Take a walk at night. . . . Walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears.1
Hanna Al-Taher, Anna Younes: Who is silenced, who is heard, who is politically included and who is not, who gets cited and who does not, who is admitted into academic settings, and who is made to leave: all of that is political. . . . Silence can be understood as a structural feature of colonially constituted forms of communication.2
Sylvia Wynter: Rather than only voicing the “native” woman’s hitherto silenced voice we shall ask: What is the systemic function of her own silencing, both as women and, more totally, as “native” women?3 Of what mode of speech is that absence of speech both as women (masculinist discourse) and as “native” women (feminist discourse) as imperative function?
Audre Lorde: I am constantly asking you, what has your silence4 bought you within this arrangement?—Are you rich, are you happy, are you secure, are you well-to-do, are you comfortable? We have the illusion that if we perform as we are expected within this machine, we will be given sanction.
Tina M. Campt: Focusing on ways of reading different types of silence I have encountered in the testimony of Afro-Germans on the issue of race, I examine silences that are not so much moments of quiet or narrative pause; rather, reading silences as provocatively filled expressions, I engage them as a narrative phenomenon I call “loud silence.” Instead of seeing silences as a lack or a void, my analysis explores how they “speak,” what they in fact “say,” and how they often “race” rather than “erase”5 the life histories of my Afro-German narrators.
Note on Form
The following text, or, rather, collection of quotes from texts, is an attempt to bring five different authors into conversation with each other, whose writings, when read together, form compelling alliances. It is an effort to disrupt, if not reverse, the hierarchy between the major text and everything that—especially in academic writing circles—is considered supplementary, para-, or sub-text. In a rigorous academic tradition, quotations and footnotes are meant to support one’s own thoughts, invoke authority or endorsement through established thinkers, or attest to intellectual reference proficiency.
My first point of contact with an anti-rigorous citational practice was through reading Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project (1927–1940), an unfinished research project consisting of an extensive and eclectic collection of quotations ranging from philosophical-scholarly sources to literary and popular ones, tracing the rise of capitalism through the study of nineteenth-century Paris. Although the Arcades Project was probably intended to be published in its surviving form, this is speculative due to the author’s premature death while fleeing the Nazis in 1940. What it taught me, as a student at the art academy in Leipzig, was to embrace a practice of gleaning texts from all areas of life as interconnected knowledge carriers and to expand the idea of writing through this broader understanding of references or engagement with primary sources. However, this learning took place within the typical Eurocentric framework of critical theory, and it was only upon leaving the academy that I started to encounter a different, decolonial queer feminist lineage of thought, in which, as feminist and queer theorist Sara Ahmed has formulated, “citation is feminist memory. Citation is how we acknowledge our debt to those who came before; those who helped us find our way when the way was obscured because we deviated from the paths we were told to follow.” She writes this in her book Living A Feminist Life (2017) and shares her citation politics in the introduction: “In this book, I cite feminists of color who have contributed to the project of naming and dismantling the institutions of patriarchal whiteness.”6 Philosopher, essayist, and novelist Sylvia Wynter is one of those whom Ahmed cites, and to whom decolonial and feminist theory is indebted.
For this text, written during and after my participation in the Plot(ting) reading group, for which participants spent several months collectively reading Wynter’s work, I was interested in writing my reading as a movement, as a tracing of what moved me, and in this approach, to think across different writers and interweave their ideas by bringing them into conversation with each other, quite literally. I assembled quotes as if they were voices responding to each other in a room, while leaving my own writing in the margins, as someone witnessing this fabulated conversation from my own situatedness.
Note on Situatedness
One of the texts that is brought into conversation here is the academic paper “Lebensraum, geopolitics and race— Palestine as a feminist issue in German-speaking academia,” co-authored by researchers Hanna Al-Taher and Anna-Esther Younes (2023). They guided me toward Ahmed’s thoughts on citation practice by summarising: “Sara Ahmed describes citation as a ‘successful reproductive technology’ that reiterates the world around certain bodies and existing power structures, while excluding others from its educational physical and epistemic territory. Ahmed’s analysis and critique of exclusion thus mirrors physical elimination through scientific and institutional exclusion.”7
Everything I have read over the past two and a half years was through the lens of witnessing, from afar, an increasingly brutal genocide in Palestine; through witnessing acts of physical elimination live-streamed on our phones; and through witnessing how it is reflected, in Germany, by the scientific and institutional exclusion of knowledge (production) about Palestine, as well as the demonisation and criminalisation of those who publicly speak up against this genocidal war waged by Israel, primarily supplied by US and German weaponry. This is why the contribution that I initially intended to write didn’t materialise. It should have become a text around orality, a liminal space between music and language that can act as a source for unruly knowledges that are excluded from the Eurocentric conception of “history”—as anything that can provide, or produce, a material or written trace. Instead, I found myself thinking about the weaponisation of silence and how one must consider the suppression of orality, of speaking up, and of voicing dissent as a longstanding practice within the colonial tradition.
