“Can the Subaltern Speak?”: A Critical Study of Hannie Rayson’s Two Brothers

Hannie Rayson’s Two Brothers (2013) critically investigates Australia’s post-9/11 border policies via presenting the ideological struggle between power of authority and refugee advocacy regarding an Iraqi asylum seeker. While Hazem speaks, his voice is systemically overwhelmed by a power imbalance reducing his complex subjective experience to a “wordless figure” manipulated within political discourse. This paper analyzes the structural mechanisms of exclusion that facilitate a political critique of the Australian border regime. Relying on the cosmopolitan theoretical frameworks of Michel Foucault, Gayatri Spivak, and Giorgio Agamben, the paper proposes that Two Brothers dissects the processes of both Biopolitics and Epistemic Violence. The study demonstrates how dominant power utilizes institutional coercion and legal threats to silence both the refugee and the advocates effectively stripping his political identity. Eventually, the systemic dehumanization reduces Hazem to “Bare Life”, a figure exposed to unpunishable violence, and denies this “subaltern” the right to speak or revolt.