Universalizing discourse silences the specific wounds of the colonized.

Evidence

How different are these words, written in silence, than, say, those of urban-dwelling graffiti artists who travel noisy urban streets and write on walls and signs and subway cars? The thoughts in the jar reassure me that I am not alone in my love and wonder of quiet. — Gordon Hempton, John Grossmann, One Square Inch of Silence- One Man’s…, 1615 (#expands, via linked claim)

Colonial domination, as we have seen, gives rise to and continues to dictate a whole complex of resentful behavior and of refusal on the part of the colonized. The colonized exerts a considerable effort to keep away from the colonial world, not to expose himself to any action of the conqueror. In everyday life, however, the colonized and the colonizers are constantly establishing bonds of economic, technical, and administrative dependence. Colonialism obviously throws all the elements of native society into confusion. The dominant group arrives with its values and imposes them with such violence that the very life of the colonized can manifest itself only defensively, in a more or less clandestine way. Under these conditions, colonial domination distorts the very relations that the colonized maintains with his own culture. — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 421 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

The difference is that, whereas culturalism would correct the hyper-structuralism of earlier models by restoring the unified subject (collective or individual) of consciousness at the center of “the Structure,” discourse theory, by way of the Freudian concepts of the unconscious and the Lacanian concepts of how subjects are constituted in language (through the entry into the Symbolic and the Law of Culture), restores the decentered subject, the contradictory subject, as a set of positions in language and knowledge, from which culture can appear to be enunciated. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 204 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Scholarly discourse can itself silence and wound marginalized participants; Discourse theory is politically responsible but historically ungrounded.; Silence shapes the very vocabulary people use to describe experience. — Gordon Hempton, John Grossmann, One Square Inch of Silence- One Man’s…, 1615 (+8 more)

Related

• Colonial discourse manufactures silence around colonized peoples’ precolonial civilizations. (similarity 0.84)

Broader Connections

• Silence shapes the very vocabulary people use to describe experience. #expands (0.50) — Gordon Hempton, John Grossmann, One Square Inch of Silence- One Man’s…, 1615
• Colonial domination distorts the colonized’s relationship with their own culture and traditions #corroborates (0.50) — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 421
• Discourse theory restores a decentered subject while culturalism restores a unified consciousness #corroborates (0.40) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 204