The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture

by Kevin Quashie

African American culture is often considered expressive, dramatic, and even defiant. In The Sovereignty of Quiet, Kevin Quashie explores quiet as a different kind of expressiveness, one which characterizes a person’s desires, ambitions, hungers, vulnerabilities, and fears. Quiet is a metaphor for the inner life, and as such, enables a more nuanced understanding of black culture.

The book revisits such iconic moments as Tommie Smith and John Carlos’s protest at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics and Elizabeth Alexander’s reading at the 2009 inauguration of Barack Obama. Quashie also examines such landmark texts as Gwendolyn Brooks’s Maud Martha, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, and Toni Morrison’s Sula to move beyond the emphasis on resistance, and to suggest that concepts like surrender, dreaming, and waiting can remind us of the wealth of black humanity.

Genres: Nonfiction, Race, Theory, History, Philosophy, Essays, Social Justice

204 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 2012

About the author

Kevin Everod Quashie is Professor of English at Brown University and the author of The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture and Black Women, Identity, and Cultural Theory: (Un)Becoming the Subject.

Reviews

[Leslie · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautifully-considered and scholarly work.

(from page 133): "The representation of black subjectivity as resistant has become a convenient simplification of what is surely more complicated; it is an easy template that does not encourage deeper, closer interrogation of cultural texts and moments. Our understanding of black culture becomes flat, and our sense of what characterizes black representation appears as a list of familiar terms---expressiveness, resistance, colorful, loud, dramatic, doubled. What would it mean to consider black cultural identity through some other perspective, like quiet, like interiority? Indeed what makes a concept of quiet so important to thinking about black culture is that by and large, quiet is antithetical to how black culture is engaged."

[jess · Rating 5 out of 5]

kevin quashie blew my mind with this. the sublimeness, vulnerability, and unpredictability of interiority and quiet... it feels important to have the language and framework to understand black agency and humanity beyond how “resistance” has become a catch-all and public expression basically a demand. i think something like this, a meditation on interiority, could only come so powerfully from literary scholarship/the incredible canon of black feminist literature. it makes me think deeply about the work i hope to do as a historian and a writer and how it might be possible to multiply expressions of agency without subsuming everything to structuralism. i also want to think about quashie’s theorization of interiority and desire alongside eve tuck’s desire-based research and trinh t. minh-ha’s woman native other... which is quoted several times here and which i have never read!

also this prose like r u kidding:

Love demands a descent into the interior, leaves us filled with vulnerability and ambition and rage that rivals anything the social world can produce; it fosters connection without forgoing the particularity of the inner life. Love is the practice and the prize. (102)

[Danielle Charlemagne · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliant marshaling of Black Feminist Literature and Black Liberation movements to theorize around quiet —the wild vagaries of the interior life. I appreciate most reading this early iteration of what Quashie further develops in his 2021 book, Black Aliveness. Quashie’s writing captures the tenderness and clarity of one who has spent innumerable hours of quiet with his craft. Essential reading for Black Studies scholars for whom study is a haven.

[Viridiana Villalva Salas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great read for attempting to understand the concept of Black Quietude. As someone who is relatively new to this concept, Quashie can be a little confusing. However, if supplemented with the right materials, it can be understood and very beneficial.

[Josh Cayetano · Rating 5 out of 5]

Profound. Beautiful. Maybe even Sublime.

All hyperbole aside, this book felt like fresh water rushing through my mind. My semester has been dominated by discussions of the politics of resistance and I have allowed myself to be consumed by questions of politics. There is something refreshing about bringing to the fore a humanism that somehow goes beyond the cycle of white oppression and black resistance and the existentialism that goes beyond the essentialisms of "white" and "black" that have bound our discourse. I do not wish to jettison these terms too easily, but I only think that Quashie has managed to lift the reader's "third-eye" to the horizon, colored by imagination and desire.

Last week I asked a question about the "effectiveness" of a certain scene in Cox's book that dismissed what Quashie has put language to: the sacredness of interiority and, by extension, the sovereignty of quiet. I am impressed by how Quashie manages to distinguish quiet from both quietism and resistance without relinquishing the context in which we all live and move and have our being. In Quashie's book ethics and aesthetics supplant politics as the frame of analysis without disavowing the political reality that necessitates such a turn. For a rare moment, I have no questions, only reflection.

[Deb · Rating 5 out of 5]

An incredibly beautiful exploration of the strength and power of quiet. This is one of those books to be read over and over. I want to not just read it again, but drink it in, breathe it in. You don't need another summary, many have described the book better than I can, so I'll share some of the profound and perfect ways the author describes quiet in the book's conclusion...

"...quiet is inevitable, it is essential to humanity. It is a manner of being that is deep within us, a being this not always exactly quiet-it can be raging and wild, is a place of desire and anxiety; it holds all that is. Quiet is uncertain and it is sure; trembling and arrogant. Quite is faith in that it can embrace what there is little evidence of. Quiet is to feel deeply and feel what is deep. It is the space of interrogation, of being able to ask and ponder beyond what might be appropriate. A practice of knowing that is incomplete. Quiet is voluntary-it has to be chosen, it is a surrender. It is unconscious too, but it has to be chosen. It can be terror, and joy. Quiet is the syntax of possibility, the capacity of the inner life. It is the unappreciated grace of every person who is black. Quiet is inevitable, ones' fully absorbed life. Quiet is"

[Nic · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very strong first book by Quashie. For me, the best sections were the introduction, conclusion, and the chapters on Black nationalism and the one poetic form. His writing style is itself lovely and is probably part of what makes this book work so well. He really teaches us how to write about the expressiveness of the interior that isn’t publicly expressed and thus remains ineffable. I want to revisit Du Bois, who I haven’t read in a number of years. I just feel like Quashie misreads him in arguing that Du Bois more or less equates Blackness with publicness and postures of resistance only, especially at the end of The Souls of Black Folks when he writes on the sorrow songs (which Quashie himself does later without mentioning Du Bois). It was difficult to read this work while also reading Judith Butler, Foucault, Freud, Lacan, and Althusser (which I had been) since Quashie wants us to zero in on quiet, interiority, prayer, oneness and other “vagaries” (one of Quashie’s favorite words) without a deep consideration of just how much the semblance of an interior life is generated by our subjection in public life, which the authors I mentioned help demonstrate and clarify. But that’s not his project and I can’t fully hold him to that.

[Austin · Rating 5 out of 5]

an absolute marvel that speaks to the possibilities in that which is not public but still full of expression. a different way to make meaning in the world, a different way to engage. quiet but not silent. quiet but not ignorant. quiet or, love.

[Erika · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent, just excellent. A game changer in terms of some of my thinking. Gives a language to something that is missing in much of my research.