Since most of our reading group members where white and European, but above all because of my own confrontation with a collectively imposed silence in Germany about Israel’s crimes, and how this current silence connects to my ancestors’ silence and complicity in previous centuries regarding acts of genocide, I was drawn to reading Wynter’s work alongside introspective analyses of German and European forms of supremacy and systemic violence. Regarding Wynter, it is her essay “Beyond Miranda’s Meanings: Un/silencing the ‘Demonic Ground’ of Caliban’s ‘Woman’” (1990) that engages most deeply with the topic.
The two other writers I bring into conversation with Wynter are Tina Campt—with her groundbreaking oral history study of Black Germans experiencing the Nazi era, published as Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender, and Memory in the Third Reich (2005)—and Audre Lorde, whose stay as a professor and community organiser in West-Berlin allowed her to analyse and challenge the unacknowledged racism of postwar-generation white German feminists, published posthumously in Dream of Europe: Selected Seminars and Interviews 1984–1992 (2019) and in her preface to Showing our Colors: Afro-German Women Speak Out (1992).
While the works of Al-Taher and Younes, Campt, and Lorde reflect on silences and silencing within specific historical or contemporary contexts, Wynter takes a literary text, Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, as a foundational illustration of Western Europe’s rise to global hegemony, serving as a template to critique the absent presence of Indigenous people, specifically Indigenous women, in cultural productions. Their othering and obliteration are depicted in The Tempest through European “explorers” living on a remote island. In it, the character Caliban is the sole representation of “the native other,” and Indigenous women are entirely absent from the story, setting the focus on Caliban as monstrous and sub-human, who endangers the white woman character Miranda. Wynter theorises this as the basis for the formation of a secularised human order that legitimises occupation and oppression, enabling the colonial project that renders Indigenous communities as sub-human. In that sense, the story produces a new order in which men don’t rule primarily over women anymore, but “European white man” over “European white woman” over “native (Black) man” over “native (Black) woman.” This new order, as Wynter suggests, creates the “demonic ground,” the position of those who are erased from the humanist narration yet whose existence is foundational to western modernity. Wynter’s notion of unsilencing the “demonic ground” explores the revolutionary potential of challenging the binary, linear narration of modernity with its patriarchal and racist foundation.
Reading Al-Taher, Younes, Campt, and Lorde alongside Wynter’s essay “Beyond Miranda’s Meanings: Un/silencing the ‘Demonic Ground’ of Caliban’s ‘Woman’” reveals each of their different writing (or speaking) modes, but also allows us one to recognise a broader, collective decolonial feminist critique that threads through all of the texts.
Hanna Al-Taher, Anna Younes: Who is silenced, who is heard, who is politically included and who is not, who gets cited and who does not, who is admitted into academic settings,8 and who is made to leave: all of that is political. . . . Silence can be understood as a structural feature of colonially constituted forms of communication.9
Sylvia Wynter: Rather than only voicing the “native” woman’s hitherto silenced voice we shall ask: What is the systemic function of her own silencing, both as women and, more totally, as “native” women? Of what mode of speech is that absence of speech both as women (masculinist discourse) and as “native” women (feminist discourse)10 as imperative function?11
Audre Lorde: I am constantly asking you, what has your silence bought you within this arrangement?—Are you rich, are you happy, are you secure, are you well-to-do, are you comfortable? We have the illusion that if we perform as we are expected within this machine, we will be given sanction.12
Tina M. Campt: Focusing on ways of reading different types of silence I have encountered in the testimony of Afro-Germans on the issue of race, I examine silences that are not so much moments of quiet or narrative pause; rather, reading silences as provocatively filled expressions, I engage them as a narrative phenomenon I call “loud silence.” Instead of seeing silences as a lack or a void, my analysis explores how they “speak,” what they in fact “say,” and how they often “race” rather than “erase” the life histories of my Afro-German narrators.13
Hanna Al-Taher, Anna Younes: As analyzed by bell hooks, different forms of oppression reinforce each other: the silence and silencing around Palestine and Palestinians is thus consequential for feminist theorization at the same time that silence is pivotal for the functioning of colonialism and the maintenance of white Lebensraum.14 Epistemic oppression very often works through ‘silence’ and, broadly speaking, we made out different types of silence showing the personal and political apparent discomfort of German speaking audiences: there is silencing as a re-/action of voices that do speak and then there is silence as re/action to the voices that are deemed too ‘radical’ or as crossing the lines beyond ‘acceptable’ academic discourse.15
Sylvia Wynter: The essays [in Out of the Kumbla. Caribbean Women and Literature] are projected within the system of interference-making of the discourse of Feminism, at the level of the sub-text which both haunts and calls in question the presuppositions of the major text, the very attempt to redefine the term feminist with the qualifier “womanist,”16 expresses the paradoxical relation of Sameness and Difference which the writers of these essays, as members of the Caribbean women intelligentsia, bear to their Western European and Euroamerican peers.17
(Silence in the audience)18
Audre Lorde: . . . why aren’t you speaking? I am also afraid of the forces rising in Europe, in North America, here in Germany. This is why I speak of power, because the only thing that can turn the tide around is all of us acting out of our fear rather than turning away from it or being immobilized. There is nothing wrong with power, it is rather a question of how it is being used.19
Who is speaking?
