Stammering tongue

Abstract

‘Stammering tongue’ is the governing metaphor we offer in our reading of the border. The border, we read as a central technique of both the modern state and the violence that produces it. Our project is a diffractive encounter with the modality of implicating and complicating reading and writing. The paper offers a reading of two recent texts, Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being that draws from the metaphor/practice of the Middle Passage to offer “The Wake,” “The Ship,” “The Hold,” and “The Weather,” to theorize black violability, black death, and black living. We read Sharpe beside Jasbir K. Puar’s The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability where she uses the notion of debility to stress the relations between harm, gender, race, war, and labor. We offer the ‘stammering tongue,’ in pursuit of a conversation between ourselves, Sharpe, and Puar. The stammering tongue is a racialized, sexualized border that produces (im)possible readings and utterances. We frame the stammering tongue as one that turns to negativity and reclaims lack to generate potentiality from that lack.

Keywords: the wake, debility, Christina Sharpe, Jasbir Puar, tongue, accent, middle passage