Silencing and Protest

Abstract

Abstract Chapter 3 lays out the communicative approach to protest that I use in the rest of the book and lays the groundwork for the expressive and speech-act-theoretic analysis of the different dimensions of protest acts. The chapter provides an analysis of the silencing of protest and distinguishes four different kinds of silencing: pre-locutionary, locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary silencing. The account of silencing sketched in this chapter pays particular attention to those forms of silencing that are produced by defective uptake (or lack of uptake) by the audiences of protest; it is an account that will be further elaborated and complicated in later chapters through case studies. This chapter also offers a preliminary analysis of four different communicative dimensions of protest and the different kinds of silencing they can be subject to, an analysis that is further developed in the four subsequent chapters dedicated to each of the four key communicative dimensions of protest.