Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History

by Michel-Rolph Trouillot

Placing the West's failure to acknowledge the most successful slave revolt in history alongside denials of the Holocaust and the debate over the Alamo, Michel-Rolph Trouillot offers a stunning meditation on how power operates in the making and recording of history.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Politics, Philosophy, Theory, Anthropology, Grad School

224 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1995

About the author

Michel-Rolph Trouillot was a Haitian academic and anthropologist. He was Professor of Anthropology and of Social Sciences at the University of Chicago. Rolph (as he was known conversationally) was the son of Ernst Trouillot and Anne-Marie Morisset, both Black intellectuals from Port-au-Prince. His father was a lawyer and his uncle, Hénock Trouillot was a professor who worked in the National Archives of Haiti. Hénock was an influential noiriste historian. He attended the Petit Séminaire Collège Saint-Martial, moving on to the École Normale Supérieure. However, faced with repression from the Duvalier regime in 1968, Trouillot joined a mass exodus of students who found refuge in New York.

In 2011 Trouillot was awarded the Frantz Fanon Lifetime Achievement Award, which is given annually by the Caribbean Philosophical Association in recognition of work of special interest to Caribbean thought.

In 1977 his first book Ti dife boule sou Istwa Ayiti on the origins of the Haitian slave revolution was published. It has been described as "the first book-length monograph written in Haitian Creole." In July 2012, Université Caraïbe Press reprinted this masterful work. Trouillot's lifetime of work presented a vision for anthropology and the social sciences, informed by historical depth and empirical examination of Caribbean societies.

Trouillot died on July 5, 2012.

Reviews

[Dusty · Rating 5 out of 5]

If Marx, Foucault, and Howard Zinn wrote a book together, it would probably look something like Michel-Rolph Trouillot's Silencing the Past. This isn't a slur, though; as you can tell from my five-star rating, I obviously appreciated the book, its author's cobbled personal reflections plus broader historical claims, and its humanity. Part of me wonders why this book isn't as well known (at least in my literary circles) as, say, Foucault's Discipline and Punish or Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, but I guess I already know the answer: Usually when people want to learn about the nineteenth century and the consolidation of Althusserian "ideological apparatuses" like the school, the prison, the concept of nationality, or the field of history, they'd rather read about white American and European countries than about Haiti. I suppose it's true that in the fifteen years since this book's publication several of Trouillot's claims have become so mainstreamed they read a bit like clichés. You probably already know that Columbus Day celebrations vaunt a celebrity Columbus the 15th century wouldn't have recognized. You probably already know that comparatively enfranchised people are more likely to leave traces of their purchases, their properties, their marriages, etc., than their disenfranchised comrades, and thus the history of any society tends to be the history of that society's rich and educated. Still, you should read the book for its methodological framework, its author's diary-like chapter-starters, and plenty of other reasons. Very highly recommended.

[Barbara K · Rating 5 out of 5]

While much of this book focuses on the history of his native country of Haiti, Trouillot's goal is broader: an epistemological re-evaluation of how our perceptions of history are formed. Of how we understand history to be true. Of how opinions come to be historical fact. It's not light reading, but easy enough to absorb when he moves from the theoretical to the specific. He goes beyond the commonplace "History is written by the victors" to demonstrate by example the four stages leading to this end result.

Those four stages are the moments when decisions are made, intentionally or otherwise, that affect what we come to perceive as history: at the time original records are (or are not) created; at the time those records are selected for retention; at the time they are retrieved and put into a narrative; and at the time that narrative is evaluated for significance. Omissions ("silences") at any point can alter our interpretation of past events.

Silences result not just from disdain or prejudice, but from the fact that the reality is "unthinkable" to the recorder/archiver/narrative developer/evaluator. The Haitian revolution of 1791-1804 provides a vivid example: that the slaves could have, on their own, desired, organized and successfully concluded their own revolutionary war was an idea inconceivable by the French or most others interpreting the record. This section brought to mind a book I read not long ago, Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia. The reality of how the South Pacific was colonized remained unknown (at least outside Polynesian oral history) for hundreds of years because Europeans simply couldn't accept that the Polynesian outriggers could have travelled the distances it has since been proved that they can.

The book is a brilliant framework, illustrating the inherent reasons that the true histories of blacks, women, native populations, and others have been omitted from history. Since we continue to struggle with the ways in which these perceptions mold actions and opinions in the 21st century these are ideas that bear thinking about.

[Lauren · Rating 5 out of 5]

Can the citizens of Quebec whose license plates proudly state "I remember" (Je me souviens) actually retrieve memories of the French colonial state? ...the collective subjects, who supposedly "remember", did not exist as such at the time of the events that they claim to remember. Rather, their constitution as subjects goes hand-in-hand with continuous creation of the past.

