el El color de la lengua: reflexiones sobre la resignificación de la violencia a partir de un poema de Michèle Lalonde

Abstract

Abstract

In the following article we propose an analysis of Michèle Lalonde's poem "Speak White" from some contributions of the critical theories of colonialism and from the speech act theory of the American philosopher Judith Butler (1997). First, we describe how the text is inscribed as a fragment of a larger plot of an "anticolonial archive" (DE OTO, 2011). At that point, we start from the hypothesis that the poem condenses certain marks that allow us to reconstruct how violence is exercised through language in a colonial system, but also the resistances that can be opposed from literary discourses. In a second stage, we analyze discursive strategies deployed throughout the poem to disrupt the system. In that instance we sustain the hypothesis that the literary discourse deployed by Lalonde aims to create new contexts that re-signify the violence of the insult.