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Introduction. The Uses of Silence and the Will to Unsay By calling this introductory chapter “The Uses of Silence,” I invoke Audre Lorde’s essay “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism,” in which she discusses anger as an appropriate, viable, and useful response to racism. Anger, she writes, when “expressed and translated in the service of our vision and our future is a liberating and strengthening act of clarification. . . . [It] is loaded with information and energy” (127). Lorde compares anger to other, less useful responses to racism, such as reactionary defensiveness, hatred, and guilt. She suggests that guilt “is not a response to anger; it is a response to one’s own actions or lack of action. . . . It becomes a device to protect ignorance and the continuation of things the way they are, the ultimate protection for changelessness ” (130). Thus, Lorde effectively reclaims an emotion previously regarded as negative, even harmful. She examines the ways in which anger, Literary history and the present are dark with silences: some the silences for years by our acknowledged great; some silences hidden; some the ceasing to publish after one work appears; some the never coming to book form at all. These are not natural silences, that necessary time for renewal, lying fallow, gestation, in the natural cycle of creation. The silences I speak of here are unnatural; the unnatural thwarting of what struggles to come into being, but cannot. In the old, the obvious parallels : when the seed strikes stone; the soil will not sustain; the spring is false; the time is drought or blight or infestation; the frost comes premature.—Tillie Olsen, Silences within specific contexts, is “loaded with information and energy” and, when used as a means of social and personal transformation, can liberate and clarify. Lorde’s analysis of anger in relation to racism also serves to expand and complicate definitions and understandings of both race and racism. Her focus on women’s racism links race to gender, suggesting the ways in which such categories of identity are inextricably intertwined and must be examined synchronously. In Tell This Silence, I recognize and acknowledge the many complex ways in which race and gender are structured in our culture, as well as the different forms that racism and sexism enact at various societal levels, from interpersonal interactions to larger sociostructural relationships. Also, I seek to expand the very concept of racism, as contemporary understandings of racism in the United States commonly fail to account for the cultural discrimination faced by Asian Americans, as well as other people of color and immigrants. Upon careful review, however, there seem to be multiple silences at work in relation to race, gender, sexuality, and national identity. Such silences are suggestive of the various social and political possibilities and processes inherent to discussions of the critical intersections of categories of identity. Hence, I look to the silences within writings by Asian American women in order to interrogate their meanings to contemporary discourse about the relationships among race, gender, sexuality, and national belonging.1 An examination of silence, in relation to Asian American women’s experiences in the United States, opens questions regarding history, authenticity , and resistance to subjugation. As a critical reconceptualization and, at times, reclamation of silence, Tell This Silence attempts to reinscribe its potential as a strategy of resistance. I suggest that an exploration of the uses of silence offers new insights into the ways in which silence operates as a form of discourse and as a means of resistance to hegemonic power, particularly the forms of power structuring the lives of contemporary Asian American women. Interrogating and historicizing representations of silence within feminist and postcolonial writings and theories provide one significant site for reconsidering notions of language, translation, memory , and history—processes that remain crucial to political and socialjustice agendas. Thus, I analyze the notion of silence within several Asian American women’s narratives. I focus on this particular group for numerous reasons, not the least of which are the negative stereotypes (e.g., silence, passivity, deceptiveness, and inscrutability) often associated with 2 i n t r o d u c t i o n women, with women of color in the United States, and with Asian American women in particular. Along with silence, I also explore the cultural meanings of speech in the United States, often conceptualized as the opposite of silence. In fact the two are not binarily opposed but have most often...

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