Starting with a pretty tame example of Quebec, Professor Trouillot goes on to broaden his examples, most specifically a comparative analysis of slavery in the Americas, specifically in his native Haiti and its revolution against French colonialism in the early 19th century, and what was happening in the US and Europe at this same point in time. Trouillot provides further context of this "continuous creation of the past" by studying Holocaust denial, history of Texas and the Alamo, and later delves into Christopher Columbus.

The fact that I did both undergrad and graduate level history and archival studies (including a seminar on Atlantic/Caribbean history) and didn't encounter this book until now (22 years after original publication!) is a problem - and it further underlines the premise of the book. However, a quick Google search - and other Goodreads reviews of many others who read this in a classroom - gives me hope, and also shows that even after decades, this book remains an important work of scholarship in historiography.

What we often call the legacy of the past may not be anything bequeathed by the past itself.

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the ten best books I've read in my life. I can't believe I'd never heard of it until now. The author's thesis is that history consists of two parts: what happened and the narrative of what happened. The latter is what determines the current consensus view.

The book argues that one of the most important events in human history, the slave revolt in Haiti that led briefly to a black-led government, has been virtually forgotten because those who write history (typically white Western men) have found it unthinkable that a group of black slaves could revolt, overturn a government, and establish a modern working state of free citizens. The prevailing narrative of blacks' abilities, intellect, characteristics has always operated on the unverbalized assumption that the black race is inferior in intellect to the white race. Thus, it has been unthinkable to the Western mind that black slaves could revolt and establish an enlightened government. Because of that unthinkability, the historical fact of the slave revolt in Haiti has been continuously silenced by what has been written and not written about it through history.

The revolt and defeat of the French was actually what stopped France from making further incursions into the Western hemisphere and the reason France sold the Louisiana Purchase to the United States. More French soldiers were killed in the Haitian revolt than died at Waterloo.

This is a profound and brilliant book. At first I thought it was over my head, but the more I read the more I understood. The very idea that history is prescribed by those in power is brilliant. The author details the elaborate means by which various European states (and later, the United States as well) refashioned Christopher Columbus to represent things that he had no idea he would be representing while he was alive. The entire IDEA of Christopher Columbus is a series of public-relations gestures by various nations and cultures to claim him as their historical forebear.

This book will transform your understanding of history as narrative.

[Raul · Rating 5 out of 5]

"We are never as steeped in history as when we pretend not to be, but if we stop pretending we may gain in understanding what we lose in false innocence. Naiveté is often an excuse for those who exercise power. For those upon whom that power is exercised, naiveté is always a mistake."

It's been about two months since I finished this book, and this is going to be one of those few moments I actually review a book after saying I will later. After I was done reading, I felt overwhelmed and left raw, grateful, of course, to have read this incredible book, but also intimidated in a way and having no clue as to how to string the words that would sum up the reading experience. I don't think this review will do much justice to the book, but hopefully it does encourage other readers to read it as well.

Trouillot's concern here is history in its production and its reproductions, and its use and service to power:

"Human beings participate in history both as actors and as narrators. The inherent ambivalence of the word “history” in many modern languages, including English, suggests this dual participation. In vernacular use, history means both the facts of the matter and a narrative of those facts, both “what happened” and “that which is said to have happened.” The first meaning places the emphasis on the sociohistorical process, the second on our knowledge of that process or on a story about that process."

Laying out this double function of history, he uses the notable events, The Battle of the Alamo, The Haitian Revolution, and The Discovery of the Americas by Columbus, to explain how history can be produced and maintained to craft narratives depending on purposes suitable to the parties involved, and most times to those in power. Over the past few years there's been a clash around the narratives that had been (and still are) widely accepted. Among them being those surrounding American history and the genocide of indigenous populations and the enslavement and oppression of individuals of African descent, and the role of European imperialism and colonialism in shaping the modern world. The fights over institutions like libraries and schools that record, archive, and produce narratives that challenge the notions of white supremacy deeply embedded in culture, being an effort to preserve the golden image of adventurers who stumbled onto strange sparsely inhabited lands to bring civilization and light to the savage non-European populations.

Trouillot describes the reason for this struggle well:

"The naming of the “fact” is itself a narrative of power disguised as innocence. Would anyone care to celebrate the “Castilian invasion of the Bahamas”? Yet this phrasing is somewhat closer to what happened on October 12, 1492, than “the discovery of America.” Naming the fact thus already imposes a reading and many historical controversies boil down to who has the power to name what. To call “discovery” the first invasions of inhabited lands by Europeans is an exercise in Eurocentric power that already frames future narratives of the event so described. Contact with the West is seen as the foundation of historicity of different cultures. Once discovered by Europeans, the Other finally enters the human world."

