An Aesthetics of Resistance.

Much of the literature on global civil society assume that progressive movement(s) need(s) to be fixed into commonly agreed upon interests and strategies that make up a stable identity of the movement as a whole. Often, these movements rely upon taken-for-granted speech acts whereby interests and desires are articulated through language, vocal language. By reducing our senses to rational speech acts, we undermine the progressive potential of other forms of sensory language. For this reason, I attempt to provide a polemical reading on the potential of silence(s) as moments and sites of agency. Thus, this paper goes beyond mainstream literature on social movements, and attempts to (re)locate potential for agency within the silent word. The written word becomes that "knowledge [which] is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting,"a space for one own, on paper, on walls, where none existed before. Included in the paper will be a brief analytical section on the problematics of social movements in relying on vocal speech acts as sites of agency. Thereafter, I begin from the premise that useful theoretical frameworks can be drawn from literary works themselves, particularly the ways in which silence manifests itself as a mode of political resistance. This paper will look at how two strangers in two separate novels create spaces of their own by narrating a reading of resistance that resist dominant structures of speech acts. Moments of silence are indeed vague, but they come with potential for something surprising and unexpected by offering possibilities for agency, even within global movements. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]