Kevin Olson concludes Subaltern Silence: A Postcolonial Genealogy by contending that ‘[t]he history of subaltern silence is very much a history of our present moment’ (p. 314), stressing this study’s contemporary relevance. Echoing Achille Mbembe’s assertion that the world is Becoming Black (2017 [2013], p. 6), Olson argues that silencing through various modes of subordination and delegitimation has become ubiquitous. Given the entanglement of colonial and metropolitan histories, and the global spread of displacement and diaspora, subalternity is not an elsewhere or a residue, but a salient feature of the contemporary world. Acknowledging that ‘we are all postcolonial now’ (p. 314), Olson warns, ‘we, now, are ignorant of silences in our midst’ (p. 315). His critical endeavour to trace a postcolonial genealogy of subaltern silence thus presents an ambitious paradox: how to articulate silence without muting it? How can the voices of the historically silenced be heard while avoiding what Gayatri Spivak critiques as the scholar’s erudite ‘ventriloquism of the speaking subaltern’ (1999, p. 255; quoted in Olson, p. 89)—a concern central to Olson’s project.

Despite the generalizing title and conclusion, Olson’s research primarily focuses on the revolutionary Caribbean, specifically the transformation of Saint-Domingue to Haiti between 1685 and 1861. This period, from marronage to the end of Faustin Soulouque’s Second Empire, serves as Olson’s paradigmatic case study. He probes how the ‘naked violence of colonialism’ (p. 13) gave way to subtler, more elusive modes of subordination and delegitimation, which he frames as strategies of silencing. However, this focus introduces a tension: While presented as a postcolonial genealogy, the book often abstracts Haiti into a general model of subaltern silencing, potentially flattening its complex intellectual and political history into a symbolic site for theory rather than a dynamic space of resistance and epistemic production. By centring Haiti yet limiting engagement with Haitian thinkers, Olson risks reproducing the epistemic silencing he critiques. Nonetheless, reading Subaltern Silence within this specific genealogical context is instructive in many respects.

Olson demonstrates commendable epistemological sensitivity in engaging colonial archives without reproducing their discrediting tropes. For instance, analysing the first newspaper in Saint-Domingue (1764), he discusses how ‘maroon notices’ (p. 50)—descriptions of recaptured fugitives—aimed to ‘reinscrib[e] maroons in the apparatus of colonial control making it possible to re-silence them’ (p. 51). Echoing Simone Browne’s work on surveillance (2015), Olson problematises colonial advertising as a ‘counterstrategy of control’ (p. 51). Yet, his analysis often centres European perspectives, focussing on visibility and inscription while potentially neglecting other modes of subaltern resistance and alternative communicative spaces shaped by the silenced themselves. He does acknowledge, however, that such publicity remained ambivalent, sometimes unintentionally allowing the ‘figure of the négre marron’ to retain an ‘agency of escape’ (p. 51).

Olson’s complex portrayal avoids reducing subaltern silence to mere subjugation, exploring moments of subjectivation as well. He acknowledges the dual danger identified by Spivak: reifying the subaltern as solely a victim, or creating a ‘romanticized “subject-in-oppression”’ (p. 89). Aware of this, Olson critiques tendencies to smooth over archival ‘gaps of silence between past and present’ (p. 90) into a ‘coherent narrative’ (p. 93). Acknowledging interpretive ambiguity requires proceeding ‘with epistemic and interpretative caution’ (p. 95), lest the ‘silenced figure is simply resilenced in a new way’ (p. 93). His cautious readings admit uncertainties and reflections, qualities of a genealogical method that treats gaps as constitutive features of the colonial archive. Olson investigates not a singular, archetypal silence, but a multiplicity of ‘silences’ (p. 10). While mentioning obvious forms like silencing through law or violence (p. 32), he focuses on less overt but compelling modes.

Olson does indeed distinguish numerous practices, including silencing through resignification (p. 37), displacement (p. 37), self-silencing through opacity (p. 41) or excessive visibility (p. 51), imaginary unsilencing (p. 71), coerced speech (p. 85), ventriloquism (p. 90), substitution (p. 133), exclusion (148), interpretation (p. 155), and delegitimation (p. 234). These are not isolated categories but interconnected elements in a ‘constantly permuting play of silences and subordinations’ (p. 10)—and, one might add, insubordinations. Silencing is presented as a dynamic power relation, not a stable end-state.

