Trouillot, Michel-rolph. Silencing the Past. Beacon Press, Term Paper

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Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past. Beacon Press, 1997.

Much as historical individuals in real space and time make claims about their own importance and their proposed role in the future, early on in his own text the historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot states that the prospective project of his book, Silencing the Past, is to tell a theoretical tale about the relationship between history and power. He attempts to analyze how historical narratives are produced. In other words, Trouillot sees history as a narrative, as a production, rather than as a series of factual, unbroken events. "Human beings participate in history both as participants and as narrators," says Trouillot. (2)

This point-of-view of history, because it employs a literary as well as a factual understanding of historical narrative, perhaps inevitably suggests that the production of historical narratives involves the uneven contribution of competing groups and individuals. Individuals at specific historical moments in time will always have unequal access to the communicative means of historical production. This may be because of a lack of education, as the poor lack the literacy to record their historical views in a time and place that prioritizes written history over oral history. Or if not due to class, this lack of access may be due to politics, as a repressive regime attempts to destroy not only all voices of dissent, but attempts to create the illusion that no ideology contrary to the ruler's own ideology ever existed.

But Trouillot's text is not purely theoretical in nature. His text specifically discusses the differences between the Haitian Revolution and the colonialist implications of Columbus' exploration of the Americas in the form of the current debate over Columbus Day, as well as several other historical examples in lesser detail. But perhaps even more importantly than the specificity of these examples, the author of this provocative text suggests a particular mode of reading history that challenges the conventional assumptions of popular and academic culture.

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He attempts to strike a balance between positivist and constructivist historical overviews, without entirely rejecting the assumptions of both 'camps.'

The author is a Haitian by birth and thus Trouillot, as an individual as well as an historian, has a particularly vested interest in imbuing the specificity of Haiti's revolutionary events with a particular theoretical significance. Critical to Trouillot's analysis is his stress upon access to the means of communication in articulating an opposition, a fact that perhaps becomes most raw during the 'writing' of the narrative of a revolution. Individual voices that existed during critical, revolutionary moments of historical changes, in time and place, are often silenced by a later, homogenizing voice of a controlling winner.

In Haiti, after the revolution, the reigning elite instituted a communicative structure that essentially silenced or rendered invalid alternative, oppositional voices. Such silencing is frequently done as a way of consolidating power after a violent transfer of power has occurred.

Trouillot's work stands as an ethical challenge to historians as well as a theoretical challenge because, while recognizing that competing groups and individuals may lack equal access to modes of communication, he maintains that the variety of voices was there and historians may simply have to work harder to bring them again to light so that a more multifaceted version of history arises in the eyes of the historian's readership.

Constantly Trouillot how is history produced as an artifact? In other words, history is not simply, like a nation, something that is discovered, by citizens or by historians. Rather, history is something that exists in….....

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