qui
parle

The use of the saying “Actions speak louder than words” renders problematic both political and legal judgments. With its often excruciating attention to language, law in particular insists on maintaining relations between speech and reality or between words and the truths that they promise in the action of speaking. In the context of President Trump’s repudiation of words, claims that actions speak louder than words threaten the possibilities of law, insofar as law relies on language.

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This article uses the writings of Erving Goffman, M. M. Bakhtin, and Edward Sapir to pose some questions about what is happening when spoken language is produced. In particular, it looks at certain complexities of the partial roles of “animator,” “author,” and “principal,” into which Goffman proposed breaking down the role of speaker. It suggests that implicit in Goffman’s essay “Footing” is the possibility that even the analytic roles of animator, author, and principal will not be fine-grained enough to capture what happens through language use. This possibility is then pursued through a look at three scenes from Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu in which the event of someone talking to themselves is represented and then analyzed, notably to reveal that it is not so easy to assume that the speech authored within any single mind-space is owned by the person associated with that mind.

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It’s our thirtieth anniversary here at Qui Parle. Wondering how to honor this milestone—in a year that gave more reason for outcry than celebration—we turned to our title as a guiding frame: who speaks? Formulated as a question in the first weeks of 2017, this was, most immediately, a turn to thinking about speech today, be it free, double, or squarely violent. At the same time, it was a self-referential move. Who speaks when Qui Parle speaks? From its beginnings, Qui Parle has been a deeply collective project, with an astoundingly rapid generational turnover, and to capture it in its broadest essence would prove nearly impossible. None of us currently on the board of editors has been around for more than five years, so in a sense, we approach this anniversary with something of a short-term memory. But perhaps these shortcomings are the best testament to pay to the future of this collectivity, that it might keep growing, expanding, giving voice. We decided to reach back in time, offering up the limits of our collective memory as the catalyst for reunion, and gathering past voices from across and throughout these thirty years to testify as they saw fit to the journal, to speech, or simply to use this occasion as a timely soapbox.

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Taking the checkpoint as anthropological site and as a symbol from which to analyze the relationship to time and communication, this article shows how Palestinian temporality is distorted. A detailed description of the temporality engendered in the spaces of the checkpoint—through spaces such as automated turnstiles, constricted corridors, and ever-increasing technologies of separation and surveillance—is combined with an analysis of the spheres of interaction and communication that are possible and impossible within these constrained, and often solitary, spaces. By explaining how time is an important parameter of communicative possibility as well as a situated power dynamic, this article argues that the checkpoint demonstrates Israel’s colonial practice of controlling and erasing Palestinian time. “Checkpoint time” is both the haunting experience inside the checkpoint and the shrinking time and space of Palestine that ultimately expresses the ontological and political insecurity faced by Palestinians.

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The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 unleashed a new wave of decolonization, and throughout the 1990s, the newly independent states spent a lot of time and effort articulating their visions of sovereignty. Unlike neighboring Lithuania, which could turn its brief experience of interwar independence into a paradigmatic model of the postcolonial and postsocialist state, Belarus had to produce its narratives of political independence from scratch. This essay looks closely at the so-called National Rebirth, a vibrant intellectual attempt to elaborate an anticolonial view of the Belarusian past and its postcolonial present, which took place in the 1990s. Framed in negative terms and expressed through gestures of rejection, the Rebirth emerged as a form of apophatic nationalism that envisioned nationhood through an extensive cartography of nonbelonging and self-erasure. Following the key figures of the Rebirth, this essay shows how instances of absence were persistently elaborated, classified, and transformed into genealogies and historiographies; how nothingness was mined as a source of inspiration; and how nonalignment became a strategic choice.

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Using a productive deployment of the double elegy, poets Lucille Clifton and June Jordan carve out a space of maternal retrieval to negotiate the loss of their creative yet stifled mothers. In doing so, both writers engender fury as a mechanism of propelled delineation, allowing them to explore the contours of their own artistic ambition, using their mothers as focal points. Embedded in this retrieval is the acknowledgment of suppressed agony both writers recognize as belonging to their mothers. “Furia” positions this acknowledgment at the center of the framework of literary production for Clifton and Jordan, as part of the way they privilege the creative world their mothers produced for them.

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Witness statement from Udhayasûriyan Kurmagati, age 47

By the time you notice it, it’s already been there a while. A weight added onto each thing. The fatigue of the legs, the irritation around the neck. And the lightest of sleep. I had to pant while opening a window to suspect it. And to admit it, I had to suffer a startling sweat while standing in line at a peddler’s handcart.

I step out of the line, careful not to brush up against anything, to keep my shirt or pants from coming into further contact with my drenched skin. I can feel fat, warm drops rolling down my temples and neck. A repugnant stream starts to flow down my spine. Symmetrically, sweat runs down to my belly button. I’m even sweating from the crown of my head. Its ridge marks out my watershed...

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Il lit sur mon lit

a phrase that came to me suddenly, in the middle of nowhere

—as I was reading.

 
That

Perhaps even   I am always in bed when reading

For
 

   regardless of where I am; or even, whenever I read, a he that is me but not I (moi, non je) is in bed . . .

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A review of Chambers-Letson, Joshua Takano, A Race So Different: Performance and Law in Asian America (New York: New York University Press, 2013), and Kim, Ju Yon, The Racial Mundane: Asian American Performance and the Embodied Everyday (New York: New York University Press, 2015).

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A review of Cramer, Katherine J., The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), and Gest, Justin, The New Minority: White Working Class Politics in an Age of Immigration and Inequality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).

Read now at Duke University Press