Silence as Voice: Silence, the Body and the Decoloniality of Quiet in Raduan Nassar and Sara Gallardo’s novels of the country.

Abstract

This dissertation, Silence as Voice: Silence, the Body and the Decoloniality of Quiet in Raduan Nassar and Sara Gallardo’s Novels of the Country, investigates silence as a literary form and an embodied mode of agency in Latin American literature. Focusing on Raduan Nassar’s Ancient Tillage and Sara Gallardo’s Enero, the study explores how silence functions not as absence or erasure, but as a generative and affirmative force that reconfigures subjectivity, narrative structure, and the politics of representation. Drawing on interdisciplinary frameworks—including poststructuralism, material feminism, critical posthumanism, and decolonial theory—this research reconceptualizes silence as an affordance of voice and a site of epistemic disobedience. Through close readings of literary silence, the dissertation develops a theory of reading as listening, proposing that silence demands a sonic sensibility that attends to the unsaid, the peripheral, and the inaudible. It argues that silence, when embodied by precarious and peripheral subjects, challenges hegemonic narrative voices and disrupts the logics of intelligibility and coherence. The study introduces the concept of the “decoloniality of quiet” as a listening posture to articulate how silence resists colonial and patriarchal frameworks, enabling alternative forms of agency, relationality, and becoming. By situating silence at the intersection of voice, body, and space, this dissertation contributes to a rethinking of literary form and subjectivity in Latin American literature. It affirms silence as a critical and aesthetic strategy that not only reveals the mechanisms of erasure and effacement but also opens pathways for resistance, transformation, and the reimagining of literary and political agency.