Trouillot Remixed: The Michel-Rolph Trouillot Reader

by Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Yarimar Bonilla (Editor), Greg Beckett (Editor)

This collection of writings from Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot includes his most famous, lesser known, and hard to find writings that demonstrate his enduring importance to Caribbean studies, anthropology, history, postcolonial studies, and politically engaged scholarship more broadly.

Genres: History

456 pages, Paperback

Published December 31, 2021

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

[beth]

Read chaper 12 for class.

IN BRIEF
Tension between Enlightenment ideas (equality of Man) and the reality of colonialism and slavery. Even the radical left had no frame of reference for the Haitian Revolution. Slaveowners and planters had to downplay the resistance of slaves (to acknowledge it would acknowledge their humanity); it was treated individually as evidence of a 'maladjusted' slave. Many ideas regarding humanity were 'politically reformist' but 'philosophically revolutionary'. The revolution itself put practice before theory; thinking needed to catch up. Outside instigators blamed for it; focus diverted from revolutionary activities of the enslaved—it this way, acceptance of the Haitian Revolution came much later. Trouillot highlights two tactics to downplay the revolution; cultures of silence, and 'banalisation' of events. Also highlights its place in the nationalist Haitian imagination, where it's mythologised and made epic.

[Purple Iris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent work pulling this together. I think I need to read Haiti: State Against Nation: The Origins and Legacy of Duvalierism now.

[Lisa]

3.5 stars—really a collection of essays, some were great; some were meh, not as good as his stand alone works.