ABSTRACT

In August 2015, Black Lives Matter activists Mara Willaford and Marissa Johnson interrupted a Seattle rally with a four-and-a-half-minute silent commemoration of Black teenager Michael Brown, preventing presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders from speaking. Using a Rancièrean political framework and a methodology of performance-inflected rhetorical criticism, I explore how this silent protest exemplifies what I call “voiced silence” and transfigures a tradition of tactical Black silence as both repression and resistance. I argue the activists staged a scene of dissensus, fracturing the false consensus of the progressive left’s post-racial façade and thereby revealing the presence of two worlds in one.

摘要

2015 年 8 月，“黑人生命也是命”活动人士玛拉·威拉福德和玛丽莎·约翰逊打断了一场西雅图集会，为黑人少年迈克尔·布朗进行了四分半钟的默哀，并阻止总统候选人参议员伯尼·桑德斯发言。我利用朗西埃式的政治框架和受表演影响的修辞批评方法论，探讨了这种无声抗议如何体现我所说的“声音沉默”，并将战术性黑人沉默的传统转变为镇压和抵抗。我认为活动人士上演了一场分歧的场面，打破了进步左派后种族外观的错误共识，从而揭示了两个世界合而为一的存在。