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Tell This Silence: Asian American Women Writers and the Politics of Speech, Patti Duncan, Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 2004, 274 pages
"Breaking the silence" is one of the most recurring themes in feminist literature. Both silence and the act of breaking it are complex social phenomena and complicated by power relations. A Korean American scholar of mixed ancestry and a professor of women's studies at Portland State University, Parti Duncan proposes to read silence "as a form of discourse and as a means of resistance to hegemonic power" in her first book, Tell This Silence (2). Rereading Asian American literary texts, Duncan emphasizes that we need to attend to the contexts in which silence becomes "a history, a reality, and a lived experience" for subjects at the margins (15). Silence as such "is not simply the absence of speech" but has multiple meanings (14). As, for example, recent testimonies of the survivors of military sexual slavery by Japan during World War ? reveal, silence operates in hegemonic discourses, for instance, in what Gayatri Spivak calls "sanctioned ignorance" of the history of colonized or marginalized people. This is furthered by the politics of silencing; however, silence can be also strategically used as a means of resistance. To speak what has been silenced is often involved both in revealing the history of silencing and in revisioning hegemonic historiographies and discourses that occlude or justify that history. While silencing is a powerful means of domination, silence is not always a passive response to domination. Similarly, breaking silence does not always directly lead to empowerment or social transformation. Rather, the act of breaking or keeping silence requires us to examine critically and historicize not only the contexts of silence but also the ways in which silence operates in power relations.
Inspired by Trinh T. Minh-ha's and King-Kok Cheung's observation of women's uses of silence, Duncan's Tell This Silence attempts to theorize silence as "a will to unsay" (30) or a will not to say according to hegemonic norms. Examining the multiple meanings of silence in Asian American women writers' literary texts in specific historical contexts, Duncan re-evaluates silence against the notion that silence means the lack of subjectivity. In the western discourses that value speech, "subjectivity is...