One of the most profound paradoxes of archival research is how we investigate histories that do not appear in the archives. This is a problem particularly when we attempt to trace the lives, thoughts, and practices of some of the most marginalized people in society: those who are excluded from view, pushed to the margins, or made to disappear completely. Such silences are not accidental. Rather, they are potent evidence of subordination and often causal means for enacting such subordination. Silences constitute a systemic problem of archival evidence, testimony, voice, and information about the lives of those people who are most marginalized and subordinated in society. As a result, some of the most potent injustices of our time become invisible in the archives. They fall into an epistemic black hole and often work their effects through the same means.

Spivak (Reference Spivak, Nelson and Grossberg1988) posed this question with signature clarity and rigor, asking whether the subaltern can speak. The answer to such a question is complex, both for Spivak and those influenced by her. We are inquiring not only about literal speech but also a whole host of phenomena that foreclose the social presence of subordinated people. Asking whether the subaltern can speak is ultimately an epistemic question, one that challenges the very construction of the subject and its participation in modern societies.

It would be too simplistic to say that this is merely a matter of exclusion. We might well be talking about people who are included in the archive but whose contributions, voices, and even presence pass with no notice. Here, the subaltern might “speak” yet remain unheard, unseen, unnoticed, ignored, misunderstood, uncomprehended, or delegitimated. Therefore, exclusion is only one dimension of archival silence. Equally important are the pathways of silent inclusion, obscuring, rendering invisible, and delegitimating the subaltern.

The question is how such silences are obscured, how they become absent from the archives. That is exactly the problem: silences by definition are not present, but they may simply mask something that is present but imperceivable. They may be a product of our own perception, or they may reflect a genuine absence. Such epistemic considerations lie at the heart of archival silence, and they present us with many puzzles. The absence of the subaltern from the archives suggests that something problematic is at work, but the absence itself is…silent. Subaltern silence is a non-object, a lack, an unexplained absence. In its pure form, it presents us with a formidable paradox. The very imperceptibility of such silence removes the subaltern from view, causing us to be unaware that anything bad has occurred.

To work in the face of such a paradox, we must devise carefully thought-out interpretive strategies. Although silence is by definition undetectable, there often are other clues that can point toward its presence. The presence of silence might sound paradoxical: What, after all, is the difference between silence and…nothing at all? Here, we must acknowledge that—in the archives at least—silence often has some positivity. It can be indicated by various other practices and archival traces.

I have searched for these traces across 200 years of French colonialism and Caribbean postcoloniality (Olson Reference Olson2023, Reference Olson2015). My particular focus is on the French slave colony Saint-Domingue and the modern nation of Haiti that emerged from it. I aim to carefully plot the penumbrae of silence, looking for gaps, ruptures, and ambiguities in the archives. All of this provides source material for observing how they reveal the subtle presence of subordination that otherwise could go unnoticed.

Close attention to the archives often reveals that silence is an active achievement. It is created by specific practices of silencing. The Haitian colonial archives display many of these practices: silencing through law and violence, which are relatively obvious, but also more subtle practices of containment, displacement, resignification, delegitimation, and other ways of rendering people invisible and inaudible—sometimes in plain sight. These strategies of silencing develop continuously over several centuries: silencing becomes more subtle, diffuse, pervasive, and effective. By tracing these practices, we often can infer the actual forms of silence left in their wake.

In addition to the practices that produce silence, silences themselves can sometimes be detected by careful interpretation. Subordination often is not clean or absolute. Rather, there are frequent ambiguities, loose ends, and lingering intuitions that some voice or presence has been foreclosed. In these cases, silences can have a penumbral quality, with shadowy edges and ambiguous boundaries. Careful interpretation can reveal traces pointing toward something broader and bigger that has been removed from view.

In these cases, it is important to preserve the ambiguity of the original sources and to work within it. Otherwise, we risk silencing those sources yet again by our own reactions, biases, and over-hasty conclusions. Ambiguous traces of subaltern silence must be drawn out carefully in an epistemically sophisticated way. At times, this means not being able to draw a determinate conclusion about the facts of the matter. For instance, there was an upstart agrarian rebellion in postcolonial Haiti in 1844: the Army of Sufferers. They succeeded in overthrowing the Haitian government and made various attempts to explain their dissatisfaction. These statements were so inchoate and ambiguous, however, that we cannot determine what they were trying to say. Nonetheless, we learn much about the silencing of these people by observing the traces of their attempts to speak. Sometimes observing the possibility of archival silence is the best we can do, and our conclusions themselves must remain ambiguous. Much can be added to what we understand about subaltern silence by observing these moments of ambiguity.

Sometimes silences are revealed by the reaction to them. The Haitian archives overwhelmingly consist of elite sources: memoirs, administrative correspondence, news reports, business records, political manifestos, pamphlets, broadsheets, regulatory proposals, and so on. They often vividly reveal elite reaction to something that is happening sub rosa—removed from our view and potentially from theirs as well—but that was chafing and bothering the dominant classes. Such phenomena often register the psychic tensions of colonial subordination. This may take the form of elite reaction to slave fugitivity or rampant paranoia about potential dangers that might befall those who exercise control over the colonies. In the Haitian archives, we see anxieties of being poisoned by disgruntled slaves, fear of incitement from abolitionist infiltrators, and even paranoia about what might happen if the doctrines of the French Revolution became known in the colonies. Here, we do not hear the voices of silenced subalterns, but we have the often-fevered speculations of those silencing them. The anxious discourse of these elites is finely detailed, implicitly confessing the ills that they have inflicted on those they dominate. Reading between the lines provides a vivid portrait of the forms and practices of silencing, as well as fears about what might happen if those regimes of silence were to fail.

Of course, such elite reports are themselves always suspect. They often are motivated by anxious speculation that reveals as much about the psychic state of those recording it as it does about the state of social relations in the colonies. Colonial elites had many fears and many concerns. Sometimes they were justified and sometimes they were merely confessions of the bad conscience of colonial domination. As a result, it is always important to interpret these sources with care, attempting to discern moments of subaltern silence within the noise of elite discourse.

The passage of time itself sometimes reveals things that otherwise would be hidden from view. Silences can have an episodic character, appearing and disappearing over time. The Haitian postcolonial archives, for instance, often reveal tensions along intersecting axes of race, class, and geography. This takes the specific form of tension between a loudly talkative dominant, mixed-race class, on one hand, and a predominantly silent stratum of Black, rural subsistence farmers on the other. The latter group is almost entirely absent from the archives, except for several occasions when they rise up in anger against those who dominate them. In these moments, we suddenly see something like a subaltern voice, although one that is poorly expressed and almost silent itself. The episodic appearance and disappearance of such moments of voice reveal silences that are undetectable in their own time but whose existence can be triangulated from brief moments when that silence was breached.

In sum, the problem of silence is crucial to our understanding of subaltern subordination. The paradoxes that surround it do not go away, however; they remain stubborn epistemic and interpretive challenges. The best we can do is approach the archives with creative ingenuity, using traces of what is there to discern that which has been erased, effaced, excluded, and silenced.