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Between Silence and Speech: Autoethnography as an Otherness-Resisting Practice

Calanit Tsalach
Qualitative Inquiry 2013 19: 71
DOI: 10.1177/1077800412462986
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0412462986Qualitative InquiryTsalach
The Author(s) 2013

QIX19210.1177/107780

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Between Silence and Speech:

Autoethnography as an OthernessResisting Practice

Qualitative Inquiry
19(2) 7180
The Author(s) 2013
Reprints and permission:
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DOI: 10.1177/1077800412462986
http://qix.sagepub.com

Calanit Tsalach1

Abstract
In this article I wish to trace three everyday moments in which my Mizrahi Ethnic Identity intersects with the academic
one, and then extract experiences of ethnic otherness that are built within those moments. Exploring these moments
while considering Mizrahi identity construction, practices of otherness, and terms of silences enables a more nuanced
understanding of the ways in which hegemonic practices work and oppress Mizrahi subjects, and how these subjects work
against them.
Throughout these described moments, Mizrahi ethnicity is marked as troublesome, inferior, or as an Other that is forced
to struggle to find its place. It is constructed as opposed to, or as a threat to the academic. Throughout these described
moments I remain silent. My voice is given back to me through this autoethnographic text. In this way, autoethnography is
also a way to oppose otherness due to its power to see these moments of ethnic otherness and resist them.
Keywords
otherness, autoethnography, silence, Mizrahi ethnic identity, academic identity

I position myself herenowvisiting my past, doing field

work, performative living my life as whole. I position
myself herein the academic public spaceas an indigenous ethnographer: as a member whose membership is not
mine . . . yet. I position myself here to decolonize inquiry,
to decolonize academia.
Claudio Moreira, 2008, p. 679

Mizahi ethnicity is discussed in literature in various contexts, but usually much less through centering on experiences and storytelling, although such writing allows for a
more sophisticated understanding of how hegemonic practices work and suppress Mizrahi subjects (Motzafi-Haller,
1997). In this article, I wish to trace three everyday moments
in which my Mizrahi ethnicity intersects with my academic
identity. I will explore and delve into experiences of ethnic
otherness within these moments and analyze the construction of Mizrahi ethnicity, practices of otherness, and the
terms of silence that operate there in such instances.
Mizrahi is a term relating to Jews who immigrated to
Israel from West Asian and North African countries mainly
in the late 1940s to 1960s. Within the Zionist view, these
Jews arrived from far-flung corners of the globe to the
Promised Land, where they became one entity. Their Mizrahi
identity was invented within the process of the Zionist
invention of the Jewish Nation (Shohat, 2001). In this

process, Jews of different ethnicities and cultures like Iran,

Morocco, Tunisia, Yemen, or Iraq, like my own family,
became a homogeneous categoryMizrahi. Moreover, rather
than being discussed as part of the social construction of the
conflict between ethnic groups in Israel, these immigrants
from Muslim countries were perceived, in an Orientalist
manner, as blocking the Zionist ethos of Israel as a White,
Western nation (Dahan-Kalev, 2006).
Mizrahi identity often writes itself out of a wounded
place (Pedaya, 2006). The wound that I speak about here is
located at the heart of academia, where an encounter takes
place between Mizrahi identity and Israeliness. It is at this
very place that the distinction between the researcher who
knows and the object of knowledge that can only be known
is drawn, resulting in a deep epistemic wound.
The moments that I will analyze are documented using
autoethnography, a form of self-narrative located in a social
context (de Freitas & Paton, 2009). Ellis and Bochner (2000)
describe autoethnography as a systematic sociological introspection where the researcher begins with her feelings and
1

Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel

Corresponding Author:
Calanit Tsalach, Spitzer Department of Social Work, Ben-Gurion
University of the Negev, P.O.B. 653, Beer-Sheva, Israel 84105
Email: tsalachc@bgu.ac.il

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Qualitative Inquiry 19(2)

memories, and uses reflexive writing practices to move

back and forth between personal narratives, wider contexts,
and social forms. Autoethnography, then, can be thought of
as a form of identity politics, the exercise of the phrase the
personal is the political.
Mary Louise Pratt (1996) defines autoethnographic texts
as one of the reactions that characterize the colonial encounter, and she therefore views them as pertaining to the relationship between the conquered and the conqueror, and to
modes of resistance to dominant discourses provided by the
native story. If ethnographic texts are texts in which
European colonial subjects present themselves and their others (usually their subordinated others), then an autoethnographic text is a text in which people undertake to describe
themselves in ways that engage with representations others
have made of them (p. 28).
In the moments I will present in my article, I remain
mostly silent. Margaret Montoya (2000) argues that silence
is an aspect of communication that is linked to ones culture
and may also be correlated with ones racial and ethnic
identity. In a partial response to Montoyas invitation from
scholars to notice and attend to silence as it used by people
of color, especially in academic spaces, I will examine these
moments in relation to conditions of silence. This autoethnographic text, so I will argue, enables me to mark my
silences, politicize and verbalize them and, eventually,
resist otherness.

