Review of Historian Trouillot's Silencing the Past

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In Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995) Michel-Rolph Trouillot challenges the stringent empiricism of conventional historical approaches. Trouillot is concerned with the “uneven contribution” some historical narratives have over others, a process that materializes when “competing groups and individuals have unequal access to the means” of historical production (xix). The book consists of five distinct chapters or essays, and a dazzling epilogue, that trace how specific events fall into irretrievable historical silence. Trouillot’s argument intervenes in the outdated (if still present) and useless discussion of “what history is” and instead tackles “how history works” (25). His overarching argument insists that power is constitutive of the “processual character of historical production” (28) and that this power in the production of history begins at the source, making the lack or abundance of documentation the central power in the production of alternative narratives.
Trouillot distinguishes two-steps in the process of historical production: (1) the socio-historical process, “what happened;” and (2) the narrative process, “that which is said to have happened” (2). These two processes overlap and converge, creating a fluid ambiguity in which participants of an event automatically enter as actors and subjects of history. Trouillot suggests that these actors and subjects enter the production of a narrative much before academics write about it. For example, Trouillot asks why, if slavery in both Brazil and the Caribbean had such a traumatic outcome in death rates and working conditions, does the U.S. more strongly emphasize the correlation of slavery to present trauma? Trouillot suggests that this occurs because history does not directly correlate with the past as socio-historical process but depends upon a variety of narrators that exist outside of the academy.
The two sides of history – sociohistorical process and narrative construction – develop outside of the academy and therefore pave the road for silences in historical production with 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)” (26). Trouillot best exemplifies historical silence in his analysis of “The Three Faces of Sans-Souci” (Chapter 2).
He protests that the real Sans-Souci (the Bossale slave who gallantly fought off French armies and altered the fate of the Haitian Revolution) was irretrievably lost when Henry Christophe dubbed his overpowering residence “Sans-Souci castle” and when Frederick King of Prussia appropriated the Bossale slave’s name for his elegant “Sans-Souci Palace” in Potsdam. Christophe and Frederick’s monumental structures wield “unequal historical power” (45) that silences Sans-Souci the man and renders him invisible.
In Chapters 3-5, Trouillot deconstructs other historical silences: the erasure and banalization of the Haitian Revolution, the appropriation of Columbus, and the historical romanticism of Disneyland. In the third – and most poignant – chapter, Trouillot questions the erasure of the Haitian Revolution in Western historiography, noting that even eminent historian Eric Hobshawm relegated the Haitian Revolution to a footnote in his classic The Age of Revolution 1789-1843. This erasure, argues Trouillot, comes from the Revolution being an “unthinkable event” for even the most radical leftists in France and England at the time, an event for which the European mind lacked a “conceptual frame of reference” (82). Similarly, Trouillot critiques Disneyland’s commercialization of the experience and history of slavery as well as official celebrations of Columbus Day. Such appropriations of the past for the purposes of recreation and profit have the power to “trivialize the historical process” (step 1) and “mythicize history” (step 2) (118).
Trouillot’s intervention in analyzing “how history works” broadly challenges the idea that postmodernism incapacitates us to find the roots of power. He exposes the link of power and history by problematizing that which normally remains unexamined, from the language we unconsciously use to the conceptual frameworks that unconsciously shape our worldview. Why, for example, does it seem so natural for even progressives in the West to call the Haitian Revolution a “rebellion” while we label the Latin American wars of independence “revolutions”? The answer may lie in what Trouillot wittily constitutes as one of the amendments for the historical discipline: “[stories and] sources are not created equal” (47).