In an age where digital archives vanish overnight despite the promise of the internet supposedly lasting forever (which means this review itself might not even exist in some years from now), and the wealthiest people in the world using their resources and their proximity to power (which seemingly grows closer and closer) in ensuring their narrow view of the world as much as their status stays in place, this book published over thirty years ago is an important guide in showing the workings of history and power, and will most likely remain just as important until both don't exist.

Below are some quotes from the books I think important to the times to finish this review:

"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."

"The classification of all non-Westerners as fundamentally non-historical is tied also to the assumption that history requires a linear and cumulative sense of time that allows the observer to isolate the past as a distinct entity."

"Archives assemble. Their assembly work is not limited to a more or less passive act of collecting. Rather, it is an active act of production that prepares facts for historical intelligibility. Archives set up both the substantive and formal elements of the narrative."

"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."

"The West was created somewhere at the beginning of the sixteenth century in the midst of a global wave of material and symbolic transformations. The definitive expulsion of the Muslims from Europe, the so-called voyages of exploration, the first developments of merchant colonialism, and the maturation of the absolutist state set the stage for the rulers and merchants of Western Christendom to conquer Europe and the rest of the world. This historical itinerary was political, as evidenced by the now well-known names that it evokes—Columbus, Magellan, Charles V, the Hapsburgs, and the turning moments that set its pace—the reconquest of Castile and of Aragon, the laws of Burgos, the transmission of papal power from the Borgias to the Medicis.
These political developments paralleled the emergence of a new symbolic order. The invention of the Americas (with Waldseemuller, Vespucci, and Balboa), the simultaneous invention of Europe, the division of the Mediterranean by an imaginary line going from the south of Cadiz to the north of Constantinople, the Westernization of Christianity, and the invention of a Greco-Roman past to Western Europe were all a part of the process through which Europe became the West. What we call the Renaissance, much more an invention in its own right than a rebirth, ushered in a number of philosophical questions to which politicians, theologians, artists, and soldiers provided both concrete and abstract answers. What is Beauty? What is Order? What is the State? But also and above all: What is Man?"

"The creation of that historical moment facilitates the narrativization of history, the transformation of what happened into that which is said to have happened. First, chronology replaces process. All events are placed in a single line leading to the landfall."

[vic]

did this? Kind of go off? wild

[Paula Koneazny · Rating 5 out of 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.

[ivan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Main points: Historians should own up to their own role in (re)producing history and power relationships. Representation can never replicate the context of the event, but unsilencing is important to prevent things from becoming shrines rather than historical sites.

[Denise M. · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book for scholars of history and public history, so it's not a casual read. That said, I wish I had read it twenty years ago. Trouillot's analogies and use of layered stories explain the complexity of memory and history in ways that are both insightful and incredibly useful to me as a professor and public historian. It's one of those books in which I highlighted too many passages, and to which I will return again and again.

[Törő László Dávid · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fontos állítása a könyvnek, hogy a múlt bizonyos szeleteinek elhallgatása nem feltétlenül politikai összeesküvés miatt történik, és kevés köze van ahhoz, hogy a múltat óhatatlanul szelektálva megjelenítő történész bal, vagy jobb lábbal kel fel reggelente.

A források létrejötte majd levéltárakba való (nem) kerülése már eleve egy szelekciós és hatalmi folyamat, ráadásul minden múltbéli eseményt már azelőtt elkezdenek értelmezni a kortársak (és így befolyásos narratívákat örökítenek az utókorra), hogy a történészek a helyszínre érkeznének megszakérteni az adott történést. Legyen tehát egy historikus Sorosbérenc vagy Hazafi, öntudatlanul is szelektál a tények és források között, elhallgat dolgokat, s bár nem sejti, de az általa vizsgált témáról alkotott korabeli (nem politikai) diskurzusok már akkor vezethetik figyelmét, amikor még a források közelébe sem szagolt.

Ezt a problémát a szerző a Haitin lezajlott függetlenségi háború elhallgatásán, valamint az eltérő Kolumbusz-értelmezéseken keresztül mutatja be. Haiti egy olyan korban (19. sz. eleje) vívta ki függetlenségét a franciákkal szemben, amikor a feketéket/rabszolgákat nem tekintették embereknek, önállóan gondolkodó és érző lényeknek - egy sikeresen megvívott, katonai géniuszokat termelő rabszolgafelkelés tehát egyszerűen elképzelhetetlen volt a kortársak számára. A függetlenség hírére ezért úgy reagáltak, hogy: 1. fakenews. 2. nemúgyvoltaz, csak pár néger bohóckodott kicsit, amúgy a helyi betegségek verték meg a francia sereget. 3. IDEGEN ERŐK (tm) provokálták ki a lázadást, maguktól eszükbesejutottvolna hisz csak "fekák".

