Michel-Rolph Trouillot looked
further back to modern positivists who sought to tell the history of what
really happened and contrasted them with constructivists of the postmodern era
who accepted saw all perspectives as relatively valid. He observed that history is written about
human beings and by human beings, and that the telling of the story is always
subject to the human limitations of the narrator. “Human beings participate in
history both as actor 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.’”[1] For Trouillot what mattered most
noticing how the positivist and constructivist processes of producