Interlude

This two-part special series, “Too Great for Words: The Ineffable in Sound and Text,” takes the ineffable as its thematic and methodological core—foregrounding what exceeds articulation and what becomes visible, audible, or felt in the spaces of silence. As our coeditors Ilka Brasch and Elena Furlanetto write in the introduction to the first issue, “‘ineffable’ moments” are those “in which the alphabetic and the articulate are not only replaced by the aural or the embodied but are also demonstratively insufficient” in or obstructive to the process of signification.1 Crucially, as Brasch and Furlanetto continue, “the absence of linear speech is not a mere circumstance but rather a political moment that opens a space for critique.”2 Following these cues, we—and the final essay of this special series—indicate here that it is necessary to differentiate between the ineffable and archival silence. The ineffable marks what cannot be said—that which is uttered beyond an ontological or expressive limit. Archival silence, by contrast, often signifies that which cannot be heard, that which has been forcibly excluded, erased, or muted by structural and epistemic violences. For example, early settler texts like William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation or Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative often describe Indigenous voices and sounds as chaotic, threatening, or inarticulate noise—rendering them ineffed within the colonial archive. These works do not record Indigenous speech as meaningful communication but instead make it inaudible. Archival silence operates in this way as a tool of settler colonialism.When Toni Morrison writes that “canon building is empire building,”3 she underscores the argument that empire fabricates itself not only through inclusion and exclusion but through “required misreading, predetermined selectivity of authentic sources, and—silence.”4 Here, silence is political rather than ontological: It is a curated absence that maintains power. As Sladja Blažan indicates in this issue, listeners have tremendous power to maintain or undermine these curated absences. Music studies scholars Dylan Robinson and Nina Eidsheim, moreover, address this concern with respect to the power dynamics entangled with the impact of social perceptions of racial difference when it comes to producing and listening to music. Both Robinson and Eidsheim describe how deeply embedded the act of listening is in these power dynamics, even though we might perceive the act of listening as a physiological activity unencumbered by political signification. When it comes to understanding what we hear, however, Eidsheim writes that it is the listener—and not the speaker or singer—who does the work of signification: “The listener, including both other listeners and auto-listening, is so strong, and indeed so overriding, that in order to understand the process of evaluating and defining vocal timbre and voices, it is more useful to consider the process from the listener’s point of view.”5 The listener’s point of view is deeply mediated by cultural values and power structures, Eidsheim continues: “In order to listen to listening…we must first observe listeners’ naturalized behaviors and assumptions.”6 Settler colonial behaviors and assumptions play a significant role in how we listen. As Robinson writes, for instance, settlers listen “hungrily,” thereby embedding within the act of listening the extractive nature of colonial enterprises.7We must therefore contend with the problem of listening when we address ineffability; here we ask to what extent the ineffable is an issue of unsayability or unhearability, rather than of silencing and erasure. The ineffable often marks violence that is, as this special series is titled, “Too Great for Words.” Archival silence, in contrast, is not the ineffable itself but a manifestation of it, an iteration shaped by political structures. Thinking along lines of effability and ineffability, we might consider certain forms of archival erasure as the ineffed—not what cannot be spoken but what has been made unhearable through settler colonial soundscapes and frameworks of knowledge. This shift draws attention away from the limits of language and toward the operations of listening: not what cannot be said but what is not permitted to be heard. As Gloria Anzaldúa indicates, the act of listening—and its refusal—can have a profound impact on the speaker. In La Frontera/Borderlands, Anzaldúa recalls being reprimanded in college for speaking English with a Mexican accent and writes, “El Anglo con cara de inocente nos arrancó la lengua. Wild tongues can’t be tamed, they can only be cut out.”8 Her poetic and brutal expression captures how silencing is enacted in settler colonial America—how culture and identity are not only marginalized but rendered inaudible or ineffed through this metaphor of amputation.We suggest here that these processes of ineffing are constitutive of US nationhood. In doing so, we follow the impetus of Toni Morrison, who critiques the widely accepted belief that “traditional, canonical American literature is free of, uninformed, and unshaped by the four-hundred-year-old presence of, first Africans and then African-Americans in the United States.”9 She argues, instead, that US American literature is always already about Blackness, even—and especially—when it denies or disavows that fact. As she writes, “the contemplation of…black presence is central to any understanding of our national literature and should not be permitted to hover at the margins of the literary imagination.”10 For Morrison, this is not simply a matter of inclusion but a structural truth: the very category of Americanness is inseparable from the legacy of enslavement and the ongoing presence of Black life.If