Silence, Invisibility, and the Violence of the Logos: Appalachian Resonances in Kashmir

Abstract

Along the twisted contours of statecraft, not only do sound and fury not signify nothing, but nothing also signifies something. What are the ways in which the state activates frameworks of silence and noise, and of visibility and invisibility, to exert authority over specific cultures? This paper looks at two specific mountain cultures, separated by a hundred years and thousands of miles, to interrogate these questions of power and violence. It attempts to trace a trajectory of power-resistance by paying attention to silence, noise, visibility and invisibility – from the Battle of Blair Mountain in West Virginia to the trauma to Kashmiri identity wrought by the recent abrogation of Article 370 of the Indian Constitution. It notes how disciplinary power seeks to legitimize itself by transforming space into infrastructure, and how this tendency plays out in West Virginia in the 1920s and in Kashmir today, to articulate the uneasy relationship between violence, power and identity that suffuses our world.