Staging progressive dissensus and the politics of Black silence

In August 2015, Black Lives Matter activists Mara Willaford and Marissa Johnson interrupted a Seattle rally with a four-and-a-half-minute silent commemoration of Black teenager Michael Brown, preventing presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders from speaking. Using a Rancièrean political framework and a methodology of performance-inflected rhetorical criticism, I explore how this silent protest exemplifies what I call “voiced silence” and transfigures a tradition of tactical Black silence as both repression and resistance. 1 (2016): 4–24; Lisa Flores, “Towards an Insistent and Transformative Racial Rhetorical Criticism,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 15, no. 4 (2018): 349–57; Lisa Flores, “The Rhetorical ‘Realness’ of Race, or Why Critical Race Rhetoricians Need Performance Studies,” Text and Performance Quarterly 34, no. 1 (2014): 94–96.3 Michael Lechuga, “An Anticolonial Future: Reassembling the Way We Do Rhetoric,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 17, no. 4 (2020): 382.4 Rachel Hall, “Letting the Object of Study Lead: A Cultural Studies Ethic,” Text and Performance Quarterly 34, no. 1 (2014): 113.5 Joan Retallack, “Geometries of Attention,” Performance Research 4, no. 3 (1999): 77.6 Holloway Sparks, “Quarrelling with Rancière: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Democratic Disruption,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 49, no. 4 (2016): 420–37; Karen Zivi, “Politics is Hard Work: Performativity and the Preconditions of Intelligibility,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 49, no. 4 (2016): 438–58.7 Krista Ratcliffe, Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005), 17.8 Reconstruction based on various video and written accounts, especially raw footage from Seattle news stations: King 5 News, “Raw: Protesters Sanders Seattle rally,” King5.com, August 8, 2015; Kiro 7 News, “RAW VIDEO: Activists disrupt rally featuring Sen. Bernie Sanders,” YouTube.com, August 8, 2015.9 Robby Stern, “And here is my take on the events of August 8,” Real Change, October 7, 2015.10 Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 26–27.11 Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, trans. and ed. Steven Corcoran (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 77.12 Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 278.13 This simplicity of “reading” race onto bodies indicates—not a naïve reality to race—but how pervasive racializing perceptual practices are. Following Alexander Weheliye, I conceptualize race “not as a biological or cultural classification but as a set of socio-political processes that discipline humanity into full humans, not-quite-humans, and non-humans” and blackness as “a changing system of unequal power structures that apportion and delimit which humans can lay claim to full human status and which humans cannot.” Alexander Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 3–4.14 Glenn Mackin, “Black Lives Matter and the Concept of the Counterworld,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 49, no. 4 (2016): 459–81.15 Rancière, Dissensus, 45.16 Tamika Carey, “Necessary Adjustments: Black Women’s Rhetorical Impatience,” Rhetoric Review 39, no. 3 (2020): 270.17 Rosalind Brazel, “Rally for Social Security’s 80th and Medicare’s 50th Anniversaries,” Washington Community Action Network, June 18, 2015.18 While Eric Schickler suggests an affinity between the economic liberalism of New Deal Democrats and racial liberalism of early civil rights advocates, any mutual support is questionable given racial tensions, such as the role of early progressives in developing and maintaining Jim Crow documented by David Southern. See: Eric Schickler, “New Deal Liberalism and Racial Liberalism in the Mass Public, 1937–1968,” Perspectives on Politics 11, no. 1 (2013): 75–98; David Southern, The Progressive Era and Race: Reaction and Reform, 1900–1917 (Wheeling: Harlan Davidson, 2005).19 Howard A Droker, “Seattle Race Relations during the Second World War,” The Pacific Northwest Quarterly 67, no. 4 (1976): 163–74.20 Dana Frank, Purchasing Power: Consumer Organizing, Gender and the Seattle Labor Movement, 1919–1929 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).21 Alicia Garza, “A HerStory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement.” BlackLivesMatter.com.22 Julie Bosman and Joseph Goldstein, “Timeline for a Body: 4 Hours in the Middle of a Ferguson Street,” The New York Times, August 23, 2014.23 Robert Scott, “Rhetoric and Silence,” Western Journal of Communication 36, no. 3 (1972): 146–58.24 Bernard Dauenhauer, Silence: The Phenomenon and Its Ontological Significance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980); Frank Farmer, Saying and Silence: Listening to Composition with Bakhtin (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2001); Robin Patric Clair, Organizing Silence (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998); Cheryl Glen, Unspoken: A Rhetoric of Silence (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004); Fernando