A könyv szerzője nem valamilyen retrospektív PC szemléletet kér számon a kortársakon, szerinte ugyanis az eseményeket nem is lehetett akkoriban másképp elgondolni (azaz mondjuk úgy, hogy emberek lázadtak fel, mert nem akartak szolgák lenni); a probléma ott kezdődik szerinte, hogy a kései történetírás is pontosan így (nem) foglalkozott a témával (a francia történelemből pl. szépen kiíródott az esemény), hiszen a kortársak történelemszemléletét vette át.

A Kolumbuszról szóló rész tanulságos (különösen az a folyamat, ahogy az Egyesült Államok emlékezetpolitikája "kifehérítette" és egy thug life cowboyt csinált belőle), de kicsit kilóg a kötetből.

Hasznos könyv, de nem olyan radikális az ismeretelméleti pozíciója, mint amilyennek el akarja adni magát és mint amilyennek az itteni értékelések alapján sejtettem. Vállalja szubjektív voltát, mellette azonban hitet tesz az empirikus kutatás és a racionális érvelés mellett (ilyen alapon támadja a romantikus gyarmatosítás-elleni "bennszülött" narratívákat is), szóval úgy posztkoloniális a szerző, hogy amúgy egy hagyományosabb iskolához tartozik. Nincs ezzel persze gond, az "egyrészt szubjektív másrészt racionális" egy ősrégi és megoldatlan ellentét a történészi gondolkodás tradíciójában (a szerző szerint örömteli ezen ellentét megélése, lehet, hogy igaza van), de semmiképp sem újdonság; száz éve is leírták már, hogy a történész jelene befolyásolja munkafolyamatát. Ez az ítélet persze nem érvényes a posztkoloniális témák felvetésére, ami valóban újdonság.

[Laya · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great read. The chapters on the Haitian revolution rightly deserve their iconic status. Trouillot goes much beyond 'putting Haitian revolution in its rightful place in the canonical history of age of revolutions' and questions the canon itself. But this is only a small part. The beauty of this book is that since the core argument is not only history but historiography more directly, it reads well for even non-professional historians. And that's where it becomes more interesting for me. Trouilloit offered so much fresh wind to history by widening the scope and responsibility of historians to be more rigorous about the politics of history production. A true moment of humility for historians to realize they "enter the scene after the frame has already been set", and locates historians in this contestation of narratives rather than being the whole observers. And contestation is the key word here because Trouilloit has an eloquent critique on 'postmodern' historians who abdicate political responsibility to relativism..Like that famous tweet said, it is periods of intense humility not just accumulation of 'more knowledge' that makes you grow.

[C. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Trouillet isn't writing for a mass-market audience, but he manages to be readable so that a relative lay-person as myself who hasn't been in accademia for almost a decade didn't feel too excluded. The book looks at how the Haitian revolution has been marginalized, misrepresented, or more often entirely silenced. Trouillet contrasts this to the rise of Columbus Day, where a minor (or most likely even non-existant) event became central to American mythos within the last century. Very thoughtful, challenging, and important.

[Kobe Bryant · Rating 3 out of 5]

I believe Chuck D said it best, "History shouldn't be a mystery, our story's real history, not his story"

[archive ☄ · Rating 4 out of 5]

156 pages of unremitting brilliance !

[Cas · Rating 4 out of 5]

really interesting stuff. i loved the use of dialectics: myth vs reality, voice vs silence, etc. made me go Hmmmmmm a lot.

[Kimia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Singlehandedly saved history as a discipline lol, I love Trouillot’s exploration of the responsibility of the historian and their duty to the present / in working on silences - “What we know about slavery or about colonialism can - should, indeed - increase our ardour in the struggles against discrimination and oppression across racial and national boundaries”.

In the chapter on the silence of the Haitian revolution in historiography on modern revolutions and “the age of revolution”, it was really interesting how Trouillot used sources from “anti-colonialists” in the 1790s and how the Haitian revolution was so unthinkable even to them: “what are 50,000 men, badly armed, undisciplined and used to fear when faced with 1,800 Frenchmen used to fearlessness? what!”. It made me think a lot about reactions to Palestinian armed resistance in the Western Left and how so many cannot conceive the possibility of people they dehumanise to be able to organise such a scale of organised resistance, of actually being able to weaken and pose a threat to their coloniser with all its military arsenal and backing.

[Michael Huang · Rating 2 out of 5]

Minority opinion alert: Totally reasonable thesis but disappointing writing.

