The Authors of Silence is a play and course designed to integrate performance and pedagogy, creating an immersive experience where participants engage critically with historical narratives, systemic oppression, and the role of technology in shaping cultural memory. By blending theatrical elements with collaborative academic inquiry, this project invites students and audiences to reflect on the suppressed dynamics of power, identity, and resistance within both historical and contemporary contexts.
The Authors of Silence is a cyborgian exploration of American slavery and its enduring legacies of systemic oppression, rooted in the profound hypocrisies at the heart of the nation’s founding. At the center of the play is Thomas Jefferson, portrayed not only as an enslaver (a fact long known and often rationalized) but also as a rapist (a fact equally long known but rarely acknowledged). Jefferson’s actions epitomize the moral contradictions embedded in the American ideal, reflecting what Jacques Derrida critiques in White Mythologies: the tendency of Western thought to erase its own particularities while presenting itself as universal truth. For more on White Mythologies and The Authors of Silence, see my blog post, "White Mythologies: Derrida, the Archive, and Rethinking Equity Through The Authors of Silence."
It is well-established that Jefferson raped Sally Hemings, as their sexual relationship began when she was a child—a fact that eliminates any possibility of consent, whether due to her age or her status as an enslaved person. Despite this, the historical narrative has repressed Jefferson’s identity as a rapist, maintaining a veneer of idealized Founding Fatherhood. This repression persists in dominant cultural and historical frameworks. The return of this repression is evident in contemporary figures like Donald Trump, another racist and rapist who, while widely recognized as such, is seldom explicitly referred to as a rapist in public discourse. This narrative of repression—asserting that America was not founded by rapists—allows figures like Trump to project the label of “rapist” onto others, as seen in his 2015 campaign remarks describing Mexican immigrants as “rapists” and his 2016 presidential debate reference to “bad hombres.” This deflection perpetuates cycles of denial and the externalization of blame, reinforcing systemic patterns of oppression.
While the Declaration of Independence boldly proclaimed that “all men are created equal,” this ideal coexisted with the violent exploitation of enslaved people, embedding racial violence into the very fabric of American society. Moreover, slavery institutionalized gender-based violence, characterized by the systematic rape and exploitation of enslaved women. The glaring nature of these two facts, coupled with the persistent lack of recognition or acknowledgment, highlights the powerful role of repression within the dynamics of the Other, as examined in this play/course.
By merging historical inquiry with speculative imagination, The Authors of Silence examines how figures like Donald Trump represent a continuation of these hypocrisies and the enduring disease of slavery. The Jefferson character’s repression of the truth—that he raped Sally Hemings—serves as a metaphor for a broader cultural denial within white America. This denial festers over generations, reemerging as modern symptoms, such as Trumpism: a manifestation of intergenerational authoritarianism-sadism fueled by systemic racism and gendered violence. Trump is another racist and rapist to assume the highest office and his rhetoric and policies amplify these entrenched dynamics, perpetuating cycles of harm that echo Jefferson’s own contradictions and moral failures.
Through its fusion of historical figures, modern voices, and futuristic elements, the play challenges audiences to confront the ways these dynamics create intergenerational trauma for Black Americans while inscribing authoritarian ideologies into white America’s cultural unconscious. The work calls for both acknowledgment and systemic transformation, insisting that only through confronting these repressed truths can the nation begin to heal.
From Digital Humanities to EJI: The Evolution of The Authors of Silence
The Authors of Silence began as a play and course designed for Digital Humanities (DH), aiming to explore the intersection of technology, memory, and historical critique. The integration of AI as a co-author reflected the project’s initial focus on how digital tools reshape our engagement with archives, cultural memory, and storytelling (the Other or cultural unconscious). This focus aligns with Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, which examines how archives are not passive repositories but active forces that shape power, memory, and meaning. Derrida highlights the paradox of archives: while they preserve, they also exclude and repress. In this light, the archive serves as a metaphor for the cultural unconscious, where historical traumas, like those explored in The Authors of Silence, are both stored and suppressed.