Sylvia Wynter
Hanna Al-Taher and Anna Younes
Audre Lorde
Tina M. Campt
Sylvia Wynter: I want to argue in this After/Word20 [to Out of the Kumbla], from its projected “demonic ground”21 outside of our present governing system of meaning, or theory/ontology . . . that it is precisely the variable “race” which imposes upon these essays the contradictory dualism by which the writers both work within the “regime of truth” of the discourse of feminism at the same time as they make use of this still essentially Western discourse to point towards the epochal threshold of a new post-modern and post-Western mode of cognitive inquiry; one which goes beyond the limits of our present “human sciences,”22 to constitute itself as a new science of human “forms of life.”23
Tina M. Campt: The work [Other Germans. Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender, and Memory in the Third Reich] looks at how in the Third Reich, power worked through racialization and gendering to produce different forms of both docile and resistant subjects in ways that at times worked against the grain of and in contradiction to the regime’s aims. . . . The history of [Black Germans in the Third Reich] opens up alternative ways of conceiving of racial and gender formation and adds new levels of complexity to interpretations of race and gender in the historiography of German colonialism, the Holocaust, and National Socialism as well as for theorizing memory, oral history, and the African diaspora.24
Anna Younes, Hanna Al-Taher: In this article [Lebensraum . . . ], we discuss Palestine as a feminist issue in German-speaking academia. Within the limitations of the theoretical and methodological scope of this paper, we examine whether and how German colonialism that endeavored to ‘rule through science’ might continue to be manifested and operationalized in German-speaking academia and higher education.25
Tina M. Campt: Underlining the fact that despite its truncated colonial history, Germany depended as much as any other European nation on the distinction from non-European populations in the constitution of national identity.26
Sylvia Wynter: To put it in more directly political terms, the absence of Caliban’s woman [in Shakespeare’s The Tempest], is an absence which is functional to the new secularizing schema by which the peoples of Western Europe legitimated their global expansion as well as their expropriation and their marginalization of all the other population-groups of the globe, including, partially, some of their own national groupings.27
Tina M. Campt: Connecting the Nazi ideology of racial purity and public discourse on Black Germans to earlier discourses on Black Germans both within and beyond the boundaries of the German nation in the years preceding the establishment of the NS state plays a crucial role in explaining the power and efficacy of such discourses within the Third Reich. . . . What is most remarkable about the relationship between discussions about and discourse on Black Germans in the colonies following World War I and in the Third Reich is the discursive echoes that recurred in each context. These echoes of the dangerous specter posed by a Black German population link the very different historical events of each of these periods and demonstrate the resilience of the perceived threat of racial mixture.28 At the same time, these echoes show how the discourse of nation was and remains an inherently gendered and racialized discourse that relies on gender and race to incite and sustain its efficacy.29
Hanna Al-Taher, Anna Younes: Given the role of higher education in building and reproducing ‘the nation’, exclusions in academia reproduce exclusions in the ideological structures of the state and vice versa. The silencing of Palestinian knowledge in German-speaking institutions of higher learning hinges upon power and access, which is conditionally conferred and thus translates into an absence of institutional support and personal de-solidarization. . . . In one of the responses we received, for instance, a German-Palestinian scholar recounts his experience as a Political Science student in the early 2000s. In a lecture on Palestine, Israel, and terrorism he attempted to discuss the relevance and legitimacy of Palestinian armed struggle in the context of the class. Instead of a critical or controversial discussion of the topic at hand, he recalls that ‘everyone was against [him]’ and that his classmates accused him of being an anti-Semite. . . . The hostile reactions Palestinians often receive when speaking about Palestine lead to an absence of Palestinian knowledge in academic institutions.30
(Silence in the audience)
Audre Lorde: But if you have nothing to say, why are you still sitting here?
Audience: I didn’t fully understand what you mean by hyphenated people.
Audre Lorde: African-American, Afro-German, African-Dutch, Turkish-Dutch, Turkish-German.
Call from the audience: German-German!
