based on the idea of ‘race’ and
in the ‘racial’ social classification of world population” (218). The invention and deploy-
ment of the category of “race” from the sixteenth century onward are pivotal in refram-
ing the discourse surrounding the inferiority of the non-European “other” from one
tied to conquest, war, and domination to one that casts inferiority as natural and ahis-
torical. Thus presented, “race” and racial discourse come to legitimize the domination
of the “Indians,” “Blacks,” and “Mestizos” by the “Spanish” and “Portuguese” (all of
which are newly produced social historical identities) on natural grounds (216). Take
the distribution of gender identity, for instance. As María Lugones points out, racial dis-
crimination regulated the ascription of gendered identities, distinguishing between
“women” and “females” and extending the status of women so described in the West
only to white women, while understanding colonized females “to be animals … in
the deep sense of ‘without gender,’ sexually marked as female, but without the charac-
teristics of femininity” (Lugones 2007, 202–03). Even when colonized females were
turned from animals into similes of bourgeois white women, “there was no extension
of the status of white women to colonized women” (203).

Hypatia 127



The second axis of power, “modernity,” refers to the systematic elaboration, carried
out by modern, Western Europe, of a new intersubjective universe based on a new
knowledge perspective compatible with the cognitive needs of capitalism (Quijano
2000, 221). This knowledge perspective is labeled as “rational” and conforms to strict
epistemic criteria such as neutrality, objective validity, and transparency (Collins
2000, 274).8 The cognitive needs of capitalism include the carving up, quantifying,
and measuring of what is knowable so as to exert control over resources, others, and
reality for the sake of commerce and exchange. Although Eurocentered, this way of
knowing was/is imposed upon the capitalist world as the only valid rationality and as
emblematic of the progress of modernity.

Importantly, the axes of power instituted through and instituting of “coloniality” not
only outlive formal colonialism, remaining integrated in the succeeding social orders,
but also are constitutive of modern identity, of the modern ethos. In “Purity,
Impurity, and Separation,” Lugones describes this modern subject as the outcome of
a fiction, of an abstraction from the ambiguity and multiplicity constitutive of concrete
subjects and realities aimed at exerting control and imparting order upon that mestizaje.
That is, this modern subject deploys a logic of purity that prunes, eliminates, forbids,
and purges; it frames complex realities in the fictional terms of a unified reality and
a unified subject that can be split-separated, that is “internally separable, divisible
into what makes it one and the remainder” (Lugones 2003, 128). This modern subject
is one-dimensional and occupies an ahistorical and acultural “vantage point from which
unified wholes, totalities, can be captured” (128). Not surprisingly, internally split-
separated into “sense/emotion/reason,” “reason, including its normative aspect, is the
unified subject” (129).

Attending to the joint operations of these axes of power reveals, as the guiding logic
of coloniality and CLS in particular, an epistemic production that, by demanding con-
formity to purportedly universal (but in fact modern and Eurocentered) epistemic stan-
dards, relies upon and produces at least a double erasure. First, it erases the colonized’s
communicative practices and knowledge-validation processes, which come to be
regarded as primitive and lacking the sophistication, clarity, and accuracy necessary
to produce knowledge. Not only, as women of color feminists have argued, is uptake
differentially distributed across gender, ethnic, and racial lines (think, for example, of
the differential treatment received by Anita Hill’s testimony compared to that of
Christine Blasey-Ford); as Spivak’s paradox highlights, coloniality is such that to be
heard entails expressing oneself in a manner that conforms to the epistemic model
of the Eurocentered, capitalist modern/colonial world power, that is, in a rational
and dispassionate manner; it requires being a split-separated subject who does not per-
ceive richly. Because indigenous peoples do not conform to purportedly universal epi-
stemic criteria, “the colonizers perceived indigenous peoples in speaking their tongues
as doing less than being able to express knowledge” (Veronelli 2015, 113). For instance,
as Trinh observes, non-Western languages like those of Taoism and Zen that are “per-
fectly clear but rife with paradox” do not qualify as clear, persuasive, or correct, for
“paradox is ‘illogical’ and ‘nonsensical’ to many Westerns” (Trinh 1989, 16).
Expressive modes that, analogously to these, do not “prune, eliminate, forbid, purge,
purify” (17) are regarded as “simple communication,” a form of communication that
conveys more than denotative meaning, but less than dialogical rational communica-
tion, and that is an inherently less valorized form of expressivity than are
Eurocentric languages (Veronelli 2015, 118–19).9

128 Martina Ferrari



As Collins details in Black Feminist Thought, the distortion or exclusion from what
counts as proper communication or knowledge of nonnormatively Eurocentered expe-
riences has characterized the lives of US Black women, who have relied on alternative
expressive forms like music, literature, and daily conversations as sites to develop self-
definitions as well as produce and validate knowledge (Collins 2000, 270). Take, for
instance, the erasure of the 2006 founder of “Me Too” Tarana Burke from the
#MeToo movement when it first took off over a decade later in 2017. As Burke observes
in a 2018 Vibe interview with J’na Jefferson, women of color—who, statistically, experi-
ence higher rates of rape and sexual assault than white women—are not only less likely to
report, but their stories have not been granted nearly as much public attention as the tes-
timonies of white women. Reflecting on her own experience with “Me Too,” Burke asks,
“Why isn’t it valid when we talk about it?,” thereby raising questions about 1) how race
affects the epistemic authority of the survivor (but also of who qualifies as a survivor in
the first place), and 2) of the extent to which credibility and correctness of an utterance is
afforded by demanding conformity to grammatical and syntactic rules, key words, or
technical terms. In this vein, Burke asks, “Is [“Me Too”] only valid if CNN talks about
it?” (Jefferson and Burke 2018).10

The two axes perform a second (perhaps more insidious) erasure: this epistemic pro-
duction conceals its own structural complicity in the reification of a system that casts
the “other” as inferior. The move whereby the in-fact-European epistemic standards/
knowledge-validation processes that norm what counts as knowledge and language is
presented as universal naturalizes racialized differences, making the processes that pro-
duce these differences, that is, coloniality, invisible. Because the colonized deploy com-
municative practices that do not conform to the putatively universal model of rational
expression, they are perceived as naturally inferior. In turn, such a naturalization makes
invisible the mechanisms that produce the colonized as inferior. It is in this sense that,
as Veronelli argues, CLS is more than the colonization of a language as a system of
meaning, but a “process of dehumanization through racialization at the level of commu-
nication” (Veronelli 2016, 408).