Despite offering a powerful reading of the revolutionary Caribbean and valid points about decolonizing archives, Olson’s genealogy contains some puzzling aspects. While commendably frank about silences, he remains curiously reticent about the figure of the subaltern itself. Although a mobile concept originating with Gramsci (2021 [1934]) and adopted by the subaltern studies group (1982), its application requires justification. Translating ‘subaltern’ to the Caribbean context is reasonable, but this constitutes a transfiguration needing relation to figures within what Édouard Glissant termed Caribbean Discourse (1989 [1981]). Otherwise, ‘subaltern’ risks becoming a too generic a label, contradicting postcolonial critiques, including Spivak’s.

Furthermore, Olson’s erudite study makes only brief reference to relevant Caribbean thinkers like Glissant—whose concept of opacity he employs—while omitting scholars like Stuart Hall or Paul Gilroy entirely. This is striking, as Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic (1993) is seminal for understanding how ‘black musical expression’ contributed to ‘developing black struggles’ (p. 36). Other key authors of the Black radical tradition (e.g. W.E.B. Du Bois, bell hooks, Fred Moten), whose works are crucial for discussing the silencing of Black people and critiquing legacies of racial violence, also remain absent. Postcolonial scholars focussing on speech in colonial contexts, notably Nikita Dhawan (Impossible Speech, 2007), are missing, too. This pattern suggests an orientation that invertedly minimizes interventions from the global south and Black radical traditions.

While Olson plausibly argues for silencing as a key term encompassing subordination dynamics, his discussion, particularly concerning the ‘art of racial caricature’ (p. 238), underplays the role of visualization. He acknowledges the potent amalgamation of ‘[c]aricature and race’ as a ‘new dispositif of subordination’ with ‘unprecedented power and reach’ (pp. 238–239), yet largely subsumes visualizing under silencing. This obscures the interplay between the two. Given the colonial imaginary’s reliance on visualization (e.g. fugitive subjects, racist depictions), engaging with concepts like Nicholas Mirzoeff’s White Sight (2023) would have been pertinent.

Olson’s framing of subaltern silence can also be problematized in some respects: Asserting that maroons demanding free days ‘acquired an identity as agents repossessing their own freedom through their mention in newspapers’ (p. 290) reframes resistance partly as a voluntary withdrawal or strategic silence. This risks over-emphasizing silence as agency while downplaying the structural coercion necessitating it and the violent consequences (recapture, death) of public visibility. This conceptual slippage between imposed and chosen silence presents subaltern agency in a potentially idealized light, rather than fully reckoning with the violent constraints under which silences were negotiated.

Finally, while acknowledging gender’s relevance and occasionally gesturing towards intersectionality (pp. 276–278), the study fails to systematically re-read the colonial archive through a gendered lens. Perspectives from Black feminist or postcolonial scholars are largely absent or too general, leaving the concept of ‘intersectional silence’ undertheorized. For instance, an engagement with Sylvia Wynter’s ‘un/silencing of the demonic ground’ (1990) would have powerfully complicated Olson’s treatment of silence by foregrounding the constitutive ontological absences that structure colonial knowledge systems—particularly the simultaneous racialization and gendering of the Black female subject in the Caribbean into a space of non-being—thus offering a crucial framework for such theorization. Moreover, while such a detailed genealogy cannot cover all forms of silencing, one significant omission is the silencing of the Haitian Revolution itself as a modern historical and political watershed within intellectual history—a theoretical erasure haunting many works through silent appropriation (e.g. Hegel) or omission (e.g. Arendt). Given Olson’s focus, a critique of this specific silencing within scholarly discourse itself might have been expected.

In conclusion, Subaltern Silence offers a meticulously researched and methodologically sensitive genealogy of silencing focussed on Haiti. Olson’s typology of silencing modes and his cautious approach to archival gaps are valuable contributions. However, the study is hampered by an insufficient engagement with Caribbean and Black radical thought, an underdeveloped analysis of visualization and intersectionality, an unclear linkage between Haiti and subalternity, and a tilted view of silence as agency. These limitations, particularly the conceptual gaps concerning the subaltern figure itself and the omission of key interlocutors, temper the book’s significant achievements in tracing the contours of historical silencing.