Dismissal, legibility and the normalising of colonial misrecognition

Abstract

The judicial act of dismissal in discrimination cases involving diasporic or minority populations is part of a larger cultural approach to diasporic subjects. Racial dismissal includes judicial as well as larger cultural forms of dismissal, whereby an authority judges a speaker’s grievances as implausible or unworthy of consideration, often due to cases of misrecognition or illegibility to a hegemonic culture or authority. Here the author draws on Kristie Dotson’s notion of epistemic silencing, which illustrates that grievances from diasporic subjects are dismissed because they fall outside settler-colonial norms, and are apprehended as trivial or illegitimate. Hence, dismissal is based on a sustained and protected misrecognition of diasporic populations.