ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 addresses narrative voice. The focus is on how and when certain voices are absent, ignored, or silenced. Silencing is a form of epistemic violence. It supports the kind of ignorance that enables empowered people to deceive themselves about the cost of their privilege. The first part of the chapter explores how George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo reveals the workings and consequences of that kind of ignorance in the USA, in a segregated graveyard full of ghosts at a moment just before the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery. The second part of the chapter then tracks how Preti Taneja, in her epic of contemporary India We That Are Young, shows violent silencing in a misogynist patriarchy that is marked by a colonial past. We That Are Young subversively lifts the curtain of silence that hides necro-pleasure: the pleasure powerful people take in the violent abjection of other living beings.