In light of these considerations, we begin to see how the two axes of “coloniality” and
“modernity” work in unison within CLS to discursively dehumanize the colonized and
racialized “other,” ultimately undermining the conditions of possibility for emancipa-
tory exchanges. On the one hand, “modernity” naturalizes the colonial difference by
upholding putatively universal and rational epistemic standards, a move that casts all
those who do not conform to those criteria as naturally inferior or incapable of rational
and clear linguistic communication. On the other hand, “coloniality” distributes this
natural epistemic inferiority along racial lines; those who are epistemically inferior
(putatively) by nature are those who are racialized as other. The outcome is that the
epistemic criteria upheld by “modernity” are such that the natural inferiority of the
non-European, racialized “other” is constantly reified through its own conceptual and
linguistic schemas, which include reason, dialogical communication, and voice—in
sum, logos.

Thinking through questions of voice in the context of coloniality reveals that, while
coloniality displaces the colonized from the subject position by producing them as inca-
pable of intelligible expression, a simple appeal to voice as emancipatory does not suf-
fice; within a colonial context, the voice that can be/is heard by the majority community
is normed by coloniality and, thus, is exclusively the voice of the colonizers. This is to
say that the abstract imperative to speak up—the imperative according to which speak-
ing up is the way to address oppression and violence irrespective of the nuances of a

Hypatia 129



given, concrete situation—skates over the important question of whose voice norms that
imperative. In sum, uncritical appeals to voice do not allow the critical distance (which
not so paradoxically can actually be obtained by remaining grounded in concrete lived
experiences of those who speak up) necessary to question the (colonial) world in which
language and naming are power, and “voice” a colonial tool. Quite the contrary—they
play into existing power structures by deploying tools, like language, naming, and voice,
that are normed by and effect the norming of coloniality, giving voice exclusively to the
modern, split-separated, and rational lover of purity.

At this juncture, it is telling to briefly turn to Linda Martín Alcoff’s Rape and
Resistance, in which she puts forward a new epistemology of rape grounded in a
more nuanced understanding of experiences of sexual violation as a way to reform
and transform the condition of survivors’ reception. Although she deems survivors’
voices the critical force behind social revolution (on her account, speaking up is neces-
sary, for example, insofar as it often is the catalyst for changing definitions, which affect
the possibility of understanding and resisting sexual violation), Alcoff warns about the
ways in which their testimonies echo in the public domain: testimonies are not only
inscribed in frames that regulate the “criteria by which claims are interpreted and
judged, what may be spoken of, what can come up for judgment itself” (Alcoff 2018,
10); they are also taken up in a domain in which the dominant understanding of sexual
violation lacks complexity and nuance. To avoid the dismissal of “voices expressing
complexity … as simply in denial, or as liars, or as deluded about their experience,”
and “to make survivor speech as politically effective as possible,” it is paramount to
complicate the understanding of the nature and dynamics of experiences of sexual vio-
lation to reshape the discourses norming the utterability and reception of such experi-
ences (12, 17). In spite of her nuanced analysis of the challenges associated with public
speaking, and her shift from individual responsibility to “speak up” toward transform-
ing the discursive structures regulating uptake, Alcoff’s advocacy for voice as the priv-
ileged emancipatory tool prevents her from making visible the imbrication of
coloniality and voice, or the ways in which the discursive formation of coloniality
undermines the conditions of possibility of emancipatory dialogues, ultimately reiterat-
ing those discursive schemas that frame and dismiss subaltern resistances.11

Uncritical appeals to voice thus contribute to making invisible non-Western
“voices”: because the voices that can be/are heard are those that conform to the episte-
mic norms of coloniality, those that do not conform are not recognized as communi-
cative, rational subjects and are dismissed as nonexistent and nonsensical.

The claim that coloniality undermines the conditions of possibility of dialogical
emancipation should not be taken to suggest that the colonized do not have a
“voice” or cannot speak. Such an understanding would play into the same binary
and totalizing logic this article seeks to destabilize. The colonized do have a “voice”
and appeal to knowledge-validation processes, but to hear these “voices” and epistemic
processes one needs to attune oneself to the echoes reverberating through and fissuring
the putative silences to which they are relegated by colonial logic. Take the institution-
alized sexual violation of black women under conditions of segregation, for instance. As
Alcoff points out, “even if there is an official silence in the majority community con-
cerning a given issue … this does not mean the silence is total”; black communities
knew what happened even before the NAACP chapters began taking cases to the courts
(Alcoff 2018, 38). “Even if these were not echoable in dominant discursive practices,”
the necessity for safety and knowledge-sharing led to the development of methods of
communication not repressed by Eurocentered norms (38).

130 Martina Ferrari



At this juncture, the MC affirmation, echoed by Veronelli, that “there is no way out
of coloniality from within modern categories of thought” (Veronelli 2016, 405) accrues
weight and clarity. The dire implications of these two erasures are not just epistemolog-
ical, but ontological; they entail a world, a metaphysics, in which the only resisting sub-
jects and modes of resistance that are recognized as existing, as sensical, are those
normed by coloniality. In other words, the implications of the concealed normativity
of voice are that those who are not heard/seen protesting—those who do not resist in
a manner consonant with the standards prescribed by coloniality—risk being dismissed
as either invalid or as facilitating their own oppression, as Martínez’s narrative reminds
us. In this sense, coloniality constructs an ontology that strives to eliminate any “resi-
due” of resistance: Along with non-Western “voices,” non-Western modes of insubor-
dination, sense-making, and, as the following discussion will show, being, are also
erased; the modes of insubordination, sense-making, and being made available are
those sanctioned by colonial logic, modes that, even in their insubordination, play
into coloniality by appealing to its concepts, structures, and logic.

In what follows, I unpack this last claim, suggesting that the abstract and uncritical
appeal to voice is complicit in the reproduction and reification of colonial epistemic and
ontological norms—what I call a racialized metaphysics of presence—that make visible
only modes of existence that are normed by coloniality, ultimately preemptively fore-
closing ways of reading and writing reality that uphold its complexity and ambiguity.

