Introduction: Polyphony and Silence as Counter-hegemonic Tools

This introductory essay offers a critical survey of the notions of polyphony and silence across disciplines. Polyphony and silence are concepts that refer to sonority and voice, as multitude or as absence. Both can be counter-hegemonic tools for writing against monolingual and ethno-nationalist imaginaries – in political movements, in literature and the arts, in institutions, in media, and in everyday life. Focusing on the power to narrate and the limits of voice as theorized in cultural anthropology and literary studies, we interrogate the political potential of bringing many voices together and the refusal to speak. We use the concept of polyphony to highlight the political significance of maintaining difference in unity, and silence to emphasize the importance of omitting, refusing, and listening. Polyphony marks a resistance to contemporary hyper-individualization, while silence is a tactic against the traps of visibility and talkability. These practices, we argue, become particularly relevant in contexts of migration and multilingualism, in which national(ist) imaginaries of (un)belonging are constructed along linguistic and ethnic difference. This special issue brings together reflections on polyphony and silence as critical and relational concepts, foregrounding texts and cultural initiatives by actors with multiple belongings, in diaspora, and with minoritized linguistic backgrounds. The introduction concludes by presenting the eight essays that make up the special issue, highlighting the multiplicity of methods (textual analysis, co-creative research, autoethnography, participant observation, discourse analysis) through which notions of polyphony and silence can be explored.