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Loading... Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, 20th Anniversary Edition (edition 2015)by Michel-Rolph Trouillot (Author)
Work InformationSilencing the Past: Power and the Production of History by Michel-Rolph Trouillot
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Talked about enticingly here. This review was written for LibraryThing Early Reviewers. 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. no reviews | add a review
In this provocative analysis of historical narrative, Michel-Rolph Trouillot demonstrates how power operates, often invisibly, at all stages in the making of history to silence certain voices. From the West's failure to acknowledge the Haitian Revolution, the most successful slave revolt in history, to the continued debate over denials of the Holocaust, and the meaning of Columbus's arrival in the Americas, Trouillot shows us that history is not simply the recording of facts and events, but a process of actively enforced silences, some unconscious, others quite deliberate. No library descriptions found. |
LibraryThing Early Reviewers AlumMichel-Rolph Trouillot's book Silencing the Past was available from LibraryThing Early Reviewers. Current DiscussionsNonePopular covers
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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, [b:Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia|40536236|Sea People The Puzzle of Polynesia|Christina Thompson|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1542039373l/40536236._SY75_.jpg|19226650]. 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. ( )