we follow this logic, might we also say that US American literature is always about settler colonialism—even when it doesn’t think it is? We might say that US American literature too is shaped by settler colonial knowledge systems, archival practices, concepts of literature, and listening habits. What if the settler soundscape—what it permits to be heard and what it renders ineffed—is structurally formative in a way similar to the silences around Blackness that Morrison names? The question, then, is not only what has been made unhearable—the ineffed—but how we learn to listen differently. What kinds of relations—and responsibility—does such listening require?The essays in this special series contend with settler colonialism as a structuring condition of US nationhood: They consider ineffability, archival silence, and settler colonial unhearing by inhabiting these silences rather than attempting to resolve them. In the first issue, Ajani Burrell’s reading of The Properties of Perpetual Light situated Julian Aguon’s poetic work within Chamorro practices of yo’åmte (deep healing), showing how tone, spiritual relationality, and embodied storytelling enact a form of sonic healing that exceeds articulation. Anna-Lena Oldehus returned to Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s sixteenth-century Chronicle to reveal how its gaps, distortions, and reassemblies open space for what Ursula Le Guin calls a “carrier bag” mode of storytelling—one that decenters conquest and instead listens for that which is not recorded. In this issue, Sladja Blažan explores how the ineffable can be heard by differentiating Emily Dickinson’s activity of listening to trees from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s and Lydia Maria Child’s signification of the noise of trees—and Indigenous people—as threatening. Each of these essays disrupts linear narration and resists extractive reading practices. They foreground listening as an ethical and situated act, shaped by relation rather than detachment. Together, they pose the question of what has been ineffed—and turn to the forms of attention, transmission, and responsibility that can emerge from that recognition.In light of these readings, we would like to use the space of this interlude—or introduction to the second part of the special series—to sit with the significance of listening. We do so as scholars trained in a Western system that is invested in invisibilizing the violences employed to maintain a settler colonial state. Following Morrison’s lead, we consider the ethical ramifications of this invisibilization by asking about the ethical impact of Western academia’s privileging of written historiography over oral history. Alongside the essays in this special edition, we imagine methods by which we might undermine the limited relationality of written academic work. These distinctions have become particularly clear to us in the process of reimagining elements of each of these papers, including this interlude, which were originally presented to an audience in the form of conference papers. As we will address in more detail below, many of these ideas met their audience in real time—through the deeply relational and affective experience of reading aloud and listening to papers and presentations. This action of reading aloud and communal active listening may be part and parcel of the conference experience, but reflecting on that experience underscores the myriad ways in which listening might resist colonial hierarchies in our literary analysis and cultural critique.Contending with the differing ethical ramifications of oral versus written history provides us with a precedent for thinking about the significance of the kind of listening with which scholars like Marisa Fuentes, for instance, demand we engage. In Dispossessed Lives, she writes: “Sound from enslaved bodies might be another way of marking enslaved historicity through the violence they endured. By reckoning unflinchingly with our methods and ethical practices as historians, our responsibility to our sources and subjects long dead, we might historically represent what has typically been unrepresentable.”11 Listening, Fuentes ultimately concludes, may help us attend to those who have been historically ineffed.Centering sound is one mode by which scholars might participate in a renewed interest in Indigenous oral history in both academic and legal contexts, a shift that is part and parcel of the recent Indigenous resurgence.12 The trans-Indigenous solidarity that emerged in response to Energy Transfer’s 2016 decision to build the Dakota Access Pipeline across the source waters of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in South Dakota, for instance, has lent attention to ongoing appeals for Indigenous life and well-being in Canada and the United States.13 Within this context, contending with the ethics of oral history may change how we engage with ineffability in the archive. Written history allows us to foreground the most specific of data—like population statistics and the exact dates on which events occurred. This mode of memory presents historical events as objective and static truths. In contrast, oral history makes the relationship between speaker and listener an integral element of the exchange of information.Because oral history foregrounds relationality between speaker and audience, it brings with it a different set of ethical tenets than does written history. As Margaret Kovach (Nêhiyaw and Saulteaux) writes, the oral exchange of story—and history—is an Indigenous research method: “This sharing of stories requires an element of researcher vulnerability. But listening intently to one another’s stories, as a method of knowing, elevates the research from an extractive exercise serving the fragmentation of knowledge