Subaltern Silence: A Postcolonial Genealogy
In his new award-winning book, Subaltern Silence: A Postcolonial Genealogy (Columbia University Press), UC Irvine political science professor Kevin Olson examines the increasingly subtle ways in which people are marginalized and disadvantaged. Beginning in the present and tracing backward through history - particularly across eras shaped by slavery and colonialism - Olson identifies the origins of silencing and how they continue to shape contemporary problems.
“We live in an intensely noisy society that pushes many people aside and silences them. Even worse, there are patterns in who is heard and who is silent,” he says. “Certain kinds of people have a leg up in our noisy world, while others are at a huge disadvantage. All kinds of privileges and opportunities are attached to being noticed—money, status, prestige, safety, and influence—while reciprocal problems of precarity, poverty, disrespect, exploitation, victimization, and vulnerability come along with invisibility.”
Below, he expands on his work and why it’s important to recognize the many ways subaltern silence shapes modern life and who gets seen, heard and understood.
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Q: What motivated you to write Subaltern Silence? Was there a particular question or moment that sparked your desire to trace how silence and subordination persist in the aftermath of colonialism?
A: The book is about French colonialism in the Caribbean, but it uses that history to identify a much broader problem: how people are marginalized and disadvantaged in contemporary societies. My answer is that techniques of power and control that started in the colonial world have become increasing more subtle and diffuse over time, to the point that we hardly notice them anymore. Instead of dominating people through force and violence, we now make them irrelevant and invisible – “silent” in this very broad sense.
I’m very aware of all the people who are pushed aside or ignored in modern societies, both here and across the world. It’s hard for anyone to be heard these days. We think we’re a society of free and abundant speech. New technologies make it more and more possible for people to force their way into public attention and be noticed—call them internet activists, wannabe influencers, or social media celebrities. And yet, so many people are ignored in our society, or what they have to say is completely devalued – they’re visible in one sense and completely invisible in another. We live in an intensely noisy society that pushes many people aside and silences them.
Even worse, there are patterns in who is heard and who is silent. Certain kinds of people have a leg up in our noisy world, while others are at a huge disadvantage. All kinds of privileges and opportunities are attached to being noticed—money, status, prestige, safety, and influence—while reciprocal problems of precarity, poverty, disrespect, exploitation, victimization, and vulnerability come along with invisibility.
This is all a long way of saying that Subaltern Silence is an attempt to describe these almost-invisible forms of domination. I’m starting from our present moment and working backwards to some past times and places that shaped our present, particularly in histories of slavery and colonialism, looking at the origins of silencing and connecting it with contemporary problems.
Q: In working through archives and engaging with thinkers like Spivak and Foucault, what did you discover about the mechanisms by which silence is produced and maintained? Did any findings surprise you?
A: Yes, there were a lot of surprises, which made this book particularly rewarding to write. The material for the book came from many different archives, mostly across France and the United States, mostly dealing with French colonialism in the Caribbean. There’s a huge paradox in doing archival work to look for silence, however. By definition, it’s an absence, it’s something that doesn’t exist. This requires a very gentle hand in teasing out the threads of evidence for who is being silenced and how. That holds both in the historical archives and in contemporary societies. And sometimes, silence just remains a paradox. You know that people are being excluded, but that exclusion is so profound that it’s impossible to say what, who, or how.
Second, I realized that at some point in the development of these silencing techniques—around the mid-1800s—we developed ways to silence people in plain sight. If that sounds paradoxical, you’re right: people are there, you see them, you hear them, yet what they have to say is completely devalued and ignored. This is a very subtle way to silence someone: by stripping their speech of value so it is ignored. One of the ways this was done is through caricature – literally, by making fun of people. Satirical drawings became very popular in magazines in the 19th century, and they had a huge audience. This seems innocent and it was portrayed as light entertainment, but I claim that certain kinds of humor, particularly racial caricature, had an enormously damaging effect.
And finally, I realized that most often silence is imposed on people, but sometimes it can actually be a self-chosen strategy of freedom. Some people vanish from view as a way of avoiding oppression. I think this happened particularly among fugitive slaves in the French colonies. They didn’t want recognition or equality, so much as to be left alone. Slavery imposed its own, specific kinds of silence, but some people successfully escaped to another. Fugitivity was a way of seeking silence by leaving, by opting out of slavery and the plantation system. In these particular cases, it was a choice and an achievement rather than an imposition.
Q: Your book criticizes institutions we often celebrate—like the free press or democratic revolutions—as also being sites of exclusion. Why is it important to reconsider these pillars of modern life through the lens of subaltern silence, and what does this rethinking change in how we understand political equality?
A: The very fact that we celebrate these institutions as sources of freedom and democracy tends to immunize them from scrutiny. Therefore, when they turn out to be sources of domination and oppression instead, we tend not to notice. I don’t think this should change our positive attitude towards the free press or democratic revolutions – both of those things can be very valuable and they’re under considerable threat today. But we need to pay careful attention to the undercurrents of power and subordination that come along with them, particularly along racial lines and across the North-South divide. My book tries to make these problems more visible – to counteract the invisibility that has been so successfully achieved to hide these forms of power and domination during the past two centuries.
Q: You show how these subtle forms of silencing continue to shape racial politics and Global North–South divides. What do you see as the most urgent contemporary implications of your work for the way societies allocate privilege and burden today?
A: The #BlackLivesMatter movement, the ongoing effects of anti-Black violence, anti-immigrant sentiment, a cavalier attitude towards the deployment of American power overseas, all of these things and many more are rooted in the dynamics I’m discussing. Subaltern Silence is an attempt to show how diffuse and ineffable domination has become in our contemporary culture by starting in a time when these things weren’t subtle, and observing the gradual transformations of racialization, subordination, and silence that gave us the contemporary world. I believe that the colonial histories of the Americas have a huge influence on present-day life—they invented many of the techniques and practices of subordination that have become universal today.
Q: What do you hope readers—whether scholars, students, or members of the public—will take away from Subaltern Silence? Are there specific actions, practices, or changes in perspective you’d like to see come out of engaging with this book?
A: My primary point is to help us realize that people are not always silent because they want to be. Their apparent lack of saying anything can actually be a powerful form of oppression that is masked as apathy, marginality, disinterest, or incompetence. Oppression is often invisible to the oppressor; all the more when it operates through such subtle mechanisms. We have to be sensitive to such silences and try to discern which ones are involuntary and which ones are chosen.
We also have to be aware when our own freedom to speak—in the broadest sense, our freedom to be heard, seen, understood, and paid attention to—is actually a form of privilege that drowns out and silences others. We don’t want to make people speak; that would just be another form of violence. But we must be aware of the people who are silenced in our midst and create spaces for them to speak, to be seen, and understood.