In his book Silencing the Past. Power and the Production of History, Trouillot showed how power worked in silencing the Haitian Revolution in societal memory. From an anthropological perspective, we consider that social silence does not constitute the absence of speech, but rather the absence of power. We assume that the unspoken and the unspeakable can bring to the surface powerful meanings covered by hegemonic narratives. For this purpose, we do not mean to revisit a subaltern studies perspective; we aim at uncovering the absences and distortions of the hegemonic narratives and strategies employed to impose a social semiotic that silences the margins.
This panel will integrate case-studies of marginalized groups to which intelligibility we propose a subaltern methodology through: 1) an ethnography on the youth from the segregated locality of Jamia Nagar in Delhi and their experiences of the lived space (Sarfras); 2) the case study of Muslims in Kayalpattinam, their everyday soundscape, and how they negotiate with the various visual-auditory influxes of modernity and try to cultivate their ethical selves in the margins; 3) To pin out how the alternant of rulers and their relational powers, from the colonialism period to Goa's unification into the Union of India, has kept insisting on denying or silencing the Muslim presence in Goan culture. Other two ethnographies will illustrate the theme of this panel: 4) Portuguese colonialism in Goa and the silencing of the voices of women enrolled in the nationalist movement that opposed Portuguese rule; however, these voices they can be heard in the ethnographic research as well as in the newspapers suppressed by the colonial regime; 5. how the definiteness intrinsic to marginality overwrites the interpellated and enforced essence of those demarcations, the paper brackets the yearning from denied belonging in the researcher-collaborator and responding-collaborator.
