Mardi Meditations #14

If a PhD program can be thought of as one long, intensive book club, then it is a lovely thing when a book comes along that you can truly savor. Such is the case for me and Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past. 

Ever since I had the opportunity to read Stuart Hall’s “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” piece in Identity, Community, Culture, and Difference for my Theory and Methods course last year, I found myself gravitating towards the intersectional perspectives of Caribbean cultural theorists. I suppose it is no accident that I feel an affinity for people betwixt and between, for whom “diaspora” has a meaning that is tinged with sweetness even as it acknowledges the bitterness of the oppression and injustice that kindled it into existence.

Trouillot’s identity as a Haitian scholar who found an intellectual home at the University of Chicago (until his untimely death at 62) exemplifies the balance between the subject-matter passion born of personal experience and the spirit of inquiry born from a desire to make meaningful connections across difference. As a philosopher of history, Trouillot offers an emphatic rejection of essentialism, tempered by empathy for the people whose methodological approaches are most animated either by a desire to find forensic truth (evidence) or discursive truth (meaningful narrative built from multiple perspectives). Below, please allow me to share some of my favorite quotes and insights from Silencing the Past.

Silencing the Past by Michel-Rolph Trouillot

“Words are not concepts and concepts are not words: between the two are the layers of theory accumulated throughout the ages…reluctance with which theories of history have dealt with this fundamental ambiguity…Positivism vs. constructivism… What I hope to do is show how much room there is to look at the production of history outside of the dichotomies that these positions suggest and reproduce.”

“History as a social process involves people in 3 distinct capacities 1) as agents or occupants of structural positions, 2) as actors in constant interface with a context, and 3) as subjects, voices aware of their vocality.”

“Silences enter the process of historical production at four crucial moments: the moment of fact creation (the making of sources); the moment of fact assembly (the making of archives); the moment of fact retrieval (the making of narratives); and the moment of retrospective significance (the making of history in the final instance).“

“Power is constitutive of the story. Tracking power through various ‘moments’ simply helps emphasize the fundamentally processual character of historical production, to insist the what history is matters less than how history works; that power itself works together with history; and that the historian’s claimed political preferences have little influence on most of the actual practices of power.”

“Facts are never meaningless; indeed they become facts only because they matter in some sense, however minimal.”

“Not any fiction can pass for history: the materiality of the sociocultural process (historicity 1) sets the stage for future historical narratives (historicity 2)”

History is neither neutral nor natural. “By silence, I mean an active and transitive process: one ‘silences’ a fact or an individual as a silencer silences a gun. One engages in the practice of silencing. Mentions and silences are thus active, dialectical counterparts of which history is the synthesis.”

“Historical narratives are premised on previous understandings, which are themselves premised on the distribution of archival power.”