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    Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History
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    Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History
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    Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History
    Audiobook5 hours

    Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History

    Written by Michel-Rolp Trouillot

    Narrated by John Pruden

    4.5/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    Placing the West's failure to acknowledge the most successful slave revolt in history alongside denials of the Holocaust and the debates over the Alamo and Christopher Columbus, Michel-Rolph Trouillot offers a stunning meditation on how power operates in the making and recording of history. Presented here with a new foreword by renowned scholar Hazel V. Carby, Silencing the Past is an indispensable analysis of the silences in our historical narratives, of what is omitted and what is recorded, what is remembered and what is forgotten, and what these silences reveal about inequalities of power.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Audio
    Release dateNov 17, 2015
    ISBN9781494589691
    Unavailable
    Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History

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    Reviews for Silencing the Past

    4.5/5

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    • 5/5
      I remember this as somewhat of a difficult read but one that opened my eyes in a big way to the truth that history is a tale told by the winners...and of how that process comes to pass. I think it is a really important book and would like to reread it.
    • 2/5
      I understand what Trouillot is trying to say in this book. The idea is important. There is a relationship between power and the history that we receive, and accordingly power has a subtle impact on our belief systems. There's no doubt about the truth of that. It's a very simple and profound truth. It is something that I have had to keep in mind constantly when writing my own histories, especially in the Essays on the Classics! series.The problem is that Trouillot is, like many of his era, a completely incompetent writer. He buries ideas under complex, in many cases meaningless, language. This language is used to obfuscate the fact that he does not have much to say, and it results in overthinking. A simple mind might be blown away by the appearance of intelligence; but a serious thinker cannot take this book seriously. Take, for example, the following quotes:1) 'History, as social process, involves peoples in three distinct capacities: 1) as agents, or occupants of structural positions; 2) as actors in constant interface with a context; and 3) as subjects, that is, as voices aware of their vocality.'2) 'By actors, I mean the bundle of capacities that are specific in time and space in ways that both their existence and their understanding rest fundamentally on historical particulars.'3) 'In other words, peoples are not always subjects constantly confronting history as some academics would wish, but the capacity upon which they act to become subjects is always part of their condition. This subjective capacity ensures confusion because it makes human beings doubly historical, or, more properly, fully historical.'What the hell? The problems with 1) are several-fold. First, what are 'structural positions'? Dear God. And what in God's name are 'actors in constant interface with a context'? Are these historical actors or computers? Moreover, what makes it so special that people are 'voices aware of their vocality'? The phrasing is annoying (or in Orwell's words, 'barbarous') and I am not sure how this in any way helps me to understand history.Passages 2 and 3 are nonsense on the surface. They are such complete hogwash as to leave me dumbfounded. Of particular concern to Trouillot is the Haitian Revolution, which he claims has been silenced by Western historiography. While I am sympathetic to Trouillot as a Haitian, I have a deep distaste for the implication that the West would need to silence the story of Haiti since Haiti has made itself into the basket case of the Western Hemisphere. Haiti has, in essence, silenced itself. This has nothing to do with an abuse of power by Western historians. I do not see how studying anything relating to Haiti can help me live my life in the 21st Century United States; it is of no value to me whatsoever.Here's what I know about history: it is a process of conflict and resolution wherein some pieces of data are more important than others. Much of this data is not recorded but must be inferred from what is recorded and from observations in our own lives on the assumption that we, as people, are similar to those about whom we are commenting. By studying history we can come to a greater understanding of our own time and place, we can learn from past failures, we can figure out a variety of possible ways to resolve our own problems. Trouillot's book teaches me nothing in this light and, as such, deserves the fate he so abhors: silence.
    • 4/5