A Racialized Metaphysics of Presence

The second step toward understanding the ways uncritical appeals to voice reify colonial
structures is by grappling with the ontological implications of coloniality. Although the
theories discussed thus far focus predominantly on the epistemic ramifications of col-
oniality, this historical formation affects the “general understanding of being”
(Maldonado-Torres 2007, 242). First, the casting of colonized people as lacking ratio-
nality has the effect of depriving them, in Fanon’s words, of “ontological resistance,”
that is, of being. We saw this implication operative in the preceding discussion of
CLS, especially in the discursive dehumanization of the colonial other through raciali-
zation. But this first ontological erasure relies on a second, conceptual one. The colo-
nial/modern world power produces a racialized, dualistic conceptual framework or,
more precisely, a metaphysics that limits “the sense of being within the field of pres-
ence” (Derrida 2015, 24)—what Derrida calls a metaphysics of presence—whereby
this field of presence appears as the exclusive domain of the colonizer. In this sense,
I speak of a racialized metaphysics of presence. As we will see, this racialized metaphys-
ics of presence of being versus nonbeing, sense versus non-sense, light versus darkness,
strives to reduce the multiplicity, complexity, and ambiguity of (the) being (of nonmo-
dern subjects) to nothingness, to nonbeing.12 Not only, then, are the colonized made
invisible, reduced to nothingness through an exclusion from presence, but their being
is conceived through a framework inadequate to express their complexity and
ambiguity.

Take the first ontological implication of the colonial/modern world power that “the
absent of rationality is articulated in modernity with the idea of the absence of Being in
others” (Maldonado-Torres 2007, 252–53). In “The Coloniality of Being,” Nelson
Maldonado-Torres argues that the Cartesian ego cogito and its instrumental rationality
operate according to an attitude of permanent suspicion—what he calls the “racist/
imperial Manichean misanthropic skepticism” (245)—regarding the humanity of

Hypatia 131



colonized and racialized “others,” which can be summarized thus: “‘I think (others do
not think, or do not think properly), therefore I am (others are-not, lack being, should
not exist or are dispensable)’” (252). The tacit assumption guiding this logic marks the
colonial and racial subjects as dispensable; it puts them under the murderous and rapist
sight of the modern/colonial ego cogito.

Fanon’s reflections in Black Skin, White Masks and Gloria Anzaldúa’s testimony in
Borderlands/La Frontera are a powerful testament to this insight. Because the colonial
world is structured by colonial conceptual and linguistic frameworks grounded in mis-
anthropic skepticism—here it suffices to think of Fanon’s powerful description of his
(linguistic) encounter with the young white boy’s shout, “Look a Negro!”—“in the
eyes of the white man … the black man [sic] has no ontological resistance” (Fanon
2012, 90, order rearranged). Coloniality is such that the colonized appears, in the
eyes of the dominant group, not as a subject, that is, someone who has a culture, history,
and language, but as nothingness. As Anzaldúa’s narrative conveys, when interpreted
through colonial schemas, the complex, ambiguous, and paradoxical dimensions of
her being are taken to be an indication of her inferiority, of her non-sense. “I have
so internalized the borderlands conflict that sometimes I feel like one cancels out the
other and we are zero, nothing, no one. A veces no soy nada ni nada” (Anzaldúa
2007, 85), as she recounts. In a colonial context, ontology collapses into Manicheism
whereby the colonized are reduced to the dark side of the light-dark equation; they
are reduced to “a zone of non-being, a sterile and arid region, an incline stripped
bare of every essential from which a genuine new departure can emerge” (Fanon
2012, xii).

This Manichean ontology, however, does more than relegate the damné to the dark
side of the dichotomy; it deprives the colonized of a (nondualistic and nonlogocentric)
“metaphysics” of their own capable of accommodating the complexity of (their) being
(Fanon 2012, 90). Given the colonial episteme at his disposal, Fanon painfully realizes
that the answer to the question, “Where do I fit in?” (93), is that he does not fit in. He
has arrived “too late!,” so to speak, in a world that chains him, through coloniality and
the working of the two axes of power, to pre-existing images, concepts, and significa-
tions that have been fabricated without him and that relegate him to nothingness. As
the anguish permeating the chapter titled “The Lived Experience of the Black Man”
indicates, Fanon’s existential struggle to make sense of his being through the colonial
episteme leads him to one untenable position after another, ultimately culminating in
a cry (an affective response that should not be overlooked and to which I will return).
Similarly, we witness Anzaldúa struggle with conceptual and linguistic frameworks too
narrow and transparent to make sense of the opaque, complex, ambiguous dimensions
of her being, which are thus taken to be an indication of her inferiority, of her non-
sense. In this sense, to use Maldonado-Torres’s words, coloniality is a “metaphysical
catastrophe” (Maldonado-Torres 2016, 11–16). But how is this metaphysical catastro-
phe possible?

As previously noted, the epistemic criteria upheld by sixteenth-century Europe
served the cognitive needs of capitalism in which knowledge had to be conducive to
the carving up, quantifying, and measuring of (external) reality for the sake of com-
merce and exchange. That is, the sixteenth century witnessed the proliferation of
explicit discourses on method for the attainment of knowledge that resulted in not
only the production of “objective,” “universal,” “dispassionate” knowledge, but also
the sedimentation of ontological assumptions about what being should be like such
that it could be known through the above-mentioned method. As it turned out, the

132 Martina Ferrari



being that could be known through these epistemic criteria is limited to the field of
presence. As Derrida suggests (following Heidegger) in Ousia and Grammē, Western
metaphysics treats “the meaning of Being as parousia or ousia, which signifies, in
ontologico-Temporal terms, ‘presence’ (Anwesenheit)” (Derrida 1982, 31). This
means that it grounds determinations of the meaning of being in that which is—a
move that produces, at once, being as “what is present,” as immediate self-presence
or “pure auto-affection” (Derrida 2015, 106) over and against nonbeing, which
comes to be understood as “what is not present,” “not-there,” in sum, what cannot
be known through immediate presence to consciousness.

Not to be overlooked is the crucial role that voice plays in delineating the field of
presence: logos, Derrida tells us, is immediately present to consciousness only through
voice because voice—or, as he specifies in Voice and Phenomenon, internal monologue
(Derrida 2011, 35–37)—is (presumably) heard without external mediation. The West’s
logocentrism is the mark of a metaphysics of presence that understands speech and
voice as the immediate conduit of (the) meaning (of being). The ontological implication
of the axis of “modernity,” then, is the reification of a Parmenidean ontology of being
and nonbeing, presence and absence, light and darkness, whereby speech and voice are
the mark of purity, presence, transparency, and the fullness of being, whereas its other,
silence, is the mark of impurity, absence, and lack of being.

