Collectif – Stilled Voices Unmuted – The Poetics of Postcolonial Silence – Broché, Essai

To engage the ever-proliferating critical apparatus that purportedly illuminates the postcolonial text is to encounter invocations of an undefinable space, fraught with equivocation, resistant to consonance, calibration or resolution and, as such, undergirded by irrevocable obstructions. The narrative discourse borne of this encounter can but adduce one or another variant of ignominious defeat. In the optic thus proffered, the labyrinth that is « the postcolonial experience » is in a constant state of flux, inchoate, unmoored, unbounded, and thus stingingly subject to the contortions of the unsayable. However hermeneutically justified such readings, they bespeak but one dimension of an inordinately complex, polyvalent enterprise. For the postcolonial text - rooted in errantry, multifarious, amorphous, and assuredly less acquiescent than subversive - apriorily debunks unidimensional or dismissive over-determinations. As such, the would-be unsayable must be defied and transgressed to acc