The Anti-Shibboleth: The Traumatic Character of the Shibboleth as Silence

This article discusses the familiar notion of the shibboleth in situations of exclusion, focusing on the non-use, rather than the use, of language, for which I propose the term the anti-shibboleth. The article begins with an introduction to the concept of the shibboleth, giving examples from situations of violent conflict and suppression such as the Holocaust and the Cambodian genocide, and goes on to develop the notion of the anti-shibboleth,...