The work done in this article, however, should alert us against taking concepts like
“voice” abstractly and toward the necessity of attending to the power differentials at play
when dealing with questions of coloniality and ontology, bringing to bear consider-
ations about the differential and racialized distribution of being onto ones about the
metaphysics of presence. In fact, Maldonado-Torres’s and Fanon’s remarks indicate
that the field of presence is demarcated by the consciousness or, more precisely, the
voice of the colonizer. Within a colonial context, the “voice” that stands for presence
is not just any voice; the only voice that has uptake and is recognized as Language is
that of the colonizer—a speech act that conforms to the cognitive needs of capitalism.
The exclusion of the colonized’s communicative functions as language, then, does not
merely entail the erasure of non-Eurocentric modes of communication, but also the rel-
egation of racialized bodies/being to absence. In this sense, the metaphysics of presence
is a racialized metaphysics of presence whereby the field of presence is the exclusive
domain of the colonizer.

In light of these considerations, I hear, in the “cries of those whose humanity is being
denied” (Maldonado-Torres 2007, 257), the reminder to call into question not only the
colonizing power of voice permeating uncritical appeals to “speak up!,” but also a world
in which naming and language are power. That is, envisioning decolonial avenues of
feminist insubordination cannot stop at questioning the conditions of possibility of
reception of subaltern voices (as Alcoff among others does in Rape and Resistance);
it must venture beyond voice, recuperating the generative power of deep silence.
Importantly, I contend, the latter requires displacing the mechanisms that reduce the
multiplicity and opacity of deep silence to oppressive silencing, to epistemic and onto-
logical absence, and uphold deep silence as a fecund source of radical meaning-making,
of a sense and a metaphysics that accommodate the mestizaje and complexity of (the)
being (of the colonized). In this vein, it is time to repropose the questions raised at the
outset of this article: Why is Martínez’s silent response read as an absence of sorts?
What are the structures and motives such that silence is immediately perceived and
conceived as silencing? There are instances of silence that are, in fact, oppressive, but

Hypatia 133



why can’t we find, within a colonial matrix, a way to think or live silence otherwise than
as oppression? And what does this evisceration tell us about coloniality?

II. The Coloniality of Silence

I concluded the preceding section by suggesting that a racialized metaphysics of pres-
ence is such that the colonizers’ is the only voice that is heard and stands for presence,
which means that being (here limited to the field of presence) is the exclusive domain of
the colonizer. Because the “voice,” “speech,” or “languages” of the colonized do not
conform to Eurocentered, capitalist, colonial/modern criteria, they are not heard or rec-
ognized as such. This entails the reduction of the colonized’s voice to nonsense (or, as
Veronelli calls it, “simple communication”) and their being to a “zone of non-being.”
However, a racialized metaphysics of presence that excludes communicative forms
and beings that are not normed by coloniality has implications for the phenomenon
of silence itself. Within a colonial context, embodied responses that are not normed
by colonial voice, like Martínez’s “joto passivity,” fall through the cracks of a racialized
metaphysics of presence; rather than being taken in their strangeness and allowed to
displace usual expectations, what cannot be heard by and from the colonizer’s stand-
point is marked as unintelligible and nonsensical, as nothingness—as mere or total
silence. Experiences of silences that can be negotiations of reality and fecund sources
of radical meaning-making are vacated of their depth and thickness, of sense and
being. That is, deep silences are eviscerated of their multiplicity and the phenomenon
of silence comes to stand for the opposite of voice and sense, as that which ought to be
broken or overcome to convey meaning or to gain recognition. As such, silence is sig-
nified negatively, as the mark of ontological nonbeing and epistemic non-sense or the
index of oppression and displacement from the (purportedly universal but in fact colo-
nial) subject position. I call the mechanisms that make invisible the depth of the phe-
nomenon of silence the coloniality of silence.13 The outcome is that silence is perceived,
at best, as a phenomenon irrelevant to meaning-making, to communication, and to the
disclosure of being, and, at worst, as an obstacle to be overcome if meaning, commu-
nication, and the disclosure of being ought to be attained. But what does it mean for
silence to be excluded from the domain of presence, being, and sense? This is also to
ask, what does it mean, for sense, to be limited to (the) presence (of the colonizer’s
voice)?

In “Cultural Alterity,” Ofelia Schutte takes up these questions by thinking through
the paradox inherent to cross-cultural communication already discussed in relation
to Spivak’s “can the subaltern speak?” Differently from Spivak, who deals with the
untenable predicament of the subaltern from the standpoint of speech/voice, the lynch-
pin of Schutte’s argument is that there is a “lack of complete translatability” (Schutte
1998, 69, n. 4), a silence of sorts, between linguistic-cultural symbolic systems but,
more broadly, within sense itself. As she puts it, “[t]here is always a residue of meaning
that will not be reached in cross-cultural endeavors, a residue sufficiently important to
point to what I shall refer to more abstractly as a principle of (cross-cultural) incom-
mensurability” (56). Although colonial/modern epistemic theories of meaning may
acknowledge this incommensurability and the fact that it may impede a perfect map-
ping of culturally different discourses, they regard incommensurability as “irrelevant
to philosophical meaning and knowledge, and thus irrelevant to the operations of rea-
son” (61). This is because they understand incommensurability quantitatively rather
than qualitatively; incommensurability is approached as the residue of an equation

134 Martina Ferrari



whose balancing entails communicative transparency. Recall Lugones’s lover of purity:
The colonial/modern subject operates under the assumption that the sense of a pur-
portedly unified reality and subject can be grasped in its totality through reason
alone, that is, by occupying an acultural and ahistorical vantage point. Lovers of purity
split-separate reality, sanitizing it from anything “impure” like affective residues and
(seeming) incompossibles. That is, they operate under the assumption that a culture’s,
language’s, or subject’s meaning is perfectly available and accessible to another, that
these meanings can be made available through dialogical exchanges, and that the col-
onized can deploy colonial meanings and frameworks to express their experiences of
oppression and resistance—assumptions that, as we have seen, make invisible the col-
onized’s communicative practices and being. In a word, the lover of purity casts sense
and reality as transparent, thus skating over the “silence,” “opacity,” or “excess of mean-
ing” inherent in sense and reality.

This assumption regarding the nature of incommensurability/silence and sense
informs strategies devised to reduce barriers to cross-cultural communication.
Because sense is assumed to be transparent, cross-cultural incomprehensions or mis-
communications are taken to be direct results of a lack of information. The solution
to this “lack,” then, is taken to be a “more”: comprehension and communication, this
logic goes, are achieved by providing more complete, detailed, accurate information.
Although these strategies, in some instances, may help reduce the incomprehensions
or miscommunications, they mischaracterize the nature of incommensurability/silence
and sense, which, in turn, leads them to mischaracterize the nature of the problem.
Because they overlook the fact that “silence” or “excess of meaning” is inherent to
sense and “the process of reasoning itself” (Schutte 1998, 61), they understand the prob-
lem of miscommunication to be a quantitative issue—addressed by providing more of
the same kind of input—rather than a qualitative issue—the nature of sense and silence.
In other words, they overlook the deep silence of sense and the sense of deep silence.
This discussion of Eurocentered theories of meaning points to the fact that the colonial,
logocentric apparatus is not equipped to approach, dwell in, harken to occurrences of
deep silence, or let deep silence open onto other dimensions of being and sense that
are prior to and cannot be accounted for by a discourse that operates at the level of con-
ceptual thinking. Instead, epistemically, silence is framed as the lack or insufficiency of
more complete, accurate, detailed sense/information that could be provided by the col-
onized via speaking up and coming to voice. In sum, what is made invisible, by virtue of
its not being recognized or acknowledged, is the sense of deep silence.

Although the coloniality of silence strives to eviscerate deep silences, occurrences of
silence can be rich phenomena that operate according to decolonial logics. Martínez’s
testimony points to the ways in which deep silence holds the promise of making sense
of his situation otherwise than via colonial epistemic and ontological frameworks.
Martínez shows us that his “joto passivity” opens onto practices of “radical meaning
making” from which one can envision and bring about radically different gendered
practices like nonmisogynist and nonhomophobic ways of practicing masculinity
(Martínez 2014, 239). Or take the description of Marita Bonner, a celebrated writer
of the Harlem renaissance, of black consciousness in “On Being Young, Woman, and
Colored.” Departing from narratives that equate black consciousness with resistance
and the public, in her writing—conveyed both through her stylistic choices and con-
tent—Bonner emphasizes the voluptuousness of interiority and the strength of
surrender:

Hypatia 135



So—being a woman—you can wait.

You must sit quietly without a chip. Not sodden—and weighted as if your feet were
cast in the iron of your soul. Not wasting strength in enervating gestures as if two
hundred years of bonds and whips had really tricked you into nervous uncertainty.

But quiet; quiet. Like Buddha—who brown like I am—sat entirely at ease, entirely
sure of himself; motionless and knowing, a thousand years before that white man
knew there was so very much difference between feet and hands.

Motionless on the outside. But inside?
Silent.
Still … “Perhaps Buddha is a woman.” (Bonner, 7–8, cited in Quashie 2012, 34)

Quiet, stillness, and silence function in Bonner’s text as the catalyst for novel under-
standings of black identity that do not stand over and against the world, its expectations,
and its limited imagination. Silence here figures as a location of insight and meaning; in
this context, silence is not oppression, “not performative, not a withholding,” but
instead, Kevin Quashie claims in The Sovereignty of Quiet, “is an expressiveness that
is not entirely legible in a discourse of publicness” (Quashie 2012, 35).14 So, again,
why are these “silent” responses read as negative phenomena, as absence, passivity,
or nonresponsiveness?

By emphasizing the why, I bring attention to the nonaccidental nature of this reading
of reality, to the fact that the casting of deep silence as mere silence, that is, the coloniality
of silence, is necessary to coloniality. In fact, because what is deemed as mere silence
would open not only onto decolonial epistemic practices, but also onto a metaphysics
or zone of being that is neither full presence nor nothing, taking seriously those experi-
ences as deep silence would challenge usual assumptions central to coloniality itself. In
this sense, the evisceration of deep silence to absence (and to oppressive silencing) is
not accidental to coloniality, but, rather, a key process in the successful reification and
legitimization of coloniality. By reducing deep silences to the expression of natural infe-
riority or the exclusion from the subject position, the coloniality of silence makes invisible
modes of knowing, communicating, and being that are otherwise than modernity and
that, by virtue of their existence, threaten to fissure the naturalization of coloniality so
essential for its own justification. After all, the existence of decolonial modes of being
and knowing challenges the operative assumption of coloniality, calling into question
the “objective” and “transparent” qualities of Eurocentered, capitalist, modern/colonial
epistemic and ontological schemas—features that are presented as natural and universal.
To use language resonant with the previous section’s discussion, the racialized metaphys-
ics of presence eliminates any “impurity” or in-between, reducing them to nonbeing.

Significantly, because this in-between, this “herida abierta” (Anzaldúa 2007, 25), is a
place where the colonized live in a way that “exceeds” the modern epistemic and onto-
logical categories of coloniality, and, as such, offers “new critical horizons … within
hegemonic cosmologies” (Mignolo 2000, xxvi), in addition to the concealment of the
production of the difference between colonized and colonizer, the naturalization of
the colonial difference makes invisible this concrete locus fecund with new horizons.15

In this way, it preemptively dismisses on natural grounds as nonbeing or non-sense the
locus from which one could contest the assumptions of coloniality. This erasure is cru-
cial to coloniality in that it conceals the colonial difference as a generative source of
subversion.16

