Responding to the 2027 MLA presidential theme of Emancipatory Narratives, this session asks what literature can teach us about the production of silence when institutions, communities, and dominant epistemologies determine which histories may be spoken, which experiences are legible, and which forms of knowledge count as knowledge at all. Rather than understanding silence simply as the absence or suppression of speech, the panel examines it as a socially produced, materially embodied, and aesthetically generative condition. The current struggle over the Smithsonian provides an immediate point of departure for a broader literary question: What happens to narrative when power attempts to determine in advance what can be said, remembered, or recognized?
The session brings environmental humanities, Indigenous studies, disability and madness studies, and transnational feminist criticism into conversation around this question. Across contemporary drama, poetry, and diasporic fiction, the three papers investigate different mechanisms through which experience becomes difficult to articulate or impossible for dominant interpretive systems to recognize. Their interventions are especially relevant at a moment when disputes over cultural memory increasingly concern not simply competing interpretations of history but the institutional conditions under which particular narratives can circulate at all.
Valerie Burgess’s “Unspeakable Toxicity: Mad Epistemology and Psycho-Corporeal (Un)Becoming in Cherríe Moraga’s Heroes and Saints” examines environmental racism as a structure that produces forms of bodily experience inadequately represented by conventional environmental discourse. Through Cerezita’s radically permeable body, Burgess identifies a “mad epistemology” in which distinctions between body and environment collapse. Silence here does not indicate the absence of knowledge. Instead, the body registers forms of toxic and colonial violence that dominant epistemologies fail to make intelligible.
Elisabeth Joyce’s “Michael Wasson’s Swallowed Light: Silence and Trauma in the Nez Perce Language” turns from bodily to linguistic erasure. Wasson’s incorporation of Nimiipuutímt produces moments in which readers unable to pronounce or interpret the language confront the limits of their own access. Drawing on Jean-Luc Marion’s concept of the saturated phenomenon, Joyce argues that these moments of readerly arrest formally enact the historical violence of Indigenous linguistic suppression while simultaneously creating possibilities for cultural resurgence. The text therefore refuses the assumption that linguistic accessibility to dominant readers constitutes the measure of meaningful expression.
Maryam Tadayon’s “Unspeakable Belonging: Silence and the Politics of Legibility in Iranian Diasporic and Irish American Women’s Fiction” considers silence within gendered and diasporic communities. Reading Dina Nayeri alongside Alice McDermott, Tadayon examines women navigating circumstances in which particular forms of self-representation become risky, unintelligible, or socially prohibited. Silence emerges as neither straightforward submission nor uncomplicated resistance but as a strategy through which women negotiate competing demands of belonging, visibility, and self-representation.
Together, the papers distinguish between being silent and being rendered inaudible. Environmental toxicity, colonial language loss, and diasporic gender norms operate differently, but each produces an interpretive regime that determines whose experience can become recognizable knowledge. The session thus reframes the current struggle over public historical narrative. Attempts to regulate stories do not merely remove particular words or subjects; they establish the conditions under which some experiences become legible and others disappear.
At a moment when federal officials are openly contesting the narratives presented by one of the nation’s most important cultural institutions, literature offers a crucial archive for understanding both the violence and the possibilities of silence. These papers suggest that emancipatory narrative may involve more than recovering suppressed voices or speaking what was previously unsaid. It may also require learning to recognize forms of meaning that dominant institutions, languages, and interpretive frameworks have been structured not to hear.