The Freedom of Speech: Talk and Slavery in the Anglo-Caribbean World by Miles Ogborn (review)

In a lecture given in 1988 entitled “Unspeakable Things Unspoken,” Toni Morrison claimed that “silences are being broken” and “lost things have been found,” as scholars of slavery and colonialism were “disentangling received knowledge from the apparatus of control.”1 In his book, The Freedom of Speech: Talk and Slavery in the Anglo-Caribbean World, historical geographer Miles Ogborn demonstrates how, amid the violence of slavery, unspeakable things could be, and were, spoken. Drawing inspiration from Morrison’s words, Ogborn draws attention to the “geographies of silencing and violence” (18) within Atlantic world slave societies and the ways in which rules surrounding speech oppressed enslaved men and women. Yet Ogborn also argues that in “necessity, ubiquity, and ephemerality” (235), words possessed the power to transcend, challenge, and enact change. Drawing on scholarship across the fields of history, geography, anthropology, and philosophy—reaching from the Caribbean to Britain and across the Black Atlantic world—The Freedom of Speech demonstrates that speech is central to the study of slavery and understandings of empire, race, gender, freedom, and power. As Ogborn argues, “empires were oral cultures too” (234), and systems of racial dominance, power, and violence were enacted through speech in determinations of who could speak, when, how, and where. Indeed, slavery and freedom were made and remade through the policing and regulation of speech as well as knowledge. These contests took place in various arenas, including colonial assembly rooms and courts; the speaking, writing, and making of botanical knowledge; the writings of abolitionists and proslavery advocates; and the words spoken every day between free and enslaved men and women. Drawing on Bruno Latour’s work on speech act theory, Ogborn explores how speech worked in areas of law, politics, natural knowledge, and religion, and how the freedoms attached to speech—alongside multiple forms of silencing—shaped the bounds of slavery and freedom while also calling attention to the transformative power of speech to contest those boundaries.2