First MomentBlessings
and Babot at Sapir College
In March 2009, I participated in a conference at Sapir
College, a college located in the south of Israel, an area
which is often referred to as the unprivileged periphery in
relationship to the privileged center of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv,
and the Coastal strip. The college is located near the border
with Gaza, and in the proximity of Sderot and Netivot, two
development towns, where in the 1950s the Israeli government provided public housing for immigrants to develop
the area. In the rest of Israel, these southern towns are
known primarily as the site for the holy grave of the Baba
Salia popular religious leader, whose burial place has
become a site for prayers and believers. Other popular religious leaders have built communities in these areas attracting multitudes of visitors asking for blessings. These
charismatic leaders and their followers are mostly Mizrahi.
Given its social and physical location, Sapir College promotes itself as an attractive educational option for students
from the periphery. For example, two years prior to this
conference, in a Southern Film Festival, the president of
Sapir College declared in his opening speech that
one of the main problems of Israeli society is that it
speaks in one voice [. . .] that its cultural space

revolves around the center of Israel. Israeli society,

however, is a society that exceeds these boundaries,
and it doesnt have an opportunity to express its
voice. Here in Sderot, Netivot, Sapir Collegewe
say: there are other layers of society whose voices are
not heard, and we are their loudspeaker. (Matatias,
2007)
The conference is titled Women, Gender and Periphery
and offers different sessions, including several on religion
and ethnicity. In a building called the Academia Building, in
auditorium 9202, still only half full, the conference begins.
I sit in one of the front rows. The opening session includes
a number of greetings by academic functionaries in addition
to the main lecture, as is customary in Israel. The first is
presented by the same president of the college. The chair of
the session invites him to present his blessings (a word that
has the same meaning as greetings in Hebrew). She then
takes pains to correct herself and says that the president
does not like to give his blessing and that is why she invites
him to only say a few words. The first statement and its
correction become clear when the president rises to speak.
The president is about 70 years old, he has gray hair, and
is wearing neat, semitailored attire. He approaches the
microphone and explains that there is no need for his blessings as there are enough Babot all around. The Babot to
which he refers are those popular Mizrahi religious leaders,
surrounding Sapir College. As I have mentioned earlier,
many people visit them and request their help as healers and
miracle workers. The charismatic leaders and their believers are studied abundantly by academia, usually as the
exotic other dwelling in our midst. Critics of the popular
religion they represent often present these matters of holy
rituals, faith, and miracles in terms of deceit and trickery on
the part of the leaders.
There are enough Babot all around, says the president
of the college. Smiles and light giggling in the audience indicate that his punch line was understood. Perhaps they were
also giggling due to embarrassment, anger, or pain. I am not
sure how aware the college president was to the possible significance of his words, but the exchanges between him and
the panel chair and organizer of the conference, also a college professor, suggests that it is not accidental but rather a
recurrent conduct, familiar and known at the college.
In this short sentence, seemingly banal and inconsequential, but also ironic and belittling, the college president
draws an imaginary line that distinguishes between the
Babot and their believers, and the college, the conference,
and its attendees; a line that discerns between the first Israel
and the Other Israel. Between the educated, enlightened,
secular, western Israel, and the faltering, primitive, religious, oriental, foreign Israel.
In order to emphasize the rational, modern, scientific,
and cultural center, folkloristic beliefs, religious rituals, and

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myths are constructed as its opposition, and as indicators, if
not the cause, of backwardness and ignorance. Embodying
exactly the opposite of what Sapir College and the academia
had set out to accomplish. The very opposite of the white
mask, through which the proper Israeli Society wishes to
see itself (Markovich & Alon, 2007). Uri Cohen (2005)
potently describes this with a quotation on the founding of
the first university in Israel claiming that science is the
wall protecting [us] from Levantine assimilation (p. 233).
Estrangement, rendering something foreign, is often done
by constructing otherness of place and consciousness. Yassif
(1995) describes how the geographic distance between center and periphery has always been a primary factor of
estrangement. The more the distance between them grows,
the easier it is to see beliefs and customs as other, strange,
foreign, and different from ours. But Sapir College is
located in the heart of the geographic periphery, a stones
throw away from Netivot and Sderot, and therefore it is necessary for its president to repeat and emphasize this fluid
border, to strengthen it by constructing otherness of consciousness. In so doing, he exchanges the ethnic divide,
usually expressed in the polarization of center and periphery, with a cultural divide between Sapir College and its
surroundings.
There are enough Babot all around says the president
and indicates the line. According to this equation can those
who believe in Babot also be rational? Can they find themselves in an academic conference? Can their children be
students? Pursue doctoral studies? God forbid become professors? On the surface it seems impossible. The marking
and delineating of borders by the president is a move that
exposes a message that it is not possible to be on both sides
of the indicated line. Both the development towns and Sapir
College. Both the Babot and the conference on Women,
Gender, and Periphery. Both folklore and scientific knowledge. Maybe even both a Mizrahi Jew and an academic
researcher. As if we were speaking about two opposites,
parallel universes, water, and oil.
And maybe it is some sort of a term being made by the
college president, according to which, to be present in the
conferencenot as an object of researchone should cross
the marked line, leaving ones traditional baggage outside
the gates of the college, so as not to set off the security detectors, upon entering the hallmark of scientific knowledge.
This drawing of the line by the president of Sapir
College, assumes that all of those present are on the right
side of this line. The inclusion of the audience constructs
them as an imagined community. Yet the line that is drawn,
as if incidentally, leaves many people on the outside. I too,
feel as if I am being pushed forcefully, almost violently, outside of the borderline, to what Stuart Hall (1997) calls symbolic exile. His words hit my nerves. I immediately stand by
the Babot. I can feel insult, exclusion, pain, and anger stirring in me. Anger resides in you writes Robin Boylorn