Depending on who you ask, history is either “what happened” or “that which is said to have happened”. I suspect that most people know that strictly speaking the latter is the right answer. But I hope that by reading widely, a reasonably accurate image of the past emerges, and is instructive. The author reminds us that the production of history is controlled by power that may have ulterior motives. I immediately agreed and hoped to be told what important historical narratives are false. Alas, The author spends the first 20% of the text performing ontological analysis. “Ontological” appears in the text again and again. As to the real examples of how the production of history is being corrupted, they are disappointing as well. Sometimes the examples are too niche (Haitian history). Other times, it’s not really “production of history” or at least I won’t define it as such. For example, modern labeling of Columbus’s “discovery” of America is found objectionable (agree again). Overall, one of the more disappointing read so far this year.

[Malcolm · Rating 5 out of 5]

History is a contradictory thing. It is, we tell ourselves, the past, what has been and happened, but it is also the stories we tell ourselves about the past, the ways we construct, remember, forget, weave together incidents and phenomena to become the past, to become history. Both of these meanings are fraught with tension: the first suggests that the past is unknowable – we can never know everything that happened, so it must be partial (as in both incomplete and existing for a purpose). The second suggests that the past is a fiction, a series of events woven into a narrative that is also partial, in that it is someone’s narrative and it exists also for a purpose. That is to say, history is all about power – about whose incidents are known, about whose voice is heard in the narration, about whose interests are served. We see this clearly in the current global debates about who is commemorated, whose statues fill our public space and to what end.

This is the problem at the heart of this short, compelling and important book where Michel-Rolph Trouillot unpacks essential questions of narrating history by looking at two key events in the histories of the Americas. Much of the book is turned over to the Haitian Revolution that by 1804 had overthrown the slave economy, fought off the reimposition of slavery, invasions by both France and Britain and declared an independent black led republic in the territory of what was once France’s most important colony. The final chapter then looks at the ways Christopher Columbus’s accidental arrival in what is now the Bahamas became constructed as the foundational moment to be commemorated, stressing that to a large degree that was an invention of the latter part of the 19th century, driven in part by the quadricentenary of that event and need for nations, especially the USA, to assert their global significance and nationhood.

To a large degree the argument turns on the identification and unpacking of two processes. The first is the way in which silence is fundamental to the construction of history: this is a well-trod path: Ernst Renan for instance made a similar case in the 1880s in discussing the formation of nations and adherence to them – but Trouillot shifts the emphasis so the process of silencing becomes an active event, not just a forgetting. The second is how this silencing occurs, and here his highlights dual dynamic of erasure and trivialisation. Both these phenomena: silencing and mentioning, and erasure and trivialisation are dialectically related to construct and sustain each other.

Drawing on these tropes and in a clear and lucid manner Trouillot explores several aspects of the Haitian Revolution to show how they both exclude the revolution as a world historical event and concurrently in the hand sof other scholars it becomes a narrowly nationalist event sustaining the status quo. This, then, is a powerful argument that history only becomes ‘authentic’ not in being true, but in its contemporary use and significance – how it engages us in the present.

It is an essential read if we want to get a grasp on how contemporary debates about history – about empire and enslavement and more – are played out. But it leaves uncertain the character of history, and the status of these contested narratives. This grounding of ‘authenticity’ (not quite truth) in history’s significance to the present leaves me wondering about the status of the ‘many histories’ it suggests, and the lines and continuities of struggle between those who sought change in the past and those in the now – that is to say I am left wondering how Trouillot makes sense of a feeling of alliance between the different generations of actors who link together in history’s telling – and for that I turn to Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s fantastic Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism as the ideal complement for this vital text.

Would that every undergraduate history course had this as its core text.

[Jessica Burstrem · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book discusses several moments about which Haitian, European, and American history has been silent in various ways. Such silences are inevitable (27) and enter history at four moments: fact creation (making sources), assembly (archives), and retrieval (narratives), and their retrospective significance (history; 26). Trouillot articulates that there are process and narrative components to history which are conceptually mostly distinct but practically related and often intertwined (3). Those who remember, for instance, are also constituted by those memories (16). He defines the past as a relative position, empty of content (15), the narratives of which are produced by agents, actors, and intentional subjects (23). He then presents as anything but random examples stories of the Haitian revolution and Columbus's landing there and of the stories about those stories that have propagated at various times and places since.

My impression of the book was that it is a philosophical reflection on history and on Haitian history from a man invested in both. I did not find it as significant as I'd been led to expect, however, perhaps because I have actually read about the Haitian revolution and am familiar with many of the perspectives on the telling of history that he shares in the book. That may be an indication of the influence it has had in the 26 years since it was first published.

