Author Meets Critics: "Subaltern Silence: A Postcolonial Genealogy," by Kevin Olson

Session Submission Type: Author meet critics

Session Description

The subject of this author-meets-critics session is Kevin Olson’s new book, Subaltern Silence: A Postcolonial Genealogy (Columbia University Press, 2024), which exposes the colonial and postcolonial roots of contemporary forms of subordination.
Modernity’s innovations of democracy, rights, and discourse are commonly regarded as having put an end to violent forms of colonial subordination. As theorists like Charles Taylor or Jürgen Habermas have argued, the public sphere is a central and ubiquitous feature of modern societies that guards against subordination. A public sphere from which some groups are excluded is, according to Habermas, “not a public sphere at all.” But what if the public sphere is itself a domain of subordination?
Publicity has long had a conflicting relationship with democracy and violence. Consider, for example, the controversial cartoons of former U.S. President Barack Obama, which variously caricatured him and his wife, Michelle, as chimpanzees, Al Quaeda supporters, clowns, or Mexicans. While many expressed outrage at the confluence of anti-Black, Islamophobic, and anti-immigrant racisms in these cartoons, others defended them as expressions of free speech. What might this tension between public speech and racist violence indicate about the function of publicity as a mode of subordination?
Olson answers this question by situating caricature as a paradigmatic dispositif of silence that emerges at a specific conjuncture in postcolonial Haiti and silences through excessive publicity. Olson reveals this form of silencing as a relatively late stage in permutations of publicity and silence in the colonial and postcolonial Caribbean. Subaltern Silence traces these permutations to show how silencing functions as a means of subordination that is made possible, paradoxically, by new and changing forms of publicity. By widening the focus from Europe to the transatlantic public sphere and the colonial and postcolonial Caribbean, Subaltern Silence offers a powerful counter-history of the standard view that colonial violence and subordination were ended by modernity’s creation of a public sphere as the guardrail of democracy and discourse. Olson’s genealogy shows that modernity, and modern publicity, are marked not by an absence of subordination but by its transformation into new forms. Today, the dominant mode of subordination is silencing: from a literal inability to speak or be heard to different ways of being in/visible, un/heard, disregarded, ridiculed, or ignored. In critical dialogue with Spivak and Foucault, Olson asks how the subaltern is silenced and examines the changing historical conditions that enabled different formations of subaltern silence. Drawing on a rich set of archives spanning several centuries of Caribbean colonial and postcolonial history, Subaltern Silence traces the appearance and disappearance of different forms of subaltern silence in struggles over and against subordination and subaltern agency. During a span of some 200 years, old, brutal techniques of colonial subordination are transformed into lighter, modern, highly efficient, and largely invisible forms.
The critics participating in this panel bring rich and varied perspectives to bear on Subaltern Silence. Their work intersects many of the book’s core themes, addressing the affective undercurrents of liberal ideals, subaltern practices of freedom, creative responses to marginalization and power, questions of race and colonialism, and fresh new approaches to Foucauldian genealogy. By bringing these perspectives into dialogue, the session explores the residues of practices that are still with us today and characterize our media-saturated, hyper-visual, hyper-networked society. They lie at the heart of our current racial moment as contemporary descendants of the earlier era’s racialized forms of representation and thought and show that the public sphere is not always a medium of democratic deliberation. It frequently also serves as a means of subordination and silencing.

Sub Unit

• Division 2: Foundations of Political Theory

Chair

• Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Presenters

• Elisabeth Robin Anker George Washington University

• James R. Martel San Francisco State University

• Neil Roberts Williams College

• Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Kevin Olson University of California, Irvine