(2006) in her narrative about her experience as a Black PhD

student in a predominantly White academic institution. It
is nestled in your belly, next to determination and ambition
(p. 661). This silent rage can serve as empowerment for
women of color in the academy, granting them clarity
regarding racism and a reminder of the need to politicize the
self (Rodriguez, 2011).
I hear the president of Sapir College and I understand that
for him, my ethnicity will always be disturbing, improper,
illegitimate, staining. That I will always have to monitor it,
regulate it, lower its voice, just like my mother used to do
when her father listened to the famous Iraqi singers Saleh
and Daoud Al-Kuwaiti on their old radio.
I wonder who I am there; which part of me hears the presidents words? Where do I belong? Where can I stand?
Which type of choices am I being asked to make? What does
it mean to me? Is this a personal or an academic issue, am I
the minority or the majority, in or out, center or margin, the
one who knows, or maybe just the one who can be known?
The native intellectual, states Frantz Fanon (1962/1968),
feels that he is becoming estranged, the living haunt of contradictions that run the risk of becoming insurmountable.
It seems that despite the postmodernist discourse of multiple identities, as well as theories that emphasize the natives
knowledge, research still relies on stable and fixed identities
and subjectivities, regarding both the researcher as the
knower and the native as knowable. An epistemic
acknowledgment of a knowing native or the native as a
knower, argue Russel y Rodgriguez (2002), threatens this
stability. Consequently, as a Mizrahi Jewish researcher writing about Mizrahi Jews in Israel, my standpoint is constructed as relying on contradictory agendas, separated
spaces that do not allow for academic terra firma.
I look around, assuming that there are other people from
similar backgrounds like my own, choosing to conform to
this line marked by the college president without challenging it. Maybe it is too hard, too painful, or too distant. Maybe
it is just not such a high price to pay in order to enter the
academia. And besides, who really wants to hold on to an
identity marked as so inferior? Yet I cannot help sensing this
price. With the ongoing will to belong pecking at the back of
my head, I see how the expert, the authority, the president of the college hosting the conference, closes this space
from me, keeping it away from me and leaving me outside.
Sitting there, I exchange a meaningful, hurting glance
with a friend sitting nearby. He rolls his eyes without words
as if to say I understand. I feel an enormous dissonance
and ponder whether I should say something, but I remain
silent. While womens silences are often coerced, we have
also been socialized to remain silent (Montoya, 2000),
especially in the academic world (Rodriguez, 2011). I am
silent even in situations of intense emotions also because I
was brought up well. I know how to behaveI know how
to be silent. I feel anger, pain, frustration, but still I am not

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Qualitative Inquiry 19(2)

talking. How can I cross this moment and find a voice to

speak, overcoming the disturbing boundaries set by the
president of the college?

Second MomentBarbecuing
at the Kreitman Fellows Club
The Kreitman Foundation is one of the most prestigious
scholarships in Israel, and it offers an academic enrichment program that takes place at the Kreitman Fellows
Club, a room whose door can only be opened by swiping a
magnetic card. The Kreitman Club includes computers,
colored printers, daily newspapers, comfortable sofas,
refreshments, and even a nice coffee machine. In other
words, all the means needed for young scholars to devote
their energies to studying, conducting research, and developing professionally.
The lecture I am attending centers on analyzing masculinity and nationalism in Israel by examining the people celebrating Independence Day by barbecuing at a large public
park in Jerusalem. There are about fifteen people in attendance, mostly men, Kreitman Fellows, doctoral students,
and young professors. I look around and do what I always
do when I arrive somewhereI read others through visible
signs on their bodies; counting heads; sorting skin colors and
other identifying marks; distinguishing between those that I
am sure of, from those who are only maybe. At the same
time, I am also blaming myself for this marking and labeling. At the end of my count, I am left with three or four
people besides myself who I perceive as possessing a
Mizrahi ethnic identity.
Right at the onset, the speaker explains that the people
celebrating at the park are Mizrahi, religious, lower-class
Jews. The atmosphere at the park, he reports, is crowded,
dense, vulgar, and sweaty. He has no idea why anyone
would want to celebrate this way. His depiction of the head
of the family leaving early in the morning to secure land at
the park brings smiles to those present. These smiles do not
reveal any familiarity with the description. On the contrary,
the words accompanying them show that barbecuing publicly at the park on Independence Day is something strange
to them, something exotic that only other people do. The
overall framing of the phenomenon is of something different, inferior, distant. Barbecuing at the public park in
Jerusalem, it seems, is as far from the lecture at the Kreitman
Club, as Sapir College and its president are from the Babot
among whom they sit.
At the end of the presentation one of the participants
wondered out loud why the speaker was analyzing this particular ritual, and how it could possibly say anything about
Israeli society. He questioned the basis for the speakers
assertion that it is such a common practice, when none of
the people he knows, including those present at the lecture,
celebrate Independence Day in this manner. The lecturer