[Jason Friedlander · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essential meditation on the importance of always being conscious of the process of history-making when engaging with the production, consumption, and recollection of historical knowledge. It also makes a convincing argument that it is a misleading mistake to disconnect the understanding of the past from its present legacies by thinking of things solely in terms of “facts”.

The section on the ethical complexities of having museums or exhibitions on slavery, the holocaust, and other tragic periods was quite fascinating. The discussion on the impact of celebrating some supposedly pivotal days over others (such as the development of Columbus Day) was also particularly thought-provoking.

And of course reading this has greatly piqued my interest in the Haitian Revolution, and in general, made me reflect more on how the public and academic collective remembrances of certain “revolutions” are stronger than others.

Fantastic book.

[Caitlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

anytime we read a book in class that mentions the mythology of the alamo i go buck wild

[Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really thought-provoking with great explanations and examples... a little bit of a mindfuck and confusing at some points, but overall excellent.

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Trouillot habla sobre la historicidad y la creación de los hechos: cómo éstos se registran, cómo se archivan, cómo se narran y cómo adquieren el significado que da coherencia posterior a los relatos de los pueblos. Si ya es en sí complicado manejar la evidencia de los hechos reales, aún más lo es el identificar los silencios, deliberados o no, en las etapas de la creación de la historia; silencios cuyas huellas es casi imposible vislumbrar en los discursos que el poder ha construido cuidadosamente: "The ultimate mark of power may be its invisibility; the ultimate challenge, the exposition of its roots".

¿Es la historia una descripción imparcial de los hechos? Incluso para quienes, como Trouillot, han estudiado profundamente los mecanismos de la producción histórica, es ambigua la distinción entre los procesos sociohistóricos y la descripción de los mismos. La historia necesariamente hereda imprecisiones, por un lado, de la imposibilidad del lenguaje por expresar la plena realidad y, por otro, de los prejuicios y tendencias de quienes la escriben:

Narratives are necessarily emplotted in a way that life is not. Thus they necessarily distort life whether or not the evidence upon which they are based could be proved correct. Within that viewpoint, history becomes one among many types of narratives with no particular distinction except for its pretense of truth.

Un ejemplo muy interesante de silencios deliberados en la creación de narrativas históricas es el de Sans Souci, un esclavo de origen congoleño que luchó contra el poder colonial francés en la independencia de Haití. Resulta importante que esta fue la primera rebelión exitosa de esclavos, así como la primera guerra de independencia de un país del sur global. Sans Souci es una figura incómoda dentro de la historia haitiana, pues desafió los erráticos cambios de bando de algunas de los dirigentes más importantes de la revolución. Por esto mismo, su memoria se ocultó significativamente, a pesar de que su destreza militar fue clave en la victoria de los esclavos (Sans Souci, como muchos congoleños, tenía experiencia en la organización de las guerrillas y el uso de las armas).

Se vuelve importante hablar de los silencios y las narrativas construidas en tanto los hechos históricos (que tanto queremos distanciar del presente para sentirnos más seguros en un mundo de conflictos), siguen reverberando en la vida cotidiana. Los despliegues de poder de la policía hacia minorías de color en Estados Unidos están correlacionados con su pasado esclavista, así como el aislamiento y el abandono sufridos por Haití por parte de una poderosa comunidad de potencias internacionales, temerosa de perder sus comodidades coloniales, explican en gran medida la precariedad por la que actualmente pasan sus habitantes. Asimismo, los discursos filosóficos y científicos del Renacimiento y la era de la exploración funcionaron como justificación para que los poderes coloniales se dieran a sí mismos el derecho conquistar otras regiones del mundo, lo cual sigue teniendo un impacto en el bienestar de las naciones contemporáneas.

Al crear narrativas es imposible contarlo todo. Alguien tiene que decidir, de forma consciente o no, lo que no se contará, lo que no es importante o lo que es confuso e incómodo. Esta decisión tiene, en el mejor de los casos, el objetivo de dar sentido. Sin embargo, en la idea preconcebida de lo que tiene sentido hay un fuerte sesgo cognitivo: "When reality does not coincide with deeply held beliefs, human beings tend to phrase interpretations that force reality within the scope of these beliefs".

Lo más importante de todo esto es comprender que la historia no deja de escribirse, que de hecho se siguen reproduciendo iniquidades legadas de ayeres no tan distantes, y que debemos reconocer nuestro papel individual dentro de esta producción de discursos. Conocer el pasado es irrelevante si no nos ayuda a entender y confrontar las propias injusticias del presente. En palabras de Trouillot, "while some of us debate what history is or was, others take it into their own hands".

