Epistemologies of Rebellion
| Author | Kevin Olson |
| Published date | 01 December 2015 |
| Date | 01 December 2015 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0090591714558425 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
research-article2014
Article
Political Theory
2015, Vol. 43(6) 730 –752
Epistemologies of
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DOI: 10.1177/0090591714558425
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Cockade and the
Problem of Subaltern
Speech
Kevin Olson1
Abstract
This essay follows Michel Foucault’s inspiration to develop an archaeology
of subaltern politics. In the archives left from the Haitian Revolution, we find
occasional references to slaves wearing the tricolor cockade, the famous
symbol of French republicanism. The archives are silent on what wearing
the cockade “meant,” however, or why whites found it so threatening. Rich
layers of meaning are packed into these silences. They reveal a great deal
about the performative character of the public sphere and the epistemological
complexity of mixing race with revolutionary politics. Wearing the cockade
was a screen of projection for all kinds of ideas, including the paranoid fears
and guilty conscience of white slaveholders. It probed tensions implicit within
Enlightenment colonialism, making those tensions explicit to white elites. By
eliciting this self-critical response, the cockade served as a disruptive enigma
well suited to the critical and political needs of people not allowed to speak.
Keywords
subaltern politics, symbolic politics, political epistemology, Foucault,
postcolonialism, Haitian Revolution
1University of California, Irvine, CA, USA
Corresponding Author:
Kevin Olson, Department of Political Science, University of California, 3151 Social Science
Plaza, Irvine CA 92697-5100, USA.
Email: kevin.olson@uci.edu
Olson
731
The question whether “the subaltern can speak” is a complicated and poten-
tially misleading one. In Gayatri Spivak’s formulation, it centers not just on
speech but a whole set of interconnected issues about epistemology, politics,
imperialism, and power.1 The problem, according to Spivak, is not simply
one of blocked speech, but more broadly of the expectation that subaltern
people be perceived and heard within a set of epistemic constraints estab-
lished by the dominant culture. Asking whether the subaltern can speak is
thus tantamount to asking about the conditions under which oppressed people
can become politically visible and understood. In this sense “speech” is not
simply discourse, but a broad range of epistemic and political concerns.
Dipesh Chakrabarty amplifies this line of thought in important ways. He
observes that a significant problem lies in the expectation that political claims
be articulated in hegemonic terms. This puts subaltern people in a double
bind: to make claims about their own oppression, they must use idioms of
speech, argument, and thought that are culturally foreign and established by
the imperialist culture itself.2 This aporetic situation can be navigated only
with great care and difficulty.
The concerns raised by Spivak and Chakrabarty highlight an important
ambiguity about the role of speech in subaltern politics. The question “can
the subaltern speak?” seems to put discourse front and center. It causes us to
expect liberatory politics in the form of speech. In this light, it is important to
ask to what extent we should think of subaltern politics as discursive in char-
acter. Properly read, many of Spivak’s and Chakrabarty’s insights argue for a
broader perspective. Their criticisms problematize any view asking the sub-
altern to raise and defend claims, especially if it involves the expectation that
they be articulated in concepts and forms of speech recognizable to the domi-
nant culture. To put such a premium on speech biases the question of subal-
tern politics in important ways. It raises the bar on oppressed people,
channeling politics into forms that are particularly susceptible to power, mar-
ginalization, and exclusion.3 In such situations, we would do well to search
for alternate ways in which subaltern people can make themselves politically
visible and understood.
I will pursue that project here. I am interested in exploring the politics of
the oppressed when speech is uncertain and problematic. To do this, I will tap
one of the earliest archives of postcolonial politics, focusing on a set of enig-
matic observations about events that are now quite distant to us. They seem
to tell a story about the revolutionary politics of oppressed people, but it is an
ambiguous one that requires careful interpretation.