answered him with the words I know what you mean, you
are in the right place, I also dont celebrate like this, but a lot
of people do.
The unstated assumption in both speakers words is that
none of the people present in the heart of academic excellence should identify themselves in the anthropological
description of the lecturer. You are in the right place he
answers, and all I could think about is my mom, who immediately after viewing the traditional torch lighting ceremony
on television, hurries into the kitchen to prepare the meat for
tomorrows barbecue. I think of my dad, whom on
Independence Day, we deport before sunrise to find a
place for us in the forests of Mount Caramel Park. I think of
the dense, crowded, sweaty but also delicious and cozy family barbecue. And I wonder whether it is me who is out of
place here, or maybe just in an Other place? Part of an Other
people? I wonder what I should think about how these
Othered peopleincluding my family and many others
besides themcelebrate Independence Day, and whether
they-we can enter the academic sphere not only as an exotic
phenomenon defining the imagined Israel. For this anthropological description of people celebrating in the park is in
line with the traditional manner in which many social scientists have constructed Mizrahi people along the years as colorful and marginal populations.
I sit there and cant decide whether to say something. It is
the first lecture I am attending as part of my Kreitman scholarship and I remain silent. When I later tell a friend about it,
she teases me and asks why I did not admit that it was exactly
how I celebrate Independence Day. I think of Pierre Bourdieu
(1984/1993) who simulates every linguistic situation to a
market in which each speaker is marketing his products
depending on the forecast of profits and penalties he expects
to receive. Sherene Razack also discusses this when she
critically examines what happens when White people look at
people of color talking. She exhorts us to direct our attention
to the conditions of communication and knowledge production that prevail, calculating who can speak and how they are
likely to be heard. This way of seeing and hearing the world
is connected to racial and ethnic superiority (Montoya,
2000). Why would I mark myself, then, as part of something
that is constructed as so inferior and out of place?
When I look around, I cannot help but think about the
social organization of silence and wonder if there are others
in the room who agree to publicly ignore something that
they also see and notice. Whether they, like me, choose to
remain silent. According to Eviatar Zerubavel (2006) the
distinction between what we see and what we ignore is not
natural or neutral. Ignoring something does not mean just
not paying attention to it. Often it is a result of pressure that
comes from social norms of attention designed to distinguish between what we conventionally perceive as worthy
of our attention and what should be ignored and dismissed
as background noise. In addition to these norms, it is also

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about social and political constraints. After all, social relationships usually involve power, and silence and denial are
often products of asymmetrical power relations. Thus, what
we pay attention to and validate, is in part a function of how
much power we have.
In Bourdieus (1984/1993) terms, we can think of a space
of speech and silence as a field in which any expression is
the product of the relation between an interest to express
and a censorship determined by the structure of the field in
which it is being expressed. Accordingly, those who enter
the field are located within the existing power structure that
determines whether they will receive the right to speak or
whether this will be deprived of them in different ways,
whether they will get credit or not, and so on. In this manner, the social conditions that constitute the field in which
discourse is produced determine what can be said, what is
impossible to say, and what should not be named.
In this context, the French literary critic Pierre Macherey
(1978) argues that what is important in a work is what it
does not say (p. 87). Macherey implies that in analyzing a
text, we have to pay attention also to its omissions and
exclusions. The subaltern subject-position may be traced
only through its negative traces (Britton, 1999). Following
him, Gayatry Spivak (1988) maintains that we can set up a
system whose task is measuring silences, a task that is particularly relevant to the question of subaltern consciousness. Silence, particularly that of students of color can
potentially be a form of resistance to oppression, but more
often, it is a form of self-censoring (Montoya, 2000), the
gray area of what Araf-Bader (2006) calls silent talks.
Therefore, when we come to talk about silence, it is easier
to point out clear and defined conditions of silencing, but
much harder to mark procedures of self-censorship.

Third MomentEthnic Trash

at Bar-Ilan University
The visual culture studies workshop at Bar-Ilan University
offers a platform to discuss critical and reflective research
methodologies. In one of the sessions Im attending, there
is a lecture on Mizrahi ethnic films as a community instrument. The lecture centers on movies created in the margins
of the canon of Israeli cinema. These movies, starred by
third class oriental singers, have what is called Turkish
style plotsmelodramas about infidelity, poverty, drugs,
prostitution, and families falling apart. In spite of their
popularity among some audiences, especially working class
and ethnic minorities, these movies are perceived as inferior and are rejected out of what is defined as cultural
(Banai, 2004). Artistically these are small budget movies
with motifs such as poor play, cinematic mistakes (shooting
from the opposite angles, unreliable locations, inappropriate lighting, etc.), flat characters, and simplicity of plot
(Aharoni, 2009).

