Speech acts and fugitive storytelling is a form of intervention with western norms and economies that uphold racial capitalism. The reading of the 1AC is key to empower anticapitalist and decolonial discourse in the debate space and beyond.

Voice as the capacity to speak is a practice of world-disclosure, let us recall, where speech works as a political act in itself: an act by which individuals announce their presence in a political community and use their voice as a form of public intervention. The requirement for recognition, where speech is not only articulated but actually heard and acknowledged in public, lies at the heart of this politics of voice—what, as noted in Chapter 3, Couldry calls “voice as value” (2010). Yet we have seen how western economies of voice and visibility prohibit migrant speech acts from appearing in public discourse and how, in so doing, such economies dehumanize migrants as un-narratable selves. Indeed, as we discussed in Chapter 4, the systematic representation of migrants as voiceless occurs within an environment of hypermediated migration 150 | Subaltern Voice and Digital Resistance where other actors speak about or for them, namely western political elites. Reflecting on this voiceless hypervisibility of migration, Horsti (2016) points to its core contradiction, namely how such silence is not only incompatible with migrants’ own digital agency (Diminescu’s [2008] “connected migrant”), but further situates them within a hierarchical order of humanity, wherein their lack of voice is misrecognized as lack of humanity. This form of misrecognition occurs because, despite the affordances of mobile phone apps widely used by migrants (Wall et al. 2015), the global flows of voice are still subjected to historical relations of power that locate human lives within orientalist hierarchies of remediation (Chouliaraki 2013). Whose voice deserves to be amplified beyond their own intimate circles and onto western news platforms, in other words, is not a matter of access to technology but of access to power: “voice,” as Tacchi (2012) argues, “is inadequate unless there is also a shift in the hierarchies of value and attention accorded different actors and communities” (2012: 7–8). In the same spirit, Gajjala (2013), in her study of the relationships of resistance and complicity in South Asian women’s use of digital media, locates such media “in a field of power (the West) and in the production of a particular knowledge (about the East)” and contends that, within these contexts, it is not enough to listen of poor people, but it is necessary to listen to them. From this perspective, techno-determinist approaches that overemphasize migrants’ use of social media as evidence of their agency and voice ignore the structural constraints within which such use takes place: what Wall et al. call the circumstances of “information precarity” that migrants are subjected to “in terms of technological and social access to relevant information; the prevalence of irrelevant, sometimes dangerous information; inability to control their own images” (2015: 240). Rather than simply giving them voice, such technologies enable selected intermediations within migrants’ communities that simultaneously subject them to repressive practices from silencing to surveillance. Postcolonial critiques, informed by Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (2010), address this condition of systemic voicelessness by locating its roots in the reproduction of colonial power that sustains itself in contemporary structures of mobility and mediation. Such structures, including the practice of journalism, work by keeping subaltern voices Subaltern Voice and Digital Resistance | 151 outside the decision-making spaces where their lives and livelihoods are narrated. Colonial discourse, Spivak argues, does this by not necessarily silencing but by accommodating this voice in ways that reaffirm differences between the “civilized” west and the “barbarian” east. Spivak’s argument places at the center of colonial critique the impossibility of an uncontaminated subaltern voice, problematizing the vision that there can ever be “a pure form of consciousness,” articulated outside western discourse. Given, she says, that colonial subjects “never themselves had agency within the traffic of imperialism” to begin with (1996: 100), any process of translation (or indeed mediation) is inevitably also a return of the colonial voice to the position of the subaltern: a voice silenced or, when spoken, unheard. Understood as a form of violence—epistemic violence—this series of silences, omissions, and reformulations turns the colonial subject into an “other,” precisely by containing its meanings within the logic of western discourse. Referring to Spivak’s paradigmatic subaltern, the woman in an Indian immolation ritual that is reinterpreted by western discourse as the savage habit of a patriarchal society, Birla explains how “the subjectivity of the woman is not only read as a violent and unstable effect of an agency not her own, but she is revealed to us as the instrument of that agency” (2010: 89). The theme of the subaltern has implicitly informed our own analysis of migrant silencing in European media, where the migrant appears in news discourse as an abstract figure existing outside history. Various forms of subalternity naturally also occur elsewhere, too—when, for instance, migrants are framed as “problems” within technocratic, “problem-solving” discourse (Nyers 2013) or as the product of exceptional circumstances and thus as an “anomaly” that needs governmental solutions (Andersson 2019). Both these representations speak about migrants by quoting their own words but leave little space for their own voices to be heard and understood (Schwiertz and Schwenken 2020). In the process, migrants are silenced or ventriloquized, and it is western “experts” instead, whether politicians or support organizations, who become the voice trusted to speak on their behalf. In so doing, such voice simultaneously subsumes migrants’ lives into western ways of knowing (Sigona 2014)