In the archives left behind from the Haitian Revolution, we find occa-
sional references to slaves and free blacks wearing the tricolor cockade. This
is the rosette ribbon, in concentric circles of blue, white, and red, that was an
732
Political Theory 43(6)
omnipresent symbol of the French Revolution. Some of these people were
slaves, some were free, but none left records explaining why they wore the
cockade or what wearing it meant. The ornament apparently had some mean-
ing for the white elites who ruled the colony, however. A series of local laws
sprang up banning blacks from wearing the cockade. Again, we don’t know
why. Local legislatures kept scant records and any that existed are now lost to
us.
In this essay, I will try to peel back the layers of complexity and silence
packed into these observations, arguing that they teach us a great deal about
subaltern politics. A careful archaeology, drawing on insights of Michel
Foucault, provides an insightful point of access to issues of political action,
agency, silence, and voicelessness. The subaltern was not allowed to speak
under slavery in the colonial Caribbean. I will show that when speech cannot
be assumed, other dimensions of subaltern politics come into sharper view.
We see practices of signification featuring missed communication, opaque
meaning, paranoid projection, and creative, self-reflexive misinterpretation.
In this context, the tricolor cockade constitutes a distinctive form of politics:
a disruptive act whose importance cannot be reduced to speech. It had revo-
lutionary significance in excess of whatever people may or may not have
been trying to communicate through its use. The cockade reached across sub-
stantial fissures of race and epistemology to pose an internal critique of
French revolutionary ideals. It did this with no propositional content, no
political manifestos, and without making any discernable claims. In short, it
operated with extremely minimal means and no discernable theory, but large
political effects. This provides a valuable lesson in subaltern politics, show-
ing how the oppressed can exercise a potent critical effect even when they
cannot speak.
Shards of History
The Haitian Revolution was the twin of the French Revolution in many ways.
While it was still a possession of France, this half-island colony was known
as Saint-Domingue. During that time it was the “Pearl of the Antilles,” the
most prosperous colony in the Caribbean and the envy of other colonial pow-
ers. Its prosperity was built on an extensive slave economy, however. That
colonial order, always undercut by its own social dynamics, was becoming
increasingly unstable by the late 1780s. There had been resistance move-
ments by slaves and maroons for many years, most notably in 1757.4 With the
start of the French Revolution, fears only increased that the destabilizing
dynamics in France could spread to the colonies.
Olson
733
A principal fear of colonial elites was fixated on the spread of French
revolutionary and republican ideals. Notions of liberty, equality, popular sov-
ereignty, and national unity animated the French Revolution and continued to
be debated during the formation of the new republic.5 Although they often
took more specific form—a commitment to end status distinctions and inher-
ited privileges, for instance, or calls for virtue and self-sacrifice—these revo-
lutionary-republican ideals were broadly shared across the revolutionary
political culture. They were the common currency of the salons, sociétés de
pensée, National Assembly, popular press, learned tracts, pamphlets, broad-
sheets, public oratory, and a wide variety of other fora.6 These ideals caused
fear in many European capitals and anxiety to many of those whose fortunes
depended on the slave economy. If applied to the colonies, they would throw
the practices of plantation slavery into stark contrast with the doctrines of the
Revolution.7 Such inconsistencies were already being publicized by French
and British abolitionists, who formed a loose international network in Europe
at this time. There was great fear among colonial elites that such “philanthro-
pist infiltrators” could spread doctrines of freedom and equality among
slaves, free blacks, and free people of color, destabilizing the racial order on
which colonial capitalism was based.
Saint-Domingue was riven by racial, class, and property divisions that
intersected with one another in complicated ways. Poor and middle-class
whites lived in tension with wealthy, often noble plantation owners. Racial
poles of white and black defined the ends of a spectrum of mixtures that were
referred to by terms like mulatto, quadroon, and octoroon. The people bear-
ing such labels preferred to call themselves gens de couleur, people of color.
There were additional tensions between white creoles and white French met-
ropolitans, and between black creole slaves and those born in Africa. These
distinctions of race,...
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