Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995) was published three years after “the end of history.”[1] Francis Fukuyama’s banal catchphrase applied to what he viewed as the arrival of a new liberal order. To Fukuyama, who was writing in 1992 at the end of the Cold War, the goal of history was realized in what he viewed as a global shift toward more democratic governments. Trouillot had no truck for such trivialization of history. “We are never as steeped in history as when we pretend not to be,” Trouillot writes.[2] Trouillot’s father and uncle were historians; he and his siblings became startlingly original writers.[3] In 1990, Trouillot’s stepmother was appointed interim president of Haiti.[4] But Trouillot learned “that anyone anywhere with the right dosage of suspicion can formulate questions to history with no pretense that these questions themselves stand outside history.”[5] Trouillot knew that the questioning of the production of history is itself an exercise in empowerment, and a crucial method of resisting erasure and silencing.

Trouillot’s first work, Ti difé boulé sou istoua Ayiti, published in 1977 after he had left Haiti for the United States, was the first full-length history of the Haitian Revolution published in Haitian Creole.[6] Trouillot, whose family were elites, felt that by publishing in Haitian Creole he “was going against class origins and attitudes. Ti difé questions the ‘great men’ tradition of Haitian historiography.”[7] Trouillot demonstrated with his first book the necessity of questioning the production of history, but Silencing would become the true flowering of his philosophy of history.

Each chapter of Silencing begins with a representative anecdote. Set off from the rest of the text by italics, the first person account at the opening of each chapter prepares the scaffolding for each layer of Trouillot’s argument. Questions about the production of history appear to him as he walks through palace ruins in Haiti, as he stands before students in a college classroom and, in fact, wherever he goes. Trouillot invites readers to accompany him on his intellectual journey as he gradually expands his argument from the dinner table to the nation-state, from the nation-state to the Western Hemisphere and beyond. Trouillot’s overarching concern is that the revolutionary content of history, epitomized by the Haitian Revolution, is subject to “formulas of silence.”[8] Western historians graft biased representations onto the Haitian Revolution, thus stripping the Revolution of its world-historical importance.

Trouillot writes of how silences are manifest in the sources, the archive, the narrative, and “the making of history in the final instance.”[9] In perhaps Trouillot’s best known chapter, “An Unthinkable History: The Haitian Revolution as a Non-Event,” the scholar posits that the actions of revolutionaries in Saint-Domingue from 1791-1804 prefigured by many decades historiographic developments that could account for self-determining, nation-building blacks. Even C.L.R. James’s The Black Jacobins (1938), which represented a paradigm shift in the historiography of the Haitian Revolution, conceived of the Revolution in terms associated with European revolutionaries. Historians outside of Haiti or the French Caribbean—whom Trouillot calls “‘foreign’ specialists”—produce insufficient histories of the Haitian Revolution because they too often do not acknowledge the silences in their sources and archives.[10] The stories Haitians tell of the Revolution differ, but these stories can also be problematized. Despots wield the epic tradition of the Revolution as “an indispensable reference to their claims to power.”[11] The solution, Trouillot writes, “may be for the two historiographic traditions—that of Haiti and that of the ‘foreign’ specialists—to merge or to generate a new perspective that encompasses the best of each.”[12] Without this merger—of Haiti-as-source and the West-as-resource—the history of the Revolution remains at risk of erasure or banalization.  

Trouillot cast his attention beyond the Haitian Revolution. The publication of Silencing roughly coincided with the 500th anniversary of Cristobal Colon’s landing in what would become known as the Americas. Trouillot noticed the active mythmaking around Colon: “Genoese by birth, Mediterranean by training, Castilian by necessity,” writes Trouillot, Colon was renamed “Christopher Columbus,” and celebrations of him became a naturalization ritual for white immigrants and their descendants in the Americas at the expense of the rights of African-descended peoples and Amerindians.[13] Myths are made and, however banal, are mobilized to serve the interests of those who aspire to power.

In Trouillot’s telling, the trivialization of history reaches its apex when Disney announced plans for Disney’s America, a theme park in Virginia that would feature “authentic” representations of American slavery. Enclosing slavery in a theme park is obscene because it is rewritten as “The Past” and “diverts us from the present injustices” of institutional racism.[14] Irresponsible retellings of the past threaten the public’s understanding of how the past affects both present and future. Trouillot encourages academics to become and remain engaged with public history to ward off misrepresentations of the past.[15]

Despite the numerous accounts of misrepresentations of history contained in Silencing, Trouillot’s acuity of thought and clarity of expression leaves his readers with a sense of hopefulness. At the end of the book, Haitians organize to throw a statue of Columbus into the sea.[16] The folk literally take history into their own hands, and judge it insufficient! Trouillot’s writings encourage the public to always evaluate the past in the present. His writings are now “part of our scholarly oxygen,” writes historian Laurent Dubois.[17] To borrow one of Trouillot’s most revelatory insights, it is now virtually “unthinkable” to consider a world without Silencing.

Bibliography

Bonilla, Yarimar. “Burning Questions: The Life and Work of Michel-Rolph Trouillot, 1949-        2012. NACLA.org. May 31, 2013. https://nacla.org/news/2013/5/31/burning-questions- life-and-work-michel-rolph-trouillot-1949%E2%80%932012.

Dubois, Laurent. “Eloge Pour Michel-Rolph Trouillot,” Transition 109, Persona. 2012. 21-32.

Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.     1992.

Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. 1995.

Notes

[1] See Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1992).

[2] Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1995), xxiii.

[3] Yarimar Bonilla, “Burning Questions: The Life and Work of Michel-Rolph Trouillot, 1949-2012, NACLA.org, May 31, 2013, https://nacla.org/news/2013/5/31/burning-questions-life-and-work-michel-rolph-trouillot-1949%E2%80%932012.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Trouillot., xxii.

[6] Ibid., 56.

[7] Bonilla, “Burning Questions.”

[8] Trouillot, 96.

[9] Ibid., 26 (emphasis in original).

[10] Ibid., 106.

[11] Ibid., 105.

[12] Ibid., 106

[13] Ibid., 140

[14] Ibid., 150

[15] Ibid., 147.

[16] Ibid., 156.

[17] Laurent Dubois, “Eloge Pour Michel-Rolph Trouillot,” Transition 109, Persona (2012), 21.