[Edward Reid · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am reading this for my graduate class and I have to start out with the factual problems that already have turned me off for the book. If the author cannot get some of these facts right, obviously I am dubious of his work.
This addresses the problems with the Alamo right off:

I know this because I am a personal friend with the historian at the Alamo...

Chap 1
• Santa Anna arrives in late February not mid February 1836.
• “Few traces of the Franciscan priests who had built the mission more than a century before survived” the compound and all the buildings present on march 1836 were still intact, they were in a similar condition as they were when the mission was secularized in 1793. The battle of the Alamo was the only assault that ever took place as the site.
• “ a few English speaking squatters occupied the place” this marginalizes the fact that there were Mexican Texans in the Alamo as well some of which (Juan Seguin) did not speak English at all. The overwhelming Anglo population were not squatting. They were Mexican citizens. Men like James Bowie had been living in Tejas, Mexico’s northern most province for 10 years, married into a Mexican family, converted to Catholicism, and learned fluent Spanish. To say they were squatting is highly inaccurate, this was a revolution for Mexican independence that boiled over into Texas.
• “the structure itself was weak” the Mexican army pounded the walls with artillery from Feb 23rd to March 5th and never breached a single wall.
• “Santa Anna blew the horns that Mexicans traditionally used to announce an attack to the death” I have no idea what he means here. Santa Anna is not on the battlefield on the morning of march 6th. He’s nearly 800 yards away, the night before the battle he issues his battle orders. He says all camps and artillery will go silent at 10:00p.m, the men will remove any items to include canteens that might make noise. On the morning of battle no alarms are given, the Mexican army wants complete silence, the move so quietly in fact they kill some of the Texans on the outer perimeter who were supposed to be on guard duty.
• “Later on that day his forces finally broke through the fort” the battle of the Alamo lasted 30 to 90 minutes. I put the number at 45, the breach of the compound happened very quickly. Mexican officers say the battle was over by sunrise. The sun set at 7:03 a.m on March 6th.
• He claims that Santa Anna went on to become the leader of Mexico four more times, this is inaccurate. Santa Anna was the leader of Mexico over 10 times.
• The Natives that are buried near the Alamo for the most part are buried off the Alamo fort footprint. We are working with a council of leaders from various tribes to repatriate remains found on our grounds. There’s a tribal monitor on site every day when archaeological work is done as well as any construction to ensure if anything is found of significance its treated correctly. None of the burials can be traced to a specific tribe and are general marked under one unifying name Coahuiltecan (co-weel-a-tek-an).
• P. 9 “…moment of glory that during which freedom loving anglos…chose to fight until the death” again, the were natural born Mexican Texans fighting in the revolution. The anglos were called Tejanos and were considered Mexican citizens.
• He alludes to annexation on page 9. As if the American Government was behind a coup of some sort. The American government could of got involved at any time and chose not to. Even after Texas wins its independence and tries to join the united States its told firmly no not once but twice.
• Page 9 “…56% nominal Hispanics many of whom acknowledge some native American Ancestry” where is this study? I would love to see it. No census has taken place to record the indigenous population of San Antonio. What has been discovered is that many people who are brown are willingly stealing indigenous identity in San Antonio. A struggle I have seen play out many times. It’s important to note that no living relatives exist for the people buried at the mission, at least not to my knowledge.
• Page 10. Travis’s line in that sand myth has been debunked, not a single historian I know believes that and its agreed it was a fabricated story by a man named Zuber. This was debunked in the 1990s
• Page 10. The Catholic church sold the Alamo to the state. I can find the deed if you need it. This is a ludicrous claim.
• Page 10. “Did Bowie bury treasure on the site?” Bowie was bedridden by the second day of the siege and likely died in his bed. He was in no state to be burying treasure. Bowie negotiated because he wanted to save the lives of his men. Bowie was friends with several Mexican officers and bargaining for certain terms of surrender was commonplace at that time period.
• P. 20“books sell even better than coonskin caps at the alamo gift shop to which half a dozen title by amateur historians bring more than $400,000 a year” I would love to see this source. I am one of many who approved the current booklist in the alamo gift shop. The overwhelming majority of our books are written by people like Dr. Bruce Winders, Dr. Donald Frazier, William C. Davis, Dr Hardin and many others. These are not amateur historians but chairs of history departments at major universities. This author should know better than to use generalizations like that.
• P.21 He makes a comparison of Americans learning their history from Hollywood, hes not entirely wrong. But he did no real research that I can see regarding the Alamo. HEs just as guilty here.
• He speaks to one sidedness on p. 22, we have primary sources from both sides of the battle of the Alamo. Why he didn’t use them I’m not sure.