      Trouillot in his Silencing The Past, presents a excellent work on examples of historiography. His use of the example of the Haitian revolution and how the history differs from the Haitian to French to American views. He cites examples of this all through the first half of the work. He then uses other examples such as the Chicago exhibition of 1893 and how the world rewrote the history of Columbus and his discovery of America. He then finishes with a side bar of the proposed Disneyland that was never built in Virginia. He however, was attempting to show how the underlining use of race had been the central point of his entire work, he had wrote it to show that race had affected how history was written by the winners and losers of events. In his use of silences(26) and all through the work he cites those types of examples. His end-notes carry the work even deeper so that the reader can explore the sources of his statements if they desire. If I had had this work during my Master's degree Historiography class it would have made the class much easier, however, the way that Trouillot presented the main case of Haiti was somewhat lessened by the use of trying to insert the other cases of late 19th century and the Columbus case, he was well on his way to showing how the Americans had wanted the Haitian revolution to go away because it did cause events to take place in the history of the United States but he failed on that effort. I was sure he was headed that way and off he went on the raise of the Italians and Irish, which took away from the Haitian history. For that reason I felt a little disappointed in the work in its entirety. I would like to have seen more illustrations. Also I would have liked to have seen more examples of the way that both the French and the Americans reacted in their press and social works to describe the events instead of secondary sources that he used. But if I taught a class in historiography I highly consider using this as a text.
    • 5/5
      How does power influences the production of history? Michel-Rolph Trouillot sharply questions historical narratives, historical myths or creations. From the historical significance of the story of the Alamo in Texas to the heroism of Davy Crockett, tirelessly, Trouillot questions who controls the narrative. How "Remember the Alamo" when defeating Mexican General Santa Anna supersedes the victory narrative of the later at the Alamo when, truthfully or not, it is uttered by Americans at the battle of San Jacinto in 1836. Trouillot questions the methods used by revisionist analysis of the Jewish Holocaust when revisionist pundits, appointed officials or historians try to empirically reduce the number of victims from 6 million to 1 million who were slaughtered because of their religion. The revisionists doubt the existence of an Holocaust altogether because of their belief in objectivism as an historical methodology. To the contrary for moral constructivists, one victim is, by itself, enough to demonstrate such a morally unbearable crime and therefore one can posit the Holocaust as a mental construct that can explain what many experienced during WWII: mass deportation, gas chambers, systematic extermination and the German death machinery. He also examines how the narrative of Slavery is most famously commented upon in the Southern United States that morphs, as a subject of debate, into the apex of a Civil war being thus collectively more vividly remembered throughout the world, as much as a dreaded institution, as the shared experience, by both North and South, that forged a nation. Evidence, however, shows that slave numbers were much higher in the Caribbean slave societies or that the institution itself survived the 13th amendment by twenty three long years in Brazil. Facts that are less commented than the dominant narrative of Slavery in the world's shared collective memory, as the memory of the sugar plantation system in the Caribbean islands or in Brazil fade away due to them dying down when the world economy moved away from these regions and this mode of coerced production. Looking at individual or collective, implicit or explicit memory, Trouillot asks the reader to question these silences. As he senses that we are inundated with competing narratives, he ultimately finds it is being somewhat misguided to analyze these narratives to make sense of history without also recognizing when a fact is not told or, supreme expression of power, political or economical, when facts are kept, deliberately, under a cloak of silence.Very important book for anyone armed with critical thinking and emotional intelligence of the past.
    • 2/5
      This book starts out with an interesting notion: There are two aspects of history (1) the sociohistorical process, that is, "what happened" and (2) the historical narrative, that is, "that which is said to have happened".In the first few pages my thoughts immediately turned to the Bible, a book of fables, fairytales, and hearsay, definitely a book that, from start to finish, is an historical narrative. The writing of the New Testament Book of Matthew was begun some 90-100 years after the so called "birth of Christ" which is said to have occurred as a result of an impossible (in humans) one-sex conception with a bright star shining overhead and wise men visiting with gifts of spices. In fact, brilliant and sane astronomers have attempted to recreate the sky during that ancient time and have pronounced that the star in the East could have been an "alignment of planets". Some feat given that the opposition of planets and the appearance of closeness from Earth lasts only two weeks at most.Another Historical narrative that comes to mind is the George Washington cherry tree myth. Historian and Washington's first biographer, Mason Locke Weems, felt that the American public should be apprised of Washington's "Great Virtues" so he invented some virtues and the "I cannot tell a lie" fabrication entered American history in his book "The Life of Washington". I learned this myth as fact in my grade school history class in the 1950s.Of course Trouillot delves into historical distortion with many examples of his own: How did my (Lost) generation