to a holistic endeavor that situates research firmly within the nest of relationship.”14 Relationality occurs in multiple ways in the context of oral history and other oral epistemological exchanges, in that this exchange both occasions and requires self-location. To some extent this practice is the establishment of ethos, one of the key elements of rhetorical exercises in the Greek tradition. In historiography, ethos is developed through the institutions at which we work, the presses who publish the written products of our work, the individuals whose endorsements form the paratexts to this work, and the documents and other writers whom we cite. Oral epistemological exchange does ask for some similar information: Who is our community, human and non-human? Are we capable of handling historical stories responsibly? To some extent, the university, the press, and the people we cite are our communities when it comes to writing historiography. But how do we acknowledge these relationships?Pursuing an active relationship might be a good start. The #NoDAPL water projection in South Dakota sparked many such relationships, on and well beyond Standing Rock Sioux land. For instance, members of the Mashantucket Pequot nation, as well as employees of the reservation’s museum, the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, came to the University of Connecticut in 2016 to speak to students and faculty about the events that led up to the resistance on Oceti Sakowin land in South Dakota, as well as to discuss the significance of this period of Indigenous resurgence. One employee, a settler, spoke specifically to the historians in the room about an article he had read in an academic journal that got all the facts about a particular event in Pequot history wrong. He said to those present, “Why didn’t the author call us?” As the tribal museums and cultural centers map collated by the Association on American Indian Affairs indicates, there are many museums to call with questions about the hundreds of Indigenous nations in the United States today.15For author Abigail Fagan, who was present at this event, this question has since become a kind of haunting as she engages texts that address early American history, and she shared this experience at the conference in Oldenburg that was the inciting event for the papers in this special series. We hope this haunting carries forward. After all, Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, as well as Lorenzo Veracini, have noted that the ultimate goal of settler colonialism is the erasure of Indigenous presence on, for instance, the US American landscape, in order for settlers to fully lay claim to that land.16 Inaccurate and unmentioned data about Indigenous history and life participates in this erasure. The question “Why didn’t he call us?” becomes a rejoinder to scholarship that participates in producing interactions between Indigenous people and settlers as ineffed. For instance, in his discussion of sixteenth-century English settlement on Roanoke Island, Michael Leroy Oberg writes that settler narratives of these efforts “give us only one side of the story.…No Algonquian tells us directly what he or she thought of the changes that began to occur after the English arrived.”17 Did he call any of the museums of Algonquian-speaking nations operating today? In Conquest by Law: How the Discovery of America Dispossessed Indigenous Peoples of Their Lands, Lindsay Roberts writes, “Indigenous peoples seldom appear in the following narrative. I hope their absence will underscore the extent of their effective disenfranchisement in the judicial conquest of Native America.”18 Why didn’t she call them?The ethics of oral history would have made contact between the settler historiographer and Indigenous historians necessary. As Max Liboiron writes, in conversation with Shawn Wilson’s work, for instance, “How we are in relationship is a genre of relationality based in obligation.…This does not mean that relations exist and you are accountable to them through your actions but rather that things are constituted by these relations (as articulated in much science and technology) and that accountability is the way to describe that constitution (which is common in many Indigenous theories).”19 Another way to address these interactions between relationship and accountability is: Are we in an equitable relationship with the land on which the university, the press, and the people we cite are seated and the land that they impact? As Kovach writes, moreover, the question of handling stories responsibly requires that speakers be aware of the ethos of their audience members. Are audience members capable of treating these stories with respect and using the information they convey in ways that are not extractive? The extractive use of Indigenous oral stories—often by putting them into print without the Indigenous speaker, community, or nation’s approval—has been a long-term practice of colonizing groups.To some extent, the practice of oral history forecloses extractive behavior. At the SOCRATES Workshop, “Practices of Storytelling and Indigenous Epistemologies,” held at Leibniz University in Hanover, Germany, on May 3, 2024, Finnish philosopher Inkeri Koskinen noted that methods of oral epistemological exchange include cyclical modes of storytelling, as well as rhythm, rhyme, and other mnemonics to commit the story to memory. Each speaker of a specific story becomes responsible for the way they tell that story and for acting in accountability with the community from which it originates. Aesthetics and relationships become integral in the event of oral historical exchange.The essays in this special edition self-reflectively engage these problems with respect to literary study. 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