Listening From Below: Black Speakerhood, White-Duplicity, and Unsettling Erasure

This study is a “raciolinguistic genealogy” that theorizes the analytic category white-duplicity , which refers to instances in which Black speakerhood is paradoxically both affirmed and negated. I first trace the problem named by “white-duplicity” within a genealogy of Black thinkers, utilizing the discussion as a springboard to investigating white-duplicity in three discursive contexts: early modern ideologies of language and speakerhood as exemplified in “Enlightenment” origin of language theories, acts of enslavement through deceit, and surveillance of the slave ship. From the initial analysis, I conclude that anti-Black erasure is characteristically attended by the affirmation or recognition of Black speaker/personhood. Afterward, I engage in a “reconfiguration” of the events surrounding Rachel Jeantel’s testimony in the trial of George Zimmerman. The reconfiguration demonstrates how instances of white-duplicity are productive of “illegitimate” subject-positions from which a praxis of “listening from below” can be mobilized to critique the binary oppositions which underwrite “raciolinguistic ideologies of anti-Blackness” and other master narratives of modernity. Overall, the analysis indicates how a response to anti-Black erasure which exploits the conditions for unsettling erasure is preferable to the production of “vindicationist narratives.”