136 Martina Ferrari



III. Toward the Rereading and Rewriting of Deep Silence

As Lugones insightfully reminds us, decoloniality requires resisting the epistemological
habit of erasing (Lugones 2010, 754). What would it mean, then, not to dismiss the res-
idue or excess of meaning—the deep silence—of experiences like Martínez’s, Fanon’s, or
Anzaldúa’s? And if sense is not transparent, and if silence is not a lack, how are we to
make sense of the operations of silence in sense? How can experiences like theirs help us
make sense of the silence of sense and the sense of silence? Consider Fanon’s and
Anzaldúa’s aforementioned experiences of not fitting within colonial norms and expec-
tations. Although painful and disorienting, their experiences are not a defeat.
Upholding the dismemberment brought about by a life in the “herida abierta,” and
dwelling in these experiences of displacement from the language and the world of
the colonizer not only reveals the fictitious nature of the logic regulating this exclusion;
it can also be a fertile “ground” for the rereading and rewriting of reality, for the dis-
placement of usual meanings and expectations.17 Although this colonial logic strives
to reduce the damné and their multiplicity, opacity, and ambiguity to the dark side
of the dichotomy (to nothingness), their material existence contextualizes such reduc-
tion. As noted, Fanon’s existential struggle to make sense of his being culminates in a
cry: “I tried to get up but the eviscerated silence surged toward me with paralyzed
wings. Not responsible for my acts, at the crossroads between Nothingness and
Infinity, I began to weep” (Fanon 2012, 119). We witness Fanon rejecting the split-
separation imposed upon him by the logic of purity, a separation that would dismiss
the emotional residue that makes up his difference, his being, reducing him to nothing-
ness and the depth of silence to an “eviscerated” silence. Importantly, however, his
rejection comes in the form of weeping, which suggests another way of being in and
making sense of the world—an embodied, affectively charged ethos.

We find a more robust exploration of this affective sense-making in Anzaldúa’s writ-
ings. We discover, in the remarks from Borderlands/La Frontera previously cited, that,
although at times, when she gives in to colonial logic, Anzaldúa feels like she is a “zero,
nothing, no one. A veces no soy nada ni nada,” her existence contests the logic of purity:
“Pero hasta cuando no lo soy, lo soy” (Anzaldúa 2007, 85). The being that she “is” does
not conform to the usual expectation or familiar meanings; she “is” neither the pleni-
tude of full being nor the absence of nonbeing: “But even when I am not, I am” (85, my
translation). Similarly to Fanon, when upholding her being and speaking from her expe-
rience, from that purportedly eviscerated silence or nothingness to which colonial logic
strives to reduce her, Anzaldúa is able to challenge the fiction of the racialized meta-
physics of presence; “when not copping out,” she lets her deep silence speak for itself,
shaping a metaphysics of her own whereby she “is” a multiplicity: Mexican, mestiza,
Chicana, Tejana, and so much more.

Testimonies like these point us to an alternative to understanding incommensurabil-
ity as well as sense and silence in terms of transparency; they ask that we resist the ten-
dency to subsume the other’s opacity into familiar schemas or meanings, dwelling
instead in that unsettling experience akin to when “another’s speech, or some aspect
of it, resonates in me as a kind of strangeness, a kind of displacement of the usual expec-
tation” (Schutte 1998, 56). Withstanding this strange experience, this deep silence, is key
to hearing the other in her difference, for new sense to emerge.

Although this article has followed decolonial thinkers in challenging the authorial
and colonial power of voice, it moves beyond them, inviting the reframing of
Spivak’s question not in terms of voice—can the subaltern speak?—but in terms of

Hypatia 137



deep silence—can the deep silence of the colonized be generative of decolonial sense-
making? In other words—by attending to colonial patterns of power, this article has
revealed the imbrication of coloniality and voice, thus problematizing as naïve any
abstract appeal to voice as emancipatory. Although survivors’ voices and testimonies
are a critical force behind social change, as the #MeToo movement continues to pro-
mote voice as the ubiquitous means of emancipation, it is paramount to contend
with the fact that social change is not achieved by making the platform more inclusive
to include the voices of those who have traditionally been marginalized because of their
social positionality. As I have argued in this article, the matter at hand is rather to ques-
tion the structural conditions and assumptions undergirding the movement, that is, its
appeal to voice. In fact, assuming that voice is a ubiquitous means of emancipation, that
speaking up is beyond race, gender, or class tacitly undermines the conditions of pos-
sibility of dialogical emancipation of those who do not conform to Eurocentered episte-
mic and ontological norms, ultimately reifying colonial formations whereby the other
and their communicative practices are cast as inferior. In this sense, so long as liberatory
movements championing the imperative to “speak up” do not critically call into ques-
tion the guiding assumption norming what counts as reliable and correct speech, the
testimonies of survivors whose expressive means do not conform to logical, clear, or
persuasive speech will be reduced to nothingness, to “total silence” (Alcoff 2018, 38).
As Spivak suggests in an interview with Jenny Sharp, perhaps “we must … take a mor-
atorium on naming too soon, if we manage to penetrate there. There is no other way for
you and me to penetrate there” (Sharp and Spivak 2003, 619). Perhaps, the openings to
decolonial sense and the key to “rereading and rewriting of reality” (Anzaldúa 2015, 40)
are not found exclusively in or through conceptual thinking or dialogical exchanges but
via affective, sensuous harkenings to experiences of deep silence.

Notes
1 Aimee Carrillo Rowe’s and Sheena Malhotra’s Silence, Feminism, Power is a collection dedicated to cri-
tiquing, from a feminist standpoint, the dominant conception of silence that casts it as exclusively oppres-
sive and recovering it as also a space of possibilities (Carrillo Rowe and Malhotra 2013). Over the decades,
there have been attempts to reclaim silence outside of philosophy. Communication studies scholar Robin
Clair, for instance, follows the path paved by Max Picard, arguing that silence and voice should not be
thought as “bifurcated concepts,” but as “self-contained opposites” (Clair 1998, xiii; see also Picard
1952). In Organizing Silence and “Imposed Silence and the Story of the Warramunga Woman,” Clair inves-
tigates strategies to organize silence such that it becomes possible to hear the voices of those who have been
silenced (Clair 1998; 2013). Following a deconstructive approach, Clair investigates the “silencing aspects of
communication and the expressive aspects of silence” (Clair 1998, 5) as a way of moving beyond the bifur-
cation of voice and silence. Notably, Clair argues that aesthetics “provides a means for silence to escape and
become expression, and an aesthetic perspective allows us to see it … an aesthetic perspective provides a
way of exploring how silence is expressed” (40).