The lecturer wishes to discuss these ethnic films as a cinema that constitutes an alternative to hegemony; a cinema
with a conscious choice not to act according to rules of the
genre and stick to a poor budget, pathos, melodramatic plot,
excess and exaggeration. These practices, he explains, are a
subversive mechanism, which represent and distribute a
unique subculture of ethnicity and classEthnic Trash
that in practice is a radical reaction to negative representations and stereotypes of Mizrahi identity by the mainstream
Israeli culture.
After this promising opening, he shows a clip from a
typical movie of this genre. Yet while it plays, he frames it
in a variety of comments and gestures that do not leave any
doubt regarding the distance he wishes to mark between
himself and what is projected on the screen. Pay attention
to the living room, he says, the gun was bought in the flea
market for two dollars. Carefully observe the people. This is
always a moment when the music becomes dramatic. At a
scene of shooting, he calms down and ridicules that, in this
case the man was shot in the head, sometimes its in the
heart, take it easy, it doesnt really mean he will die. The
audience does not need much more, and is completely swept
into the joke. In front of my eyes, the scene morphs into
what Stuart Hall (1997) calls a spectacle of otherness.
Inequality is revealed as a lack of respect, shame, and public humiliation (Amor, 2008, para. 12).
As in the lecture at the Kreitman Club, there is a general
assumption that there is no one among those present for
whom this spectacle is familiar or relevant. The marginality
of the people related to these ethnic films, as well as the
people barbecuing on Independence Day or seeking the
blessings of the Babot, is a fascinating and entertaining discovery. Yet it is not really a revelation. People like the ones
being shown on the screen are hardly a revelation to most
people living their lives in similar surroundings, at the margins of Israeli society.
I sit there and hear my heart pounding. I get up and walk
two rows ahead, where my supervisor is sitting, trying to
figure out whether she feels the same way. My supervisor
nods and says, Its really disgusting. Suddenly, I realize
something about the difference in our positions: she identifies the otherness being constructed into the event and finds
it problematic, while I take it as a personal attack, as if
someone is talking about me, laughing at me, threatening
me, negating me. At this moment, my racialized identity
works as a pair of epistemic binoculars from which certain
layers of reality become visible, while they remain less
accessible and relevant to members of other identity groups
(Alcoff, 2006).
The threat that I feel has to do with understanding that I
do not have a place there, and it also involves a fear of being
recognized, of having someone discover that I am much
closer to those presented on the screen than to the people
enjoying themselves observing them; that it is only this time

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Qualitative Inquiry 19(2)

that I managed to sneak in, and immediately the inferior

ethnic detector will be put to work. The fact that I am not
clearly marked as such helps me blend in rather than stand
out, yet it also allows me to see how others are treated.
I look around, pretty sure that any minute someone will
say something or leave the hall in protest. But on the contrary,
when the clip continues and one of the leading characters, an
obese ethnic singer enters the frame, the speakers words of
explanation are not even needed. The audience is laughing
hysterically, fascinated by the cinematic trash in front of
them. Between the various cuts of scenes, the reactions are
getting more intensified. In this manner, at the presence of the
most enlightened audience, among critical researchers dealing with various Others, such as gays, Palestinians, and
Bedouin women, there is an ethnic Mizrahi spectacle taking
place with the silent consent of all those present. How ironic
it is to find that under the appearance of critical alternativesubversive discourse, between discussions on hearing the
voice of the Others and resisting Orientalism, the construction of Mizrahi otherness is rampant.
It seems that gays, Bedouins, and Palestinians are distant
enough not to constitute a real threat. Encounter with the
Mizrahi Other, however, requires those present to position
themselves and reflect about their location within the current power structure. This reflection becomes even more
complex, since the productethnic trash cinemais constructed as carrying inferior value and challenges their selfperception as enlightened and liberal people. In reaction,
these Others are ridiculed and symbolically exiled outside
of the social context (Hazan, 1994).
Seyla Benhabib (1985) distinguishes between two conceptions of the relations of self-otherthe generalized other
and the concrete other. From the standpoint of the generalized other, each individual is perceived as a rational person
entitled to the same rights and obligations as we are; our
attitude to him is subject to norms of formal equality and
reciprocity. These are rooted in universal commitment as
perceived by classic theories of justice and law, and established in democratic government through the recognition of
human rights, civil rights, and political rights. The starting
point of the concrete other, however, requires us to see any
rational being as an individual with a life history, a concrete
and specific identity and emotional structure. Our attitude
to the other here is subject to norms of equality and mutual
reciprocity rooted in ethical relations. Differences between
the self and other in this case are complementary and not
exclusive of each other (Benhabib, 1992).
To recognize only the generalized other leads to a discourse based solely on rights and obligations, without reference to human needs and without recognition of the
importance of norms such as friendship, solidarity, love, and
compassion. The critical discourse at the university workshop acknowledges the Mizrahi ethnicity described in the
movies only as the generalized other. For the concrete

