We Speak Violence: How Narrative Denies the Everyday

Abstract

My interdisciplinary dissertation seeks to reevaluate the ethics that are implicit in the way that we narrate, or rather fail to narrate, experiences of mass or systemic violence, and the effect that such a failure wields on literature and contemporary political and social discourses. In the manuscript, I juxtapose my terms everyday violence and event violence, theorizing event violence as when violence interrupts a peaceful quotidian, acquires narration, and functions as a transient abstraction, albeit one whose effects may continue to reverberate into the present. Everyday violence, in contrast, eclipses and completely commandeers the quotidian. Significantly, everyday violence limits freedom of movement, regardless of whether this movement is physical or otherwise, because—where violent events may rupture the victim’s subjecthood, destroying the boundary between them and the world—in the words of Wittgenstein, everyday violence repeatedly shatters this boundary, to such an extent that the victim is unable to repair it or is unable to reassert subjecthood. My dissertation is divided into three chapters, with two theoretical chapters flanking the principal study of the effect of this narratological transformation on literature’s attempts to grapple with the everyday experience of racism. The first chapter, “How We Speak When We Speak Violence,” establishes the theoretical and historical framework for my argument regarding the distinction between everyday and event violence. The chapter is in dialog with the work of, primarily, Veena Das, Paul Ricœur, and Yuri Lotman, whose pioneering study of byt, or everyday life in Russian, I translate. In the dissertation’s central chapter, “We Speak Racial Violence: Denying a Black Everyday, and Various Rebellions,” I study the way that canonical African American texts—such as those by Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, and Toni Morrison—have both fallen victim to this structure and have attempted to subvert this denial of an African American everyday experience of racism by locating this violence in the homeplace, as, in the words of bell hooks, “the site of resistance.” Because racism attaches to Black subjects as something willfully and permissibly performed against them by White subjects, deflecting violence away from the body and upon the home is an act of defiance. The final chapter, “How We (Could) Speak When We Speak Violence,” returns to the earlier theorists to propose, utilizing the work of Richard Wright, among others, a methodology for speaking the everyday and, thus, everyday violence. As representation is the accumulated influence of ideology, custom, policy, fashion, etc., it is not that narrative can only be told via interconnected and discrete events but rather that is done so because this method is habitual. However, because it is habitual, it has the potential to be disrupted and restructured.