It should be noted that the history of silence and feminism is a complex one. By the mid-1980s, third-
wave feminist analyses of oppression complicated the concept of silence. Silence was not exclusively a mark
of patriarchal oppression, theorists such as Audre Lorde or María Lugones insisted (Lorde 1978/2007;
Lugones and Spelman 1983), but also a phenomenon endemic to feminist discourse. Attending to what
came to be known—thanks to Kimberlé Crenshaw’s groundbreaking essay “Mapping the Margins”
(Crenshaw 1991)—as the intersectionality of oppression entailed calling into question the racialization of
silence, that is, the white assumption that silence is co-extensive with the feminine. On the one hand, inter-
sectional analyses of oppression revealed that “silence” (as well as “passivity” or “fragility”) characterizes
and normalizes the experience of (most) WASP women, not of all women (Collins 2000, 14). In the col-
lective imaginary and their communal spaces like the family and the church, Black women do speak and
often are framed as rowdy and loud (Lorde 1978/2007; hooks 1989/2015). In this sense, the reduction of

138 Martina Ferrari



oppressive, silencing practices to the silencing of patriarchal oppression performed a double erasure, that is,
the erasure of women of color whose experiences are characterized by the intersection of multiple axes of
oppression, but also the making invisible of white feminism’s complicity in the oppression of women of
color. In fact, so long as silence is understood to be coextensive with the feminine, the normative force
of this assumption is that women of color, whose existence and experiences do not conform with this silent,
(white) feminine norm, are made invisible within (white) feminist discourse. To be clear—by taking the
experience of white women as indicative of the feminine, second-wave feminism foreclosed the recognition
of its participation in the marginalization and exclusion of women of color. On the other hand, intersec-
tional analyses of oppression revealed the limitations of the emancipatory strategy of effecting the transition
from silence to voice; at stake in women of color’s emancipation was the production of speech that would
compel listeners, speech that would be heard—as Lorde and hooks argued. Yet, although the phenomenon
of silence accrued complexity, coming to index not just literal silence, but also the “speech” of women of
color (speech that would not conform to white, patriarchal standards of “proper” speech and, as such,
lacked uptake), third-wave feminism left unchallenged the guiding political imperative of “breaking the
silence” by “coming to voice,” continuing to espouse a conception of silence coextensive with oppression,
equating it to “starvation” (Moraga 2015, 24) or a locus of peril and vulnerability (“your silence will not
protect you” [Lorde 1978/2007, 41]).
2 Given the spatial constraints of this article, I cannot thoroughly engage with critiques of ableist and nor-
mative modes of communication such as (narrow forms of) voice put forth by disability studies. A fruitful
starting point for those engagements is Christine Ashby’s “Whose ‘Voice’ Is It Anyway?,” in which she
takes up the difficult challenge of “giving voice” to those individuals who experience disability—in her
case, those who do not use speech as the primary mode of expression—while also calling into question nar-
row conceptualizations of voice. “Ensur[ing] a space within a critical, qualitative framework for the inclu-
sion of ‘voices’ that do not speak” entailed problematizing the use of the term “voice,” which, as she
observes, too often goes unchallenged, as well as the assumptions behind the desire to give voice. Ashby
recognizes the importance of silence as a means for the individual to “give voice to his experience and pro-
vide an opportunity to talk back to the technologies of power that oppress. … perhaps not speaking, or not
typing, is also a way to subvert systems of power that limit and marginalize” (Ashby 2011).
3 It was brought to my attention by one of the anonymous reviewers that my choice of the terminology
deep silence may inadvertently reify problematic dichotomies such as surface/depth that have been central
to the colonial/modern project. As Marlon B. Ross points out in his critique of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s
epistemological theory of the closet in “Beyond the Closet as a Raceless Paradigm,” the surface/depth
dichotomy is at play in the delineation of sexual modernity whereby homosexuality is marked by claustro-
philia, that is, the value promoted by the White, intellectual establishment of deep, hidden or “closeted
meaning” (Ross 2005, 139). “Primitives, savages, the poor, and those uneducated in the long history of epis-
temology are not normally represented as epistemological subjects, partly because they do not have the lux-
ury of composing the kind of voluminous texts that bear the weight of such deep buried—and thus closed/
closeted up—intellectual dilemmas begging for painstakingly close readings” (139). I thank the reviewer for
bringing attention to the possible limitations of “depth” as a concept. Aware of the imbrication of the
binary surface/depth with the reification of Eurocentered norms, in the context of this article “deep” is
deployed to effect an epistemological suspension of the familiar, and problematize the widespread and
monovalent conceptions of silence as oppression. Given the decolonial lineage within which this work is
situated, the deployment of “depth” as a qualifier for the generative and fecund silence at stake in this article
is also meant to evoke the work of “making visible the invisible,” to borrow Maldonado-Torres’s words,
“and analyzing the mechanisms that produce such invisibility or distorted visibility” (Maldonado-Torres
2007, 262). “Depth” indexes the recuperation of such invisibility.
4 American writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit’s latest book, The Mother of All Questions, is a
prime example of how the phenomenon of silence is conceived and treated in mainstream white feminist
circles. The author discusses how feminists have long used silence as a metaphor for oppression and makes
the case for how liberation is “always in part a storytelling process: breaking stories, breaking silences, mak-
ing new stories. A free person tells her own story. A valued person lives in a society in which her story has a
place” (Solnit 2017, 15). Silence, she claims, is what condemns “people to suffer without recourse, what
allows hypocrisies and lies to grow and flourish, crimes to go unpunished. If our voices are essential aspects
of our humanity, to be rendered voiceless is to be dehumanized or excluded from one’s humanity” (18). As
I acknowledge in the body of the article, although there are oppressive forms of silencing, the equation of

