Abundant Silences: Artistic Strategies of Witness in Public Narratives    

This seminar builds on successful past seminars on the roles and limits of narrative silences in showing care toward  trauma and injustice. 

While silence is often discussed as an absence or erasure, silences can also be abundant with meaning. Silences can resist hegemonic interpretive frameworks or refuse to offer up a story for commodification or spectacularization. They can create echoes that produce new ways of understanding trauma and injustice. They can connect audiences with people and places represented in narratives. They can push listeners to think about what remains untold, and in that way call on us to do the work of witness-bearing. 

Strategic silences take varied forms depending on genre and medium, social contexts, and the goals of the individual.With this in mind, we invite participants to consider strategic silences in public narratives, including tribunals, novels, films, art installations, museum exhibits, legal proceedings, policies, public reports, etc. How can these silences produce spaces for love and care, for innovative relationships and ethical commitments? 

Participants may choose to address some of the following questions: 

• In what ways can silence and abundance interweave to create spaces of care or resistance? In what ways can silences reflect and contribute to thriving? 

• How do formal aspects of witnessing or conventions of testimony care for -- or fail to care for -- people subjected to trauma or violence? Can silences transform these formal conventions? 

• How can we keep from homogenizing silences and attend to them in their specificity and situatedness?

• How do strategic silences invite audiences to respond? What kind of spaces do silences create for audiences?  

• As critics, whose job is typically to explicate and to put words to silences, how can we hold space for the silences that people and projects refuse to break?

Papers on all genres, media, geographical contexts, and languages welcome. Please submit 200-word abstract and bio through the NeMLA submission portal at https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/21607 to Kelly Minerva and Lisa Propst.