Abstract
This article investigates how the refusal to speak becomes a resonant expression of protest in Percival Everett's novel Glyph (1999). It offers a reading of Everett's experimental work as generating a literary soundscape of the quiet voice to reflect on the functions of sonic absence in the politics and aesthetics of resistance. With Kevin Quashie's work The Sovereignty of Quiet (2012) and Fred Moten's writings on the significance of sound in black radical aesthetics as conceptual bridges, it seeks to establish that Glyph explores the boundaries and possibilities of black self-determination in the American socio-political context as it pitches the acoustics of silence and voice against the mute textuality of the book. Along these lines, the explicit refusal of a voice to speak in Glyph simultaneously reveals and complicates the dynamics of racialization in literary imaginations and reading practices.
Highlights
This article investigates how the refusal to speak becomes a resonant expression of protest in Percival Everett’s novel Glyph (1999)
With Kevin Quashie’s work The Sovereignty of Quiet (2012) and Fred Moten’s writings on the significance of sound in black radical aesthetics as conceptual bridges, it seeks to establish that Glyph explores the boundaries and possibilities of black self-determination in the American socio-political context as it pitches the acoustics of silence and voice against the mute textuality of the book
How much dissent can a quiet voice express and what objections could its silence impart? This question informs the present inquiry about the apparent paradox of quiet resistance in Percival Everett’s Glyph—a novel that presents itself in the guise of a deconstruction paper featuring a black protagonist who proudly proclaims his sonic erasure from an obtrusive and noisy world: “I was a baby fat with words, but I made no sound.”[1]. The stark contrast between the manifest surplus of speech and the obliteration of sound brings to mind both Kevin Quashie’s ideas on the agency of the quiet and Fred Moten’s take on the intricate connections between sound, vision, and power
Summary
This article investigates how the refusal to speak becomes a resonant expression of protest in Percival Everett’s novel Glyph (1999). It offers a reading of Everett’s experimental work as generating a literary soundscape of the quiet voice to reflect on the functions of sonic absence in the politics and aesthetics of resistance.
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