Invited Talk
Anthropology

INDIRECTION, OPACITY, AND PARRHESIA: UNSETTLING IDEOLOGIES OF LANGUAGE, RACE, AND DEMOCRACY, a talk by Louis Römer

Date
Fri April 29th 2022, 3:30pm
Location
Building 50, Room 51A
Anthropology Colloquium Room
Center(s)
INDIRECTION, OPACITY, AND PARRHESIA: UNSETTLING IDEOLOGIES OF LANGUAGE, RACE, AND DEMOCRACY, a talk by Louis Römer

Please join the Center for Global Ethnography for “Indirection, Opacity, And Parrhesia: Unsettling Ideologies Of Language, Race, And Democracy,” a talk by Louis Römer, (Vassar College, Anthropology).

Friday, April 29th
3:30PM to 5:00PM
Building 50, Room 51A
Anthropology Colloquium Room

Attention Grad Students: If you wish to meet with Dr. Römer for a coffee chat with other students, please indicate your interest in the RSVP. 

☞ RSVP HERE.

 ABSTRACT

Presenting oneself as a speaker of truth to power has become a reliable rhetorical strategy among aspiring populists and demagogues. This climate makes a critical interrogation of parrhesia, or free speech, an urgent task. This talk analyzes political talk radio in Curaçao to argue that treating parrhesia as synonymous with directness and transparency can further marginalize racialized speakers while empowering those who enjoy racial privilege and social prestige.
 
Curaçaoan elite narratives posit Papiamentu speakers, and particularly those who are Black and working class, as incapable of the direct, transparent discourse necessary for an open, democratic society. This supposed linguistic pathology is attributed to post-slavery trauma and is also invoked in debates justifying Curaçao’s continued non-sovereign status as an overseas territory of the Netherlands. In contrast to such ideologies of linguistic pathology, Curaçaoan political talk radio programs exhibit many forms of courageous speech within a hostile regime of language where speakers risk social ostracism and acts of reprisal both due to the content and form of their utterances.
 
Analyzing parrhesia as courageous speech requires jettisoning ideological notions of direct and transparent speech while reorienting the focus on the power relations within a speech situation. This reorientation allows a more precise distinction between parrhesia as an act of courage within a hostile regime of language and the rhetorical spectacles of free speech where privileged speakers with access to large platforms adopt the pose of the frank contrarian to accrue prestige.
 

BIO
Dr. Louis Philippe Römer is Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Vassar College. His current research focuses on the language, race, media in the Atlantic world and specifically on the Dutch colonial empire and its enduring presence in the Caribbean. Römer studies how people use language, culture, and technology to create visions of the future in Caribbean public spheres. Römer is currently working on a book titled Strategic Ambiguities: Race, Class, and Populism on the Caribbean Airwaves, an examination of how populist discourse transforms race and class identities into badges of political loyalty and shifts the horizon of political possibility. Römer’s research has been supported by the Wenner Gren Foundation and by the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds of the Netherlands, among other sources. His writing in this vein has appeared in Somatosphere, Anthrodendum, and Footnotes, and also news outlets such as Al Jazeera English, the Daily Maverick (South Africa), Kouti Pandoras (Greece), Lilith Magazine (Netherlands), and Extra (Curaçao).

For any questions about the event, please contact David Stentiford, ds1 [at] stanford.edu (ds1[at]stanford[dot]edu).