Hypatia 139



silence as oppression and voice or storytelling as emancipation forecloses critical analyses of the violence
entailed by the normativity of voice. What to do with the co-opting of principles like “having your voice
heard” or “breaking the silence” for the fight against justice and equality through fake news, for instance?
Or appeals to “free speech” as means to advance alt-right messages? Or the logically analogous instance
whereby French actress Catherine Deneuve wrote an open letter, published in Le Monde, in which she
undermines the #MeToo campaign, contending that men should be “free to hit on” women? And what
about instances in which silence is needed for self-care and self-preservation? So again, though public tes-
timony may be a practice that, in certain contexts and circumstances, is called for, the ubiquitous imper-
ative to speak up and its association with agency and humanity upheld by most liberatory narratives entails
harms of its own that ought to be brought to light to avoid complicity with structural oppression.
5 It should be noted that, as Carrillo Rowe and Malhotra point out, although the works of Glenn and
Ratcliffe “productively bring silence more fully into focus by challenging the epistemological conditions
of its annihilation, they remain bound to Western and modernist assumptions about completeness of
understanding” (Carrillo Rowe and Malhotra 2013, 6).
6 To this end, in “Resistant Silences,” Christine Keating works to recuperate silence from its equation with
absence, distinguishing between enforced silences, which are oppressive and should be resisted, from three
kinds of silences that serve as technologies of resistance: “silent refusal, silent witness, and deliberative
silence” (Keating 2013, 25). In “Legacies of Silences,” Malhotra speaks of her struggle with the “Western
compulsion for voice and speaking … speak your position; take a stand; speak, speak, speak!” (Carrillo
Rowe and Malhotra 2013, 220)—a commitment that problematically equates agency with voice.
Reflecting on her experience as a survivor of ovarian cancer, Malhotra reframes silence as a “space of unset-
tling possibilities” (223) whereby words, ideals, thoughts, and explorations do not have to follow structured
and linear regimens, but can hold “more than one thing at once” (225). She argues that agency is a pre-
requisite for silence to be empowering, a space for possibilities—“silence without any agency is oppressive,
particularly given the material conditions of the lives in question” (224).
7 As Veronelli argues, although these conditions can be granted at the abstract level (she criticizes MC
exponents Enrique Dussel and Walter Mignolo for taking for granted the existence of these dialogical con-
ditions of possibility by operating at the level of “ideas, of epistemic and political projects” (Veronelli 2016,
408)), these conditions of possibility do not necessarily exist at the level of the concrete lives and experi-
ences of colonial subjects.
8 As Collins points out, knowledge claims must satisfy criteria upheld by the context in which they are
presented. Ultimately, “because this enterprise is controlled by elite White men, knowledge validation pro-
cesses reflect this group’s interests” (Collins 2000, 271).
9 This is also true for vernacular expressions, which are not acquired through formal institutions and
thereby are not “repressed by either grammatical rules, technical terms, or key words” (Trinh 1989, 16).
10 Burke created “Me Too” in 2006 as a MySpace page to promote conversations and build community
among women of color who were survivors.
11 As Sadie Graham points out in an October 2018 Broadly article, the ubiquity of reporting promoted by
and characteristic of #MeToo fostered the belief that this journalistic form of reporting would “dismantle
the oligo-patriarchy and save us all.” Yet many of the same problems persist. Not only “other kind of
reporting—to human resources, to police—are so aggressively unsustainable for survivors” (Graham
2018); closer scrutiny shows how this platform amplifies the voices of white, middle-class women to the
exclusion of others.
12 In In-Between, Mariana Ortega argues that multiplicity and mestizaje are characteristic of all beings, not
only of those who, because of their material, geopolitical existence, are forced to “travel” between cultural
and linguistic norms and worlds of meaning (Ortega 2016).
13 Furthermore, as the discussion on the coloniality of voice indicated, the coloniality of silence inscribes
silence as the natural expression of racialized and colonized subjects. The joint operations of the axes of
“modernity” and “coloniality” are such that the racialized “other” is cast as naturally epistemically and
ontologically inferior—as silent. Rather than being recognized as a colonial production, “silence as absence
and nonsense” comes to be understood as the natural domain of the colonized—as the expression of the
natural inability to fight back, the nonresponsiveness of queer Chicanos in the face of violence.
14 See Evelynn Hammonds’s treatment of a politics of articulation and a politics of silence in “Black (W)
holes” for a discussion of how the concept of silence figures in black women’s cultural work (Hammonds
1994)

140 Martina Ferrari



15 As Walter Mignolo affirms in the “Preface” to the 2012 edition of his earlier book, the root of the con-
cept of the “colonial difference” can be traced to Anzaldúa’s use of the Nahuatl term Nepantla, which she
also refers to as “herida abierta”—the open wound that is the lived space of the borderland/la frontera. This
lineage stresses the “physical as well as imaginary” (Mignolo 2000, xxv) place that is the colonial difference
and the traumatic as well as generative/transformative quality that it bears.
16 In other words, as a place whose materiality refuses disappearance and erasure, the colonial difference
threatens to undermine, in its resilience and concreteness, the colonial logic whereby “knowledge and aes-
thetic norms are … universally established by a transcendental subject” realizing instead that they are “uni-
versally established by historical subjects in diverse cultural centers” (Mignolo 2000, 5).
17 Although I speak of a ground here, this ground is a “lugar no lugar,” what Anzaldúa calls Nepantla,
“a Nahuatl word for an in-between space, el lugar entre medio. Napantla, palabra indígena: un concepto
que se refiere a un lugar no-lugar” (Anzaldúa 2015, 28).

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Martina Ferrari is a PhD candidate in philosophy at the University of Oregon specializing in twentieth-
century continental philosophy (especially phenomenology), feminist philosophy, and decolonial thought.
In her dissertation, titled “Decolonizing Silence,” she reexamines the question of silence and contends that,
approached from the phenomenological standpoint of concrete, lived experiences, silence can be more than
a simple absence of speech, sense, and being; it is revealed as a fecund locus for the renewal of sense.
Ferrari’s work has been published in Chiasmi International, Symposium, and the International Journal
of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics. Ferrari also co-edited with Bonnie Mann a volume on Simone de
Beauvoir, titled On ne naît pas femme: on le devient: The Life of a Sentence (Oxford University Press,
2017) and co-founded Puncta: Journal of Critical Phenomenology. (mferrar2@uoregon.edu)

Cite this article: Ferrari M (2020). Questions of Silence: On the Emancipatory Limits of Voice and the
Coloniality of Silence. Hypatia 35, 123–142. https://doi.org/10.1017/hyp.2019.9

142 Martina Ferrari

http://frantzfanonfoundation-fondationfrantzfanon.com/article2360.html
http://frantzfanonfoundation-fondationfrantzfanon.com/article2360.html
http://frantzfanonfoundation-fondationfrantzfanon.com/article2360.html
mailto:mferrar2@uoregon.edu
https://doi.org/10.1017/hyp.2019.9

	Questions of Silence: On the Emancipatory Limits of Voice and the Coloniality of Silence
	The Coloniality of Voice
	On Coloniality and the Normativity of Voice
	A Racialized Metaphysics of Presence

	II. The Coloniality of Silence
	III. Toward the Rereading and Rewriting of Deep Silence
	Notes
	References