UC Irvine political science professor Kevin Olson has been named the recipient of the Charles Taylor Book Award for his latest work, Subaltern Silence: A Postcolonial Genealogy (Columbia University Press). The honor, awarded by the American Political Science Association’s Interpretive Methodologies and Methods Group, annually recognizes the best book in political science that uses or develops interpretive research methodologies and methods.

In Subaltern Silence, Olson investigates the politics of subordination and resistance, examining the complex ways that subaltern subjects have been silenced, particularly in colonial and postcolonial contexts, and some of the subtle and unexpected forms of resistance they have mounted in return.  This work explores rich archives of treatises, pamphlets, broadsheets, correspondence, administrative documents, court records, illustrations, caricatures, and photographs from the revolutionary Caribbean and colonial Europe.  It draws insights from Michel Foucault, Gayatri Spivak, Pierre Bourdieu, Benedict Anderson, Ernesto Laclau, and others, and ranges over themes of collective imagination, affect, performativity, the construction of public spheres, and the dynamics of subaltern speech.

The book is Olson’s fourth as author or editor; previous works include Imagined Sovereignties: The Power of the People and Other Myths of the Modern Age (Cambridge), Reflexive Democracy: Political Equality and the Welfare State (MIT) and Adding Insult to Injury: Nancy Fraser Debates Her Critics (Verso). He is also co-editor of the journal Political Theory. He’s been a member of the UCI faculty since 1999 and he specializes in contemporary political theory, colonialism and postcoloniality, insurgent and popular politics, cultural politics, poststructuralism, and critical theory.

Olson received his award at APSA’s annual meeting held Sept. 10-14 in Vancouver.