The project has since transformed into an EJI course that takes seriously the ways in which Digital Humanities impacts the goals of Equity, Justice, and Inclusion. By critically examining how digitized archives and AI tools influence whose voices are amplified or erased, The Authors of Silence engages with the cultural unconscious embedded in technological systems. These tools are interrogated as participants explore the biases and exclusions encoded in digital archives, echoing Derrida’s warning in White Mythologies about the archive’s power to shape collective memory and the future.
The play’s evolution into an EJI course also draws on Lacan’s four discourses to unpack the dynamics of power and subjectivity. The discourse of the master, for example, reveals how authoritarian structures, rooted in slavery and patriarchal domination, continue to shape systemic oppression. The discourse of the university highlights the role of educational institutions in perpetuating dominant narratives. The discourse of the hysteric, embodied in the play by marginalized voices like Sally Hemings, challenges these dominant structures, exposing their contradictions and demanding accountability. Finally, the discourse of the analyst serves as the guiding framework for reflection and transformation, encouraging participants to confront the unconscious dynamics shaping their own complicity and resistance.
This evolution reflects the dual focus of the play and course: to explore historical and systemic patterns of oppression while equipping students with the critical tools to interrogate how emerging technologies shape these patterns. By emphasizing the ethical and transformative potential of DH, the course positions itself as a space where students can engage deeply with both the intellectual and affective dimensions of EJI work.
Educational Interventions: Envisioning EJI Programs Led by Therapist-Scholars
To address these deeply ingrained patterns, The Authors of Silence invites us to imagine Equity, Justice, and Inclusion (EJI) programs led by therapist-scholars. Such programs would draw on the unique expertise of educators trained in both therapeutic and scholarly practices, creating spaces for students to critically examine the cultural unconscious shaping their subjectivities. These therapist-scholars would approach EJI work with humility, recognizing the resistance they are likely to encounter from students—resistance rooted in unconscious defenses against acknowledging the role of the Other in shaping identity and power dynamics.
Sigmund Freud’s insights into resistance and repression, particularly as outlined in The Future of an Illusion, provide a critical foundation for this work. Freud examines how collective beliefs and illusions serve as defenses against existential uncertainty, a dynamic that mirrors the cultural repression of historical truths like those explored in The Authors of Silence. Just as Freud emphasizes the need to confront these illusions to achieve psychological health, therapist-scholars in EJI programs must help students confront the cultural illusions and repressions that sustain systemic oppression.
In the play, the cultural unconscious is represented by the archive and the AI co-author, both of which reveal the suppressed dynamics of power and oppression embedded in American history. Rooted in the historical exploitation of slavery and patriarchal domination, these dynamics continue to shape contemporary authoritarian tendencies. The integration of a therapist-scholar framework in EJI programs would offer students an opportunity to engage not only with historical and systemic critiques but also with the emotional and psychological dimensions of this work.
By creating an environment that encourages reflection, dialogue, and emotional processing, therapist-scholars can guide students toward deeper understandings of how systemic oppression operates within and through them. This approach acknowledges that true transformation requires engaging with both the intellectual and affective dimensions of justice, enabling participants to move beyond resistance toward meaningful change. Through such interventions, we might begin to address the unconscious forces perpetuating cycles of harm and imagine pathways toward a more inclusive and equitable future.
By integrating the theoretical insights of Derrida, Freud, and Lacan into its structure, The Authors of Silence provides a unique framework for understanding the intersection of history, technology, and justice. It demonstrates how the tools of Digital Humanities can be leveraged not only to critique the past but also to transform the present, offering hope for a more just and equitable future. As Derrida warns in White Mythologies, such transformation requires challenging the Eurocentric and exclusionary narratives that underpin our archives and institutions, replacing them with a more inclusive and reflexive understanding of justice and history.
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