Mizrahi Others on the screen, or, God forbid, who managed

to sneak in to the lecture, there is no place. Their otherness
is their entrance card to the workshop. And the speaker, in
complicity with the audience, will not let them escape this
early typecasting.
Thus, while the structured marginality of Mizrahi ethnicity serves an academic and social purpose, the Mizrahi subjects themselves lose their visibility and meaning (Hazan,
1994). Instead of really seeing them and voicing the sound
of otherness loud and clear, we are left with a rhetoric of softened liberal diversity regarding the legitimacy of different
cultural groups (Yona & Shenhav, 2005). As Cohen (2001)
maintains, Israeli society may be at the point where it recognizes that there are others, whose voices are indeed permissible, appropriate, and need to be heard, but still only from
the perspective of the dominant society, rather than through a
broader vision of taking responsibility for these others.
The movement of the speaker and his ambivalent attitude is fascinating. Despite his opening statements, the
speaker cannot hide his opinion of these movies, an opinion
that is itself part of the atmosphere against which he argues,
but that he also effectively reproduces. He makes declarations about subversion and a critical standpoint, but in fact
cannot or does not dare break the mainstream hegemonic
climate. In so doing, like the President of Sapir College, he
draws a line, a boundary, marking the normative and acceptable, and the nonnormative and inacceptable; the in place
and the out of place, the self and the other. This epistemic
violence reinstates order. The one who represents, therefore, is also the one who excludes.
Sitting there, I am already memorizing my pointed
response, one that will start with doubting the methodology
and theoretical framework of the presenter, and will end by
saying that what we have just seen was not an ethnic trash
and a poor epic, but rather an academic trash and a poor
criticism. But this panel turns out to be interior, without outside responses. I want to do something, say that it is really
unthinkable, yet I do not want to violate the order and I
remain silenced, ashamed. Shame, according to Ziv (2008),
is the indicator of hegemony, the shepherd pushing the subject back into the ranks of the herd. Yet it is also an opportunity for a dialectical relationship between domination and
agency, between denial of recognition and recognition, and
between the threat of subject deconstruction and the opportunity to reestablish it.
My shame, anger, and frustration later turn into tears.
Why? my supervisor asks when we walk to her car. Do
you see these films? Is it you there? In his book, The
Wretched of the Earth, Fanon (1962/1968) writes that since
colonialism is a systematic negation of the Other and a
refusal to see in him any human characteristic, it urges him
to constantly ask himself the question Who am I really?
This question becomes more acute when the original culture is underneath the dominant colonial culture. Individuals

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in such societies suffer from the pain of what Fanon defines
as a split-hybrid existencean attempt to live at the same
time as two different contrasting persons and negotiate
between different identities and value systems. Following
him, Dangarembga (1989) describes the formation of an
internal othernesssituations of ambivalence, uncertainty,
the blurring of cultural boundaries and haziness between
the inside and the outside. She calls this the nervous condition of the native trying to find his place.
My supervisors question echoes in me for a long time. I
wonder whether it is me there on screen. Why do I care so
much? Maybe I am appropriating a pain that is not truly
mine. Sometimes it seems that if I am not close enough, if I
am not among those who seek blessings from the Babot, or
did not grow up watching ethnic trash films, I must cooperate with this spectacle of otherness, with the silence protecting me there. Its violation would mark me immediately;
would require me to explain, to justify, to take a side.
Paradoxically, despite the silence protecting me, it is
clear that at this moment I voluntarily choose to stand there.
To stand where ethnicity meets class till they seem inseparable; to stand where Mizrahi ethnicity is perceived as poor,
weepy, irrational, loaded with excess and exaggeration. The
same link that runs between the Babot, barbecuing on
Independence Day, and ethnic trash movies. At this point
otherness is constructed, and at this point I find myself identifying, belonging, knowing that a lot of what these films
represent regarding ethnicity and class is not really strange,
other, far from me.
So yes, it is also me there.
Ignoring this seems to alienate me. The subaltern intellectual, writes Fanon (1962/1968), knows the danger lurking
him, the danger of severing ties with his people. To ensure
his salvation and to avoid the superiority of the White culture he feels the need to return to unknown roots, to even get
lost within his barbarian people, because he feels he is
becoming estranged from himself, the living haunt of contradictions that run the risk of becoming insurmountable.

