Cirque du Silence

Abstract

In this performative play without speech, the author demonstrates the various acrobatic negotiations she makes in her everyday life as a transnational feminist educational researcher who was born in India, raised in Canada, and educated and employed in higher education in the U.S. The author uses silence as a space of reflection, resistance, adaptation, retreat, and freedom in order to challenge the duality of silence and voice where silence is seen as the absence of voice. The author presents her negotiations in academia as a set of acrobatic moves in response to her everyday circumstances. She also demonstrates that for her home is always a shifting concept that continues to force her to shuttle between multiple national identities. The author uses the works of Kamala Visweswaran and Inderpal Grewal to theorize nomadic, diasporic, and transnational subject positions and ways in which silence and voice function. Using the form of silence as a performance, the author invites readers to find their own entry points of identification, resistance, and points that transcend both identification with and resistance to the scenes with which she works, works out, and plays.