Audre Lorde: But you don’t usually say that. You say, I am German. Most people expect me to say I am American but that is a gross simplification because, as it has been pointed out to me over and over again, I am U.S. American to begin with and African-American. That is a factor of who I am in the same way that multiple identities represent a factor for each of us who shares a double heritage, a double culture, a double life. The hyphenated people, we have a particular power as well as particular pains.31
Tina M. Campt: “The silence that surrounds the phrase ‘Auschwitz was the extermination camp’ is not a state of mind, it is a sign that something remains to be phrased which is not, something which is not determined.” [Here, philosopher and sociologist Jean-Francois] Lyotard describes silence as a sign of something left over in excess of or escaping representation, something that remains to be articulated, though not necessarily unspecified, unsaid, or unexpressed. Silence here is a gap or lack and at the same time functions as an excess of meaning.32
Audre Lorde: Too often, I have met an immobilizing national guilt in white German women which serves to keep them from acting upon what they profess to believe.33 Their energies, however well intentioned, are not being used, they are unavailable in the battles against racism, antisemitism, hetero-sexism, xenophobia. Because they seem unable to accept who they are, these women too often fail to examine and pursue the powers relative to their identity. They waste that power, or worse, turn it over to their enemies. Four decades after National Socialism, the question still lingers for many white German women: how can I draw strength from my roots when those roots are entwined in such a terrible history?34 That terror of self-scrutiny is sometimes disguised as an unbearable arrogance,35 impotent and wasteful. The words of these Black German women [in Showing Our Colors]36 document their rejection of despair, of blindness, of silence. Once an oppression is expressed, it can be successfully fought.37
Tina M. Campt: I focus on a very different question than that posed by many studies of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust: What happens when we view the Holocaust not through the history of anti-Semitism and the persecution of the Jews but through the ideology of racial purity? In this way, I emphasize how, in the service of racial purity, this regime produced the same subjects it regulated, administered, and indeed ultimately sought to destroy.38
Hanna Al-Taher, Anna Younes: Today, we come to find that German academia still needs to facilitate a much-needed discussion on the origins and continued attraction of ideas and practices based on racial purity as well as spatial inclusion and exclusion.39
(Silence)
Audre Lorde:
Are you getting tired of feeling?
Do you want to get up and stretch?
Do you want to get up and stretch?
Are you tired of feeling?40
Hanna Al-Taher, Anna Younes: Scholars of settler colonialism in Palestine, in particular Palestinian scholars, have long pointed out the intricate mechanisms of race and racism within modern colonial Zionist space-making and, in particular, land-and-nation-building claims based on white European identity-making. In relation to German land-and-space-politics, Zoé Samudzi notes for the genocide in Namibia41 as well as in Europe that the concept of Lebensraum, a space for a race, has been fundamental for shaping German (colonial) politics: “The logics for racial management in both German genocides are rooted in colonial claims to land-based sovereignty defined by bounded territorialisations of identity.”42 In Germany, these same territory-based claims, reminiscent of Lebensraum ideology, remit an engagement with Palestine that defines the latter through various and at times quite wondrous articulations of nationalist exceptionalism/-s, depending on political affiliations. Utterances range from claims that a topic like ‘Palestine’ or Palestinian freedom, ‘doesn’t belong to Germany’,43 or that it ‘can’t be articulated as such in Germany’ or that it needs to be phrased differently or in more palpable, ‘less political’ ways.44
Tina M. Campt: Like the category of gender, race is a category both lacking any essential meaning and overdetermined by the meanings attributed to it in society. These attributions (which have historically claimed the status of essential, biological, or natural attributes) lend race the semblance of excessive meaning. In this way, race often comes to overdetermine an individual’s meaning and status in society. By the same token, the representation of the Holocaust, both in narrative accounts and historical analyses, can be read as having a similar plurality of meanings because it is a phenomenon of race par excellence.45
Audre Lorde: I was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences.48 And it was the concern and caring of all those women which gave me strength and enabled me to scrutinize the essentials of my living.49
Sylvia Wynter: . . . a “native women” intelligentsia . . . has enabled the move, however preliminary, on to the “demonic” and now unsilencing trans-“isms” ground of Caliban’s woman. This terrain, when fully occupied, will be that of a new science of human discourse, of human “life” beyond the “master discourse” of our governing “privileged text,” and itssub/versions. Beyond Miranda’s meanings.50
Tabea Nixdorff is an artist, typographer and researcher currently based in Arnhem. Her artistic practice involves (self)publishing, writing, sound and language-based performances, collaborative learning and social gatherings. Often working with/in archives or libraries, Nixdorff’s works delve into micro-histories while touching upon broader themes such as omissions and distortions in historical narratives, embodied knowledges, queer belonging and a feminist poetics of error.