Voicing Silence: Autoethnography

as an Otherness-Resisting Practice
In this article, I have tried to capture three daily moments
of ethnic otherness in academic spaces, and linger on them.
Writing about experiences of ethnic otherness might be
perceived as a problematic move, suggesting possible conforming to external stereotyping, and maybe even acceptance of hegemonic discourse that constructs the Mizrahi
subjectmeas a problem. Yet for me, writing about and
within my experiences of otherness is also a demonstration
of power and a site for critical investigation. If the writer is
not quite at home, it allows her to transcend everyday
perceptions of the self and society, and to some extent
rewrite them (Reed-Danahay, 1997). As Richardson (1994)

maintains, it is through telling our stories that we create

ourselves, validate our identity, and give meaning to our
pain. This turns the margins into an alternative sphere for
the development of critical and political consciousness
(hooks, 2000), where Others can be heard and represented
(Young, 2003).
Focusing directly on oppressive experiences often means
saying what cannot be said and attempting to learn what is
not knowable. That is to say, rather than seeing knowledge
as something that is available in a transparent way, speaking
about these moments of otherness as a type of epistemic
erasure reveals that knowledge is always an assertion of
ideology and reminds us of what cannot be known, what has
been erased, and the process by which this is done. Once
you recognize what is unknowable, academic authority is
undermined and the control it is based upon fissures (Hong,
2008). Although I point to my own experience, I would like
to think that this testimony says something about knowledge as whole, about its borders, its oppressiveness, and its
potential. Moreover, if violence against ethnic bodies is
executed via epistemic means, then the complementary act
must be a different type of knowledge production that can
create a different space within the academy. This form of
knowledge production would enable us to reimagine the
university as a site where various kinds of intellectual
projectsincluding autoethnographic projectsmay emerge
(Hong, 2008). In this way, academia can also be a source of
strength and not only of pain.
Krumer-Nevo and Sidi (2012) identify textual mechanisms that create othering in academic writing. As I have
tried to show in this article, creating othering is not restricted
to writing, but prevails in other academic spaces as well,
even allegedly critical ones, and can serve to tell us something about the strength of hegemonic discourse. These
mechanisms produce alienation and social distance at the
research encounter, which in turn creates otherness (KrumerNevo & Sidi, 2012). In similar manner, the speakers during
the moments I have outlined in this article speak in a hegemonic theoretical voice in order to distance themselves
from what is perceived and constructed as inappropriate,
inferior, and nonacademic.
Throughout the analytic description of these moments,
Mizrahi ethnicity is marked as troublesome, inferior, or as an
Other forced to struggle to find its place. In my analysis of
the first moment, it is described as a threatening alternative
cultural force; during the second moment it is an object of
anthropological research; and in the third moment it is a
symbol of low, inferior culture. In each case, it is an object
being discussed, constructed as opposed to, or as a threat to
academic identity. It seems that the ethnic endangers us
native researchers because it is perceived and valued as not
appropriate enough. Value is given to holding on to the intellectual, the theoretical, and the academic, all of which polish
the personal stains and give us our status in the academic

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Qualitative Inquiry 19(2)

field. But cant we break through this discourse? After all,

for me it is actually the academic that prevents me from
forgetting, from alienating, and from leaving my people
behind, and instead, allows me to connect, belong, and be
present. Therefore, I insist on not giving up on marking suppression and voicing the silences. I insist on speaking academically with an ethnic accent.
In the moments I trace in my article, I remain mostly
silent. At times, it is a silence that involves giving up
expressing intense emotions publicly. At times, it is a protective silence, keeping me from self-marking in a setting
that constructs my ethnicity as inferior. Yet at the same
time, this silence also strengthens the hierarchic dichotomy
between my ethnic and academic identity, a separation that
I am trying to contest. Linda Alcoff (2006) writes that the
truth of racial and gendered identities is largely considered
something that can be seen. Consequently, a threatening
dependency is developed between what is real and what is
hidden. The feeling that if I say anything at the lecture, Ill
expose my hidden ethnic identity, constructs what is hidden as the true essence of my nature, my real self, and what
is supposedly outmy academic identityas not truth
or as a disguise. Moreover, it leaves the academic identity
associated with my public identity, while my ethnic identity remains inside the body. Yet what is so-called out
my presence at the lecture, my intellectual ambitions, my
academic identityis not nonethnic, and it is a part of me,
just the same.
I am not sure of the exact conditions that would enable
me not to remain quiet and censor my words and speech, or
how such speech might have sounded in each of these
moments, but in retrospect, it is clear to me that my silence
is more complex than merely a form of avoidance. Within
the experience of these moments, I look up and look around;
looking for recognition, an echo, feedback that will remind
me it is not just in my head. Those who experience these
moments of otherness are not once required to experience
them quietly. The dominant social rules in multicultural
societies perceive it as inappropriate or tactless to engage
with differences in public spaces. Those who point to these
moments are accused of exaggerating, being too sensitive,
making a fuss about nothing, or simply misunderstanding
the situation. The courage to bring such moments into discursive consciousness stands against denial and powerful
acts of silencing that can cause subaltern people to feel like
they have lost their sanity (Young, 1990).
Violating the silence, argues Benjamin (2003), is a process where social relations hitherto conducted by hegemonic powers of oppression, and therefore characterized by
alleged harmony, adaptation, and acceptanceor actually by
silencenow change through social conflict and require
renewed negotiation on conditions and order. In this sense,
we can examine the violation of silence and silencing not
only as an analysis of the relative strength between competing

