This panel aims to explore the possibilities presented in immanent, paralinguistic expressions which evade or function parallel to and beyond the realm of structured grammar and logics of exchange. Edouard Glissant, in Caribbean Discourse, teaches us that in the beginning was not the word, but sound. He writes, “the spoken imposes on the slave its particular syntax. For Caribbean man, the word is First and foremost sound. Noise is essential to speech . . . Since speech was forbidden, slaves camouflaged the word under the provocative intensity of the scream.” From this, in In The Break, Fred Moten develops the shriek of Aunt Hester in Douglass’s slave narrative as an interruption in the subsuming process of European subjectivity. The enslaved as commodities, following Marx’s formulation, would be entered into a system of exchange by slavers, only intelligible as their exchange value. This, for Moten is as true for logos as it is for economy. Thus, the scream functions as a non-exchangeable expression interrupting this process, claiming the consent to not be a single being under racialized Enlightenment subjectivity. 

Gilles Deleuze writes in The Logic of Sensation of the scream as a paralinguistic expression. As Deleuze understands the realm of sensibility and emotion to stochastically precede and coincide with the possibilities constructed in the use of a language, he takes particular interest in modes of expression that can exceed the limitations of what is speakable. The Kantian common sense of the sovereign subject is merely a limiting ordinal assumption constructed in Enlightenment language. The screaming figures of Bacon’s paintings, for Deleuze, are thus not human figures, but dissembling figures of pure affect. It is this characteristic Deleuzian (and Foucauldian) critique of the sovereign subject that Spivak famously takes issue with. She argues instead that this location of liberation outside ‘representation’ and subject leads to “an essentialist, utopian politics”. She alerts us, that if anything, this leads to a privileging of the subject all over again. 

This panel thus seeks papers exploring the use of paralinguistic expressions such as silence, screaming, stammering, muttering, scoffing, and more in search of liberatory potentials and unexplored lines of flight. On the other hand, we also invite papers that develop arguments in line with Spivak’s criticism of Deleuze and by extension Moten and Glissant as well. 

Potential topics include but are not limited to:

• Aesthetic practices that experiment with fugitivity and possible lines of flight

• Critiques of paralinguistic expressions intended to exceed the comprehension of language as the logic of exchange

• Political acts that innovatively engage with structural restrictions 

Please submit abstracts of 250 words with a short bio. For queries, contact Zach Wagner (zwagner3@binghamton.edu) and Kaushik Tekur (ktekurv1@binghamton.edu)