Table of Contents:
  • The sounds of silence
  • Silence as an achievement : Marronage, 1685-1790
  • Unsettling silences : the perils of poison, 1682-1758
  • Phantasmatic public spheres : the paranoid style in French colonialism, 1770-1802
  • Disruptive object : the tricolor cockade and the fear of Black Jacobins
  • Interlude. The shifting horizon of modernity : Placide Camus, apprentice printer, 1791-1804
  • Times of exception : subaltern silence in the revolutionary Caribbean
  • Revolution within a revolution : postcolonial liberalism and the army of sufferers
  • The force of farce : Emperor Soulouque and the art of racial caricature
  • Silent in plain sight : We are all postcolonial now.