| Sumario: | This article grapples with the performativity of speech as a crucial site through which empire brings into being that which it names. I offer a critique of reading (and rehabilitating) empire as a mild and benign force in conjunction with the popularity of the filmThe King’s Speech(2010) which, I argue, attaches a humanized and redeemed face to the violence of empire. In my analysis, I suggest that a film that is ostensibly about the triumph of the speech-act could be read more productively as a text about the silence of empire. Drawing on queer and disability rights critiques of the politics of rehabilitation, I argue that in attempting to contain the stigma of stuttering, the film implicitly rehabilitates the politics of empire for a new millennium. I read the film in conjunction with certain strands of colonial historiography that are invested in recuperating the colonial encounter and refashioning it as a potentially egalitarian and mutually beneficial force, implicitly rejecting the insights of postcolonial critique.
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