"Subaltern Silence challenges the common view that, while subaltern people were held down by brutality, force, and violence during the colonial/slavery period, anticolonial revolutions and abolition have ushered in an era of increasing democracy, equality, freedom, and autonomy. The aftermath of colonialism has, in reality, given rise to a host of new techniques for subordinating vast new categories of people, techniques that are simultaneously effective and invisible. They lie at the heart of contemporary racial relations, ...
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"Subaltern Silence challenges the common view that, while subaltern people were held down by brutality, force, and violence during the colonial/slavery period, anticolonial revolutions and abolition have ushered in an era of increasing democracy, equality, freedom, and autonomy. The aftermath of colonialism has, in reality, given rise to a host of new techniques for subordinating vast new categories of people, techniques that are simultaneously effective and invisible. They lie at the heart of contemporary racial relations, dividing Global South from Global North and allocating privileges and burdens in ways that are scarcely perceptible to us. The idea of "subaltern silence" is an extended response to Gayatri Spivak's celebrated question, "Can the subaltern speak?" It investigates the conditions under which the subaltern is silenced, which, Kevin Olson argues, is the key characteristic of subordination in contemporary societies. Silence can sometimes be a literal inability to speak or be heard, but more often it is a metaphor for other historically shifting ways of being ignored, uncomprehended, devalued, or not taken seriously. These forms of silence render some people invisible, push others to the margins, and devalue the voices and actions of yet others. Olson's genealogy begins in the early years of European colonialism. Using Haiti as a case study, Olson draws on a rich set of archives spanning several centuries of Caribbean colonial and postcolonial history, sourced from pamphlets, broadsheets, legal texts, interrogation transcripts, newspapers, journals, engravings, maps, letters, speeches, memoirs, and manuscripts. He develops a detailed analysis that reworks Foucault's themes of race, problematization, and "subjugated knowledges" with quite different phenomena occurring in a very different context. Over a span of some 200 years, the early brutal techniques of colonial subordination are transformed into modern, highly efficient, and largely invisible forms, coextensive with the politics of race, which are a fundamental condition of contemporary societies, stripping specific kinds of people of significance, presence, and voice. What began as a response to anticolonial revolution is today the norm. The public sphere of today is not always a medium of democratic deliberation; it frequently also serves as a means of subordination and silencing"--
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Add this copy of Subaltern Silence-a Postcolonial Genealogy to cart. $34.90, new condition, Sold by Paperbackshop rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Bensenville, IL, UNITED STATES, published 2024 by Columbia University Press.
