Toward the end of Subaltern Silence, Kevin Olson suggests that “we cannot separate metropolitan and colonial histories” (p. 314). To continue to treat them in compartmentalized terms would obscure a contemporary condition of subalternity that is proliferating globally. As Olson contends, “we are all postcolonial now” insofar as historical colonial practices of domination “travel freely when liberated from colonial existence” (pp. 314–315). Historians have for some time been attentive to how such practices have imbricated metropolitan and colonial spaces—tracing, as Julian Go does in Policing Empires (2024), the importation of policing practices from the global periphery to their institutionalization in the metropolitan state. Olson takes a different, perhaps paradoxical, approach. Rather than tracking the migration of specific institutional practices, his critical genealogy excavates how forms of subordination are produced through the silencing of the other—a persistent mode of domination that operates in successive political formations from the colonial period to the present.

In doing so, Olson’s focus on silencing as the constitutive condition of subalternity reopens both a methodological and an ontological problem. Methodologically, it returns us to the question Gayatri Spivak posed in her canonical essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988): how does one illuminate the presence of those who have been silenced without speaking for them? What is perhaps distinctive about Subaltern Silence is precisely Olson’s attempt to construct a Foucauldian critical genealogy that navigates this problem in productive ways. Ontologically, however, the continuous reproduction of subordination across a longue durée of silencing provokes a deeper question about what sustains this recurrence. At what point does the persistence of silencing across various institutional assemblages cease to be evidence of the contingent power arrangements that genealogy is designed to illuminate and begin to look like evidence of a structural condition?

Olson explores this question of silencing subalternity specifically through the archive of the French colonial and revolutionary Haiti until the middle of the nineteenth century with the Emperor Soulouque (1782–1867). The text navigates this period by aptly showing the reconfiguration of public forms of silencing from the colonial to the post-independence period. In the former, legal modalities of silencing were solidified through coercive mechanisms designed to strip the enslaved of any sense of personhood. But this silencing was, as the book demonstrates, perhaps even more insidious as it traversed not just legal forms but also cultural ones. For Olson, silencing embodied a form of racialization that congealed the illegibility of the other. What he refers to as a “silencing through resignification” or “silencing through displacement” (p. 37) represents legal forms of desubjectification best embodied by the infamous Le Code Noir. But Olson also highlights forms of self-silencing, such as marronage—that is, the obscurity that results from individuals fleeing the excessive violence of the slave state. Opacity, Olson writes, following Édouard Glissant’s work, “is a kind of epistemic freedom, freedom from the need to be understood or understandable in the terms of the dominant culture” (p. 40). Silencing through domination and self-silencing are coterminous with a generalized colonial order riven by paranoia and fear at the prospect of black self-realization and identity. Thus, trivializing and mocking the Emperor Soulouque in the French public sphere of the mid-nineteenth century represents another form of silencing through parody: “Humor,” Olson writes, “is used to mask the sting of the representation, allowing a highly stigmatized portrayal to pass as innocent fun” (p. 8).

Olson’s methodological and theoretical attentiveness to the implications of uncovering how silence constitutes subalternity is compelling. Spivak’s own critique of Foucault reflects a long-standing set of, not just theoretical, but ethical issues involving the ability of the theorist to impose upon those unable to speak for themselves. Nonetheless, Olson’s caution with the archive is evident. To the extent that it contains traces or the shadows of the subaltern, Olson prudently reads out such silences across historical moments without necessarily imposing an a priori theoretical framework. What emerges is an account of how silencing traverses legal, cultural, epistemic, and representational registers—adapting to each successive institutional formation while retaining its subordinating function. Importantly, the figure of the négre marron (“fugitive slave”) reveals how the colonial order reproduces forms of silence and self-silencing that come to outlive it.

But this also raises a thornier ontological question about what accounts for such continuity. If Foucauldian genealogy is designed to reveal the contingency of power arrangements—to show that things could have been otherwise—then how do we account for structural forms of continuity that persistently reinscribe silencing and subalternity across successive formations? When the genealogist’s own evidence demonstrates that silencing endures from colonial law through the nineteenth-century European public sphere to the postcolonial present, the method’s commitment to contingency begins to sit uneasily with the pattern it has uncovered. What, then, explains the fact that subalternity is continuously reproduced in metropolitan spaces long after formal decolonization? Olson provides no easy answers to such questions.

One way of reframing the ontological problem, however, would be to treat the very categories of “Blackness” or the French “négre” not as historically constituted formations amenable to genealogical analysis but as constitutive of the grammar of modernity as such. Following Afropessimist insights, Blackness would name the foundational form of abjection through which modernity’s own political concepts—agency, subjectivity, and freedom—acquire their intelligibility. For Frank Wilderson in Afropessimism (2020) and Christina Sharpe in In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016), the grammar of agency, resistance, and political subjectivity belongs to a category of the Human from which Blackness is constitutively excluded. To speak of the enslaved person’s “agency” is therefore to import a framework that presupposes the very recognition that the structure of anti-Blackness denies. On this account, the maroon’s flight is not agency in the political-theoretical sense, and the self-silencing Olson describes is not an expression of such agency. Rather, the maroon inhabits a space in which its agency is only constituted through the negation of Black subjectivity.

This creates a pointed challenge for Olson’s project. If Afropessimism is correct that anti-Blackness is not one form of subordination among others but the foundational grammar of modern domination, then Olson’s typology of silencing practices—resignification, displacement, and ventriloquism—risks being a sophisticated catalog of symptoms that mistakes the surface play of techniques for the structural condition that generates them. To be sure, one need not subscribe to Afropessimism’s strongest ontological claims to find this challenge illuminating. Christina Sharpe’s reading of the colonial archive operates in a different register. Sharpe’s concept of the wake is at once metaphorical and material: the turbulence left by the slave ship’s passage, the vigil kept over the dead, the condition of living and mockery in an aftermath that is not past. Anti-Blackness, in her account, is less a structure than an environment. Sharpe describes it as something closer to the weather: it is pervasive and self-renewing, saturating the ordinary and the unremarkable in ways that constitute the very medium within which all practices occur. As a result, the archive cannot be reduced to a repository of power configurations awaiting genealogical excavation. Rather, the archive may be constitutively incapable of holding what matters most about Black life. This is not because the records are missing per se. Rather, it is because the epistemic framework that produced the archive is the same framework that continuously reproduces the very conditions of abjection, and ultimately, silence.

Notwithstanding these critiques, Subaltern Silence is a remarkable contribution to a postcolonial approach to political theory. The field would significantly benefit from such a wider engagement with the colonial archives it probes.