meanings of public discourses but also in terms of a change

in how we understand ourselves within this interaction and
the way we gain power by redefining ways to speak and
strengthening identification with the sources of identity
(Benjamin, 2003). Through this reflective move, we are
able to give voice to issues and ways of speaking that seem
inappropriate in this social interaction and begin negotiations regarding the definitions.
Thus my silences are also a gaze, an effort to relocate,
and mostly, an attempt to find a language to voice my pain.
As I write this text, I know that my silence is also a kind of
inner space in which work is being done, mainly regarding
highlighting the silences, politicizing them, andyes, also
verbalizing them, pushing what was private to the public
eye, as an act of resistance to oppression. In this sense,
silence can also be performative because of its production of
action, interpretation, and consequence (MacLure, Holmes,
Jones, & MacRae, 2010). Although silencing exists, there is
also the subversion of precisely what structures this silence
(Bhattacharya, 2009). Montoya (2000) adds that because of
the role academics play in the production and maintenance
of the forces of hegemony, we can use silence in a counterhegemonic manner, that is, we can learn to hear it and
inquire into its meanings, learn to employ it as a means of
resistance, and subvert the dominant conventions. This is
the undermining that writing allows me. So I do not only
testify to suppression but also act against it.
During the moments I described above, I focused on my
silences. If, as Alcoff (2006) argues, our racialized identities work as epistemic binoculars that can capture certain
layers of reality, while leaving them less accessible and relevant for other people, one must ask how we hear the silence
of others. How attentive are we to the others? Are silenced
voices interested in the silence of others? Is there a desire
and ability for solidarity, a longing to belong to a cry that
transcends boundaries? In other words, can silences meet?
Just as autoethnography is about crossing borders, I think
the answer lies in breaking the dichotomy between those
who are silent and those who silence them. It is important to
remember that there is no full, static state of I vs. Other,
but rather these locations are hybrid and fluid (Riggins,
1997). To be an Other, maintains Sartre (Sartre, 2007), is an
experience that enables the recognition of the possibility that
you also have an Other. The understanding that otherness
can include you at any time, provides a more forgiving and
careful standpoint regarding the world. Politically, it means
that we can see the simultaneity inherent in the location of
the other and the fact that under the gaze of this other, I could
have been an Other too (Kaplansky, 2006).
Throughout the moments I described and analyzed, I
remained mostly silent. My voice is given back to me through
this autoethnographic text, which allows me to move between
different modes of silence and speech. As such, it offers a particular kind of cultural self-awareness regarding facets of my

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Tsalach
life as they are marked and tagged by the dominant group
(Pratt, 1996). Remaining silent will guarantee my erasure and
allow the colonizer to define who am I (Rodriguez, 2011).
In this way, this autoethnography is also a way to oppose
otherness (Richards, 2008) due to its power to see these
moments of ethnic otherness and resist them. It confronts
dominant forms of representation and power in an attempt
to reclaim, through self-reflection, representational spaces
that exclude certain individuals and groups, and relegates
them to the margins (Tierney, 1998).
Krumer-Nevo and Sidi (in press) suggest that research
methods that use narrative, dialogue, and reflexivity can
contribute to the mitigating of othering in academic writing.
Autoethnography can be one method that is in line with
these characteristics. Besides escaping the inevitable power
relations that representation carries, autoethnography brings
the subject and her history to the fore; it is contextual, particular, written out of a situated position, and uses reflexivity. In autoethnographic texts, the research subject who
writes the narrative on her own, as Krumer-Nevo and Sidi
(in press) suggest, has the strongest ontological and epistemological status, since she serves as not only the protagonist but also the writer, who defines the narratives content,
form, and point of view. Moreover, autoethnography can
give an embodied sense of the lived experience of otherness, affect readers, and therefore has the potential of creating an encounter across the great divide between the social
positions of individuals who would otherwise never meet.
This alternative ethnography does what bell hooks calls
repositioning (Boylorn, 2006); it gives voice to those who
are silenced, and enables them to say what cannot always be
said. Breaking the silence, according to Rodriguez (2011),
involves retraining ourselves to speak, to envision a new
world of freedom (p. 595). Such an act is critical to us as
marginalized people, leading to a possible change that
becomes a means to becoming subjects. In a paraphrase on
Gayatry Spivaks words, although the subaltern cannot
speak, it seems that, over time, they cannot remain silent.
Authors Note
This article is part of my PhD thesis under the supervision of Prof.
Michal Krumer-Nevo, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and
Dr. Yuval Yonay, University of Haifa. I thank Art Bochner,
Henriette Dahan-Kalev, and Orly Benjamin for their helpful comments on parts of earlier drafts.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with
respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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Bio
Calanit Tsalach is a doctoral candidate at the Spitzer Department
of Social Work and a member of the Israeli Center for Qualitative
Research of People and Societies, Ben-Gurion University of the
Negev, Israel. Her doctoral research is an autoethnography of
experiences of ethnic otherness in academic spaces. Her research
interests are qualitative methodologies, ethnicity, critical race theory, popular culture, and production of knowledge. She received
her masters degree in communication studies from the University
of Haifa. She is a Kreitman fellow and was recently the recipient
of the Wolf Foundation award.

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