This author questions the narrative of the battle which I find fascinating. The narrative we teach and have taught for the past 30 years is from the viewpoint of a slave. William B. Travis’s slave Joe was present at the battle and was the only adult male to survive the battle. He gives an unbiased account of the battle, and it aligns pretty well with the accounts of the Mexican Army.
People (this author included) do not devote the proper time to understanding why the Mexican revolution is taking place. They scratch the surface and do not realize how deeply complicated the event is so they simplify it and use broad claims to push an agenda. I see no sources or footnotes listed and most of what he has written here is from the 1990s. Every few years a book just like this pops up (one was published last year called to forget the Alamo) and the author makes broad sweeping claims that leaving Borderlands Historians like me scratching our heads

[Harry C · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely fantastic exploration into the forces of historical production. Also an incisive reflection on the historical profession, and all from… an anthropologist!

[Jack · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very good historiography book, quite easily accessible, poses some very interesting questions. If I were a professor making an "Intro to historiography" course, this would most certainly be required reading.

[Ellison Moorehead]

I’m interested in the idea of the silence that’s been carved out of the southern and eastern Mediterranean in our collective thought and specifically in my education and on my bookshelves. Why don’t I have any North African or West Asian thinkers on my philosophy shelf? Why (up until last year) didn't I have any novels translated from Arabic? I’ve always thought it would be hard to trace an absence, a void of knowledge. How do you paint something you can’t see? How do you make there what isn't there? Trouillot is the first person to make an attempt that I’ve come across and he does so with a few different methods, some of which I find easier to understand than others. One I liked, but that made my mind stretch a bit, was by talking about the outlines of the absence in Haitian historiography. As I was reading him, I realized how much empty space there was where knowledge of the largest successful slave revolt in history took place and how much of that empty was carved out on purpose. I only knew a thing or two because I’d read The Black Jacobins by CLR James and I’d only read that because Edward Said mentions it (in Orientalism?) and I spent about ten years after I graduated from college just reading books Said referenced, an education in itself.

I liked this book, I liked where he was going, I liked that he pushes historians to be public and to be present and I liked that it was about historiography more than it was about history. I liked that he ends saying that historians need to stfu and stop whining we’ve lost (this is the 90s, of course) and take history (i.e. the day) by the horns and do something about it. I liked the clarity and simplicity of his complex ideas and kept thinking as I was reading him, “I’d love to write like this, with this crystal sharp prose that keeps you reading slowly, but surely.”

I like this sort of thinking-about-thinking stuff, I realize, even though I myself get very muddled when I try to do it. That doesn’t keep me from trying and muddling my way through it though.

[Ashley · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Is history real?" That is a question I asked one of my academic advisers several years ago in the midst of some soul-searching about just why I was writing the thesis I wrote. Oh how I wish I'd know about Trouillot then! This book doesn't suggest that history is (or isn't) real. Rather,
Trouillot's book is about the practice, process, negotiation, and meaning of History. Trouillot moves far beyond the "history is written by the victors" cliche to discuss just how those "victors" create, archive, recall, and describe/narrate "facts."

The chapters on the evolution of Columbus Day and Disney's plans to build a US-history theme park are especially fascinating. In these chapters, Trouillot's arguments about how The Past and present are codependent are clearest and, for me at least, the most accessible.

Alternately meditative, scholarly, and theoretical, this book requires sustained attention and effort to fully process. Trouillot is writing to an academic audience and assumes a degree of familiarity with literary theory, post-modernism, and other subjects.

[William]

This book was not really what I expected it to be. Rather than an account of the Haitian revolution this is book an explanation of specific events within the revolution and how the history of the revolution came to be what it is today. A history of history, this book requires more background knowledge about certain historical events than I possess and for that reason I have not rated this book by stars because I struggled to completely grasp the true value of what Trouillot has to say. Nonetheless, I think what is accomplished in this book is very interesting. I have not read many books about the way history is written and it is an important subject to understand before one can ever really hope to understand history itself. This book to will appeal to those interested in history and will perhaps change one's perspective on whatever history one has learned.

[Stephen Matlock · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an excellent book, for many reasons.

First, it's a book about the history of the Western Hemisphere (mostly), centering on Haiti and San Souci, and then upon Columbus.

Second, it's a book about how history is determined. It's not just a compendium of facts. History is developed and managed based upon certain facts and upon the suppression of other certain facts.

Third, it's a book about what history means, how facts are presented or suppressed, what the history of that history is.

Fourth, it is simply an excellently written book. The language is crisp and accurate, the thought advances at a smooth but swift state, and the author is present in every paragraph and word. There is no hesitancy or evasiveness.

I enjoyed this book. It's a history book, but I enjoyed it.