Our silence will not protect us: Liberatory speech in a time of censorship
We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired. For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us. […] For it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.
- Audre Lorde, “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action”
We live in times when censorship is being weaponized to silence debate, to erase histories, and to foreclose certain futures, when many remain silent and indecisive in their fear or reprisal, and when decisions made in secret serve to consolidate power and undermine accountability and trust. Artists and educators are being blacklisted for speaking out against the killing of civilians. Books are banned for providing accurate accounts of the atrocities of white supremacy or of the diversity of human gender and sexuality. At the same time that censorship is used to stifle public dissent, decision-making is increasingly cloistered in corporate boardrooms, backroom deals, and predictive algorithms.
Drawing upon Paulo Freire’s faith in the power of dialogue and Audre Lorde’s call for us to break the silence that chokes us, even in the face of our fears, we devote this residency to the practice of open, honest, and vulnerable speech. We will discuss the ways that speech is being silenced and controlled in the context of ongoing settler-colonial politics, in the biopolitics of bodies and health, in the narratives around ecology and sustainability, in the written word and the performative act, and we will also put into practice the radical politics of fearless speech, the power that emerges when we come together to listen and to speak truth.