learn about the American west? The Saturday afternoon matinee featuring such "cowboys" as Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Randolph Scott, et al, and the "Indians", war-painted white actors on horseback who dressed in ceremonial head feathers and made strange "wee-ow" sounds as they were attacking god-fearing American pioneers on the front-line of Manifest Destiny. The sociohistorical fact of the last quarter of the 19th century is that true cowboys were only a phenomenon for about 15 years and were replaced by barbed wire.The central thrust of Silencing is slavery in the Western Hemisphere, especially the Caribbean and primarily Haiti. Interesting is the central role slavery plays in US history when millions of slaves existed in "slave countries" of the Caribbean and Brazil.As Trouillot plows ahead it became apparent to me that he was repeating the original premise (two aspects of history) in 1000s of unnecessary and sometimes obscure English words. When I got to the following I'd had about enough: "...any historical narrative is a particular bundle of silences, the result of a unique process, and the operation required to deconstruct these silences will vary accordingly." I'm sorry but that point I had to give up reading this book in its entirety. Instead I skipped ahead to Ch 4, "Good Day, Columbus" which is fascinating.This book is for historians and other intellectuals who delight in trying to make sense of obscure works. In fact, you may want to look up a review or synopsis of this book that has broken down Trouillot's cogent points in readable fashion. It could save a headache.
    • 5/5
      This is an important and classic work of historiography. It is pretty out of place in the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program, since it is the only book I can recall seeing here that is academic. And yes, this is an academic book, and not popular non-fiction. That being said, I think it deserves a wider reading audience than the purely academic, since it deals with issues that are of profound and vital interest to everyone, and not just scholars. To a certain extent, it is actually more vital for non-academics to read this, since many of its lessons are taken for granted by scholars these days. As long as you know what to expect when you pick this book up, I think you will be fine. If you are looking for a quick or easy read, this is not the book for you. If you are willing to struggle a bit to have your mind blown, then give Trouillot's book a try. We have all heard that history is written by the victors, but Trouillot's book puts this into concrete terms that show just how real and devastating the effects of this truism are.
    • 5/5
      The single best theoretical work I have read about writing history. Upon first reading, Trouillot instantly became the historian I most admire.
    • 5/5
      An important book in the history of writing and thinking about history. Trouillot -- and Hazel Carby in her excellent introduction to this edition -- make the point that power and prejudice often determine historical "truth." Trouillot, through meticulous use of sources, demonstrates how events are forgotten, misinterpreted, just plain lied about, to serve a larger narrative.Besides being a landmark work of historiography, Trouillot tells great stories about Haiti and its revolutions, ones you may not be familiar with if you haven't seriously studied the period. I highly recommend this book.
    • 5/5
      To explain this book in the simplest terms I would simply say that Trouillot explains how we get holes, or as he calls them silences, in our historical narrative. It is simple, he writes, silences occur at “the moment of fact creation (making the sources), at the moment of fact assembly (making the archives), at the moment of fact retrieval (the making of the narratives), and that the moment of retrospective significance (the making of history in the final instance)” As he explains those four moments he also manages to teach a good bit of Haitian history, he demonstrates the difficulty in recording the history of “impossible” events, and examines the evolution of Columbus from a hired shipmaster who did not even make a log entry for October 12, 1492 to an immortal icon celebrated across three continents on October 12, 1992. I feel humbled after reading Trouillot’s book. He explains concepts with such clarity that I am embarrassed I did not already know them. Even the one idea that I can claim to have already understood, that two historians with different world views can make honest use all the available data and come to differing conclusions, he explains so much better than I ever could. Without even mentioning Watergate the Tea Party he explained to me how so many adults at the time believed that Nixon did nothing wrong and now believe that Obama was not born here. Silencing the Past is a first rate histography and one of the few that I would recommend to non-historians.
    • 5/5
      I found Silencing the Past (published in 1995) both fascinating and illuminating, still new, while at the same time anchored in the scholarly discourse of the 1990s. Since the January, 2010 earthquake in Haiti, Trouillot’s book seems to have appeared on every bookseller’s recommended shelf. But I wonder why I didn’t know about or read it fifteen years ago. Back then, I was a graduate student in English. Although my focus was Creative Writing, I had a special interest in what was/is called postcolonial literature and theory. Trouillot was not on my reading list in 1998, however, at least not at Sonoma State University.
