"Still Unthinkable? The Haitian Revolution and the Reception of Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past,” Journal of Haitian Studies 19, no. 2 (Fall 2013): 75 – 103 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Narratives of Power or Power of Narratives? 'Silencing The Past' and a History of Convenience
A normal textbook on modern world history often unfolds itself with the history of Monarchs, Queens, Knights, and major revolutions in European History, like Glorious, French, restorations, World wars, etc. All these episodes are dominantly mapping our minds to understand what is happening in the world. In these narratives, we barely find a name of a country like Haiti which once challenged the major power of the world, the French power, which is nonetheless important in its own right. But the major history writings, or the historians when they were writing history with some selected facts and narrating them as they are the sole important actors or the movers of history, they silenced some histories too. And these silences are found with the narratives which had lived experiences, which traveled through oral narratives, stories, etc, which had a direct experience with the actors of the fact. The association of historical writing with the creation of hegemony and power is an evident phenomenon despite the never-ending 'subjective' and 'objective' ways of doing history debate. One of the important functions of history has been to provide legitimacy to those who are in power. It is done through a selective narrativization of events from the past in a way which suits the convenience and knowledge system of the dominant ideology or those in power. Michel- Ralph Trouillot’s work ‘Silencing the Past’ is also an attempt to look at the processes which create the power discourses and declare themselves to be the 'mainstream' while cautiously ignoring the contradictory details.
Beyond Trouillot: Unsettling Genealogies of Historical Thought
Small Axe, 2021
This essay explores the genealogy of historian and anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s writings as related to broader trends in historical scholarship. The author suggests that it was through Silencing the Past’s acceptance and ascendance within the very North Atlantic “guild” that Trouillot deconstructs in his historical writings that the ideas of nineteenth-century Haitian historians such as Baron de Vastey, Hérard Dumesle, Beaubrun Ardouin, and Thomas Madiou produced an immeasurable influence on the direction of historical scholarship across the world. The author argues that the influence of these nineteenth-century Haitian authors can be seen everywhere in social history, especially in the concept of history from below, even though most historians in Europe and the United States have never even heard the names of these other Haitian authors.
Silencing the Past: Reflections on Remembering and Forgetting
Overland Literary Journal, 2020
'Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History' by Haitian writer Michel-Rolph Trouillot was first published in 1995. Twenty-five years on, its weaving of personal narrative with stories of slave rebellion, black Jacobins in the Haitian Revolution and the ‘discovery’ of the Americas still resonate. This paper looks at aspects of the book that speak directly to discussions of remembering and forgetting; the bits that remind us that history is more than just individual or collective memory recall. For Trouillot, it is not just a matter of what is remembered or forgotten. Silences are produced and reproduced throughout any telling of a story.
Telling Histories: A Conversation with Laurent Dubois and Greg Grandin
In contemporary US discourse, "Haiti" has become a phantasmatic object of fear and desire. The name typically conjures images of political failure, social catastrophe, or natural disaster. Alternatively, on the left and among critical theorists it often functions as an idealized object of projective identification, evoking images of revolutionary refusal and popular mobilization. Given these overdetermined poles of abject failure and audacious triumph, it is difficult for scholars to speak clearly about Haiti -the place rather than the image -in ways that can be heard. Laurent Dubois's new book Haiti: The Aftershocks of History makes a crucial contribution to this charged field of entangled political, intellectual, and affective forces. 1 It focuses deliberately on the understudied period between the revolution led by Toussaint Louverture and the post-Duvalier social movement for popular democracy led by Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Sidestepping polemics and projections, it attempts to understand contemporary Haiti in relation to the persistent external pressures and internal contradictions that have constrained the nation since its independence in 1804.
This paper is essentially an exercise in the Philosophy of History and it aims at exposing the transmodern understanding of history. The transmodern project is a Latin-American school of philosophy which seeks to undo the vestiges of the colonial experience or 'the coloniality of power', as they call it. They do not seek decolonization, they seek decoloniality rather. History is one of the spheres in which they seek to achieve this; and for them, decolonizing history can only be achieved by rethinking history. In their opinion, history can best be conceived as 'Memory Keeping' and not just documentation of facts from the past in books through writing. But this understanding of history is not unique to the transmodern project. Various strands of contemporary theorizations about history have advocated a return to memory. Most prominent of the reasons for these advocacies are: the fragmentary nature of the postmodern condition and the trauma of the first half of the 20th century. Despite these, this essay is poised to show that the transmodern understanding of history as memory which developed as a reaction to the defective connection of history to books and writing is a more nuanced and universal appreciation of the human fact of history. The paper adopts the philosophical methods of analysis, critique and hermeneutics.
Cultural Studies Review, 2013
A review of Andrew McGahan's The White Earth (Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2004).