Poyatos, Nonverbal Communication Across Disciplines, Vol. II: Paralanguage, Kinesics, Silence, Personal and Environmental Interaction (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2002); J. Vernon Jensen, "Communicative Functions of Silence," ETC: A Review of General Semantics 30, no. 3 (1973): 249–57; Richard Johannesen, “The Functions of Silence: A Plea for Communication Research,” Western Speech 38, no. 1 (1974): 25–35; Thomas Bruneau, “Communicative Silences: Forms and Functions,” Journal of Communication 23, no. 1 (1973): 17–46.25 Barry Brummett, “Towards a theory of silence as a political strategy,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 66, no. 3 (1980): 289–303; Glen, Unspoken; Cheryl Glenn and Krista Ratcliffe, Silence and Listening as Rhetorical Arts (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2011).26 Dana Cloud, “The Null Persona: Race and the Rhetoric of Silence in the Uprising of ’34,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 2, no. 2 (1999): 178.27 Kennan Ferguson, “Silence: A Politics,” Silence and Listening as Rhetorical Arts, 114.28 Eric Watts, Hearing the Hurt: Rhetoric, Aesthetics, and Politics of the New Negro Movement (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012), 16.29 Eric Watts, “‘Voice’ and ‘Voicelessness’ in Rhetorical Studies,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 87, no. 2 (2001): 185.30 Hillery Glasby, “[ ]: National Day of Silence’s Rhetorical Silence as Performative Rhetorical Activism,” Liminalities 12, no. 3 (2016); Nicholas Paliewicz, “Making Sense of the People’s Climate March: Towards an Aesthetic Approach to the Rhetoric of Social Protest,” Western Journal of Communication 83, no. 1 (2019): 94–112.31 Kris Acheson, “Silence as Gesture: Rethinking the Nature of Communicative Silences,” Communication Theory 18, no. 4 (2008).32 Shaun May, “On Silence and Autism,” Performance Research 23, no. 4–5 (2018): 425–27.33 Audre Lorde, “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley: Crossing Press, 2007); Michelle Cliff, “Notes on Speechlessness,” Sinister Wisdom 5 (1978): 5–9; bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (New York: Routledge, 2014).34 Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 51; Katrina Thompson, Ring Shout, Wheel About: The Racial Politics of Music and Dance in North American Slavery (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014).35 Carrie Crenshaw, “Resisting Whiteness’ Rhetorical Silence,” Western Journal of Communication 61, no. 3 (1997): 253–78; Watts, Hearing.36 Harvey Young, Embodying Black Experience: Stillness, Critical Memory, and the Black Body (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010).37 Approaching silence as both communicatively meaningful and requiring listeners’ participation through reflection and meditation challenges Lisa Schwartz’s taxonomy, which divides silence into Harpocratic and Larundic types. Lisa Schwartz, “Understanding Silence: Meaning and Interpretation,” Performance Research 4, no. 3 (1999): 8–11.38 The durational moment of silence has recently been deployed by various social movements, including Emma Gonzalez's six-minute-and-twenty-second silence at the 2018 March for Our Lives rally and various eight-minute-and-forty-six-second silences following George Floyd’s murder, suggesting its efficacy for making perceptible what cannot be adequately expressed linguistically.39 Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi and Chana Teeger, “Silence and Collective Memory,” The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Sociology, ed. Wayne Brekhus and Gabe Ignatow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).40 Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 28.41 Charles Mudede, “The Bad Politics of the Black Lives Matter Protesters Who Interrupted Bernie Sanders,” The Stranger, August 12, 2015; Rich Smith, “Black Lives Matter Activists Interrupt Bernie Sanders at Social Security Rally,” The Stranger, August 8, 2015; the Twitter of Seattle-based journalist Sydney Brownstone.42 Jelani Cobb, “The Matter of Black Lives,” The New Yorker, March 14, 2016.43 Nina Lozano-Reich and Dana Cloud, “The Uncivil Tongue: Invitational Rhetoric and the Problem of Inequality,” Western Journal of Communication 73, no. 2 (2009): 224.44 Bettina Judd, “Sapphire as Praxis: Toward a Methodology of Anger,” Feminist Studies 45, no. 1 (2019): 188.45 Rancière, Dissensus, 61.46 bell hooks, “Representing Whiteness in the Black Imagination,” Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, et al. (New York: Routledge, 1992).47 Kristiana Báez and Ersula Ore, “The Moral Imperative of Race for Rhetorical Studies: On Civility and Walking-In-White in Academe,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 15, no. 4 (2018): 331–36.48 Conor Friedersdorf, “A Conversation About Black Lives Matter and Bernie Sanders,” The Atlantic, August 21, 2015

Aesthetics · Art · Political science · Politics · Silence · Sociology · Critical Race Theory in Education · Gender Studies · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society

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