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 h ...more
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.
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 wo ...more
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. ...more
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 ...more
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 entir ...more
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 prof ...more