11:30 - 13:00
Oral session
Room: Muirhead Room 109
Stream: Open Stream
Stammering Tongue
Danai Mupotsa1, Xin Liu2
1University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
2University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg

Our paper responds to a special issue of Tydskrif vir Letterkunde titled “Ghostly Border-Crossings:
Europe in the Afrodiasporic Imaginary,” that asks contributors to interrogate the “silent racializations”
(Fatima el Tayib) which inflect the home and host land, state and statelessness, belonging and
nonbelonging of racially-marked subjects, from the perspective of racially-marked subjects, from the
perspective of critical black geography (Katherine McKittrick) and relationality (Edouard Glissant).
The editors ask us to attend to questions raised by national, geographic and social borders in African
Afrodiasporic writing about Europe by reading border locations, border lives and border crossings as
nodes of identitarian – political, socio-cultural and historical entanglements. In so doing, we are asked
to explore notions of silence, porosity and haunting (Avery Gordon) through imaginaries and
experiences of the border. The border, we read as a central technique of both the modern state and the
violence that produces it. The “border”, here is our analytic from which we read violence. Our project
is a diffractive encounter that places feminist and queer theorizations of lack and “sex without
optimism” (Berlant and Edelman) through afro-pessimist and decolonial frameworks of radical
negativity. Through diffractive encountering, with the modality of implicating and complicating reading
and writing, we problematize the conception of knowledge as property and genre of Man (Lisa Lowe).
Our reading aims at two recent texts, Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being that
draws from the metaphor/ practice of the Middle Passage to offer “The Wake,” “The Ship,” “The Hold,”
and “The Weather,” to theorize black violability, black death and black living. Sharpe describes racism as “that engine that drives the ship of the state’s national and imperial projects, [cutting] through all of
our lives and deaths inside and outside the nation in the wake of its purposeful flow” (2017, 3). We read
Sharpe against Jasbir K. Puar’s The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability where she uses the
notion of debility to stress the relations between harm, gender, race, war and labour. The right to maim
is a new concept of biopolitics, which Puar offers to describe how precarious people are contained and
oppressed. As Puar offers, debility is a term that helps us to understand biopolitical risk, “to extrapolate
a bit from Claudia Rankine’s prose: “I am in death’s position.” And to expand: I am in debility’s
position.” (2017, xvi) We offer the “stammering tongue,” in pursuit of a conversation between
ourselves, Sharpe and Puar. The stammering tongue is a racialized, sexualized border that produces
im/possible readings and utterances. We frame the stammering tongue as one that turns to negativity
and reclaims lack to generate potentiality from that lack.


Reference:
Tu-OS16 Rethinking Violence-P-003
Presenter/s:
Danai Mupotsa
Presentation type:
Panel
Room:
Muirhead Room 109
Date:
Tuesday, 11 September
Time:
12:00 - 12:15
Session times:
11:30 - 13:00