Insurgent truth: Chelsea Manning and the politics of outsider truth-telling

'Insurgent Truth' argues for the importance of outsider truth-telling to democratic politics and reads Chelsea Manning as an important contemporary outsider truth-teller. Outsider truth-tellers such as Manning tell or enact unsettling truths from a position of social illegibility. Often dismissed as in-credible by their societies, this text argues that their acts and writings reveal problems with dominant models of truth and truth-telling in politics, which often look to truth to offer a prepolitical stable common ground and align credibility with gendered, classed, and raced traits.

Challenging depictions of Chelsea Manning as a failed whistleblower, Insurgent Truth argues that Manning's act should be seen as what the book terms "outsider truth-telling." Lida Maxwell develops this argument through an examination of Manning's prison writings, the lengthy chat logs between Manning and the hacker who eventually turned her in, various journalistic, artistic, and academic responses to Manning. Comparing Manning's example and writings with other outsider truth-tellers, including Audre Lorde, Virginia Woolf, and Bayard Rustin, Maxwell develops a theory of outsider truth-telling as a productive practice of telling unsettling truths from a position of social illegibility.

"This book is about Chelsea Manning's leaking of government documents. Manning told the truth about war and a social order sustained by it. Her truth-telling also revealed the complicity of public and private in casting her - a non-gender-conforming individual - as an improper truth-teller. And Manning's truth-telling unsettled hierarchies of truth-telling that prop up a discriminatory and often oppressive social order. I read Manning not as an isolated political actor, but instead as an outsider truth-teller within a cohort of outsider truth-tellers (such as Virginia Woolf, Bayard Rustin, Audre Lorde), whose practices are distinct yet connected, and whose significance becomes more apparent when read in conjunction with each other"--