      Although he talks about particular events (the Haitian Revolution, Columbus’s landfall in the Bahamas in 1492) and historical characters (Christophe, Sans Souci, Columbus), the author’s primary concern here is with the production of history and the relation of power to that production with its consequential silences: “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).”
      Trouillot’s stance is neither that of the positivist nor the constructivist. He states rather that “Whereas the positivist view hides the tropes of power behind a naive epistemology, the constructivist one denies the autonomy of the sociohistorical process.” He rejects “both the naive proposition that we are prisoners of our pasts and the pernicious suggestion that history is whatever we make it. History is the fruit of power, but power itself is never so transparent that its analysis becomes superfluous.”
      I particularly appreciated and remain intrigued by Trouillot’s reminders to his readers regarding the materiality of history, “that history begins with bodies and artifacts: living brains, fossils, texts, buildings” as well as his discussion of the “ethical differences between scholars and intellectuals.” Silencing the Past is nothing less than (and what could be better?) a thought-provoking read.
    • 5/5
      I missed Michel Rolph Trouillot's Silencing the Past: Power and Production of History the first time around. I'm glad I had a chance to see it in its twentieth anniversary edition. Trouillot is inspiring in his passion, clear in his terminology, exquisitely precise in his explanations of facts and theories, and straightforward in his examples. And inspiring. I want to go back to reading and analyzing history. The book takes the adage “history is written by the winners” and expands it with a challenge. “History is the fruit of power, but power itself is never so transparent that its analysis becomes superfluous. The ultimate mark of power may be its invisibility, the ultimate challenge, the exposition of its roots.” [xxiii] Each historical narrative has its own unique silences; issues and people left out of the history. These are created when a singular concept had to be addressed / repressed / silenced. Because of these differences, the methods of researching and reversing the silences need to be specially tailored to each, so voices can be investigated and exposed.The points where “silences” most often enter the records and narratives are made apparent and I think I now have tools needed to see these silences in any history book or article I read.I need to research the facts and find access to tools to help me find where my own thoughts are blinded by the “impossibilities” he discusses. “When reality does not coincide with deeply held beliefs, human beings tend to phrase interpretations that force reality within the scope of these beliefs. They devise formulas to repress the unthinkable and to bring it back within the realm of accepted discourse.” [72] This is what happened during the precursors to the Saint Domingo / Haiti slave rebellion. The slave-owners, the local government leaders, and the European governments which depended on slaves simply could not see the facts that we see as showing stronger rebel slaves. Slaves simply do not rebel. Period. It was unthinkable. “How does one write the history of the impossible?” [73]The Notes section of the book is helpful, and it has an index, but because Trouillot died in 2012, Beacon Press's characteristic “resources for further study” could not be appended. I really miss that, as I want to go on, and am not sure how.
    • 5/5
      Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of HistoryMichel-Rolph TrouillotBeacon PressMarch 2015978-0807080535At a time when educational “reformers” push to reduce not only the sciences, but also the humanities towards quantifiable, or more accurately testable, quanta of knowledge, the study of historical production is an increasingly important counter-balance to ideological efforts to constrain and sanitize historical knowledge. These reductions, far from just a banal attempt to analyze student performance, are part of the process of historical production themselves, playing out in school boards across the United States. Recent reactionary consternation to the revamping of the AP History curriculum demonstrates the jejune nature of the well-worn aphorism, history is written by the victors. In Silencing the Past, Michel-Rolph Trouillot encourages us to unmask this aphorism to interrogate a number of productive forces. Far from the victors, as modern school boards and states have shown, history is written by the living for reasons so often disconnected and distantly related to the event. From the act of labeling—did Columbus “discover” or “encounter”—to establishing the importance of the event—was the landing important to those living in 1492—Trouillot focuses the reader on the many considerations involved in the construction of historical narratives. From Columbus’s journey through the Haitian Revolution and the Alamo to the Holocaust, he uses these historical events to push the reader to recognize historical actors who, removed from the events they narrated, gave life to historical lore in ways and for reasons that so often served themselves and the present. Silencing the Past is an encompassing examination of these productive forces backdropped mainly by the Haitian Revolution. Trouillot strikes an impressive middle-ground between an academic text, useful and piquant for those who already have a passing familiarity with postmodernism and ideas of historical construction, and an evocative read for a lay audience, who at most would need a cursory Google search over a few theoretical concepts of which they might be unfamiliar.