New Minorities: Tracing the Tolerated Other from Silence to Speech

Abstract

This article discusses the asylum practices in Hungary by looking at the asylum seekers’ road from struggling to express their claims to the point of achieving the quality and recognition to speak. I focus on the particular manifestations, meaning and interpretations of their voice. Drawing on the role of language turned into agency and power, at times into protest, I argue that the asylum seekers go through a process of imposed voicelessness by a set of actors, spaces and institutions pertaining to the asylum system. They can overcome this silence when they make themselves heard, listened to and understood outside the space of control and detention, when they reach political subjectivity and when they efface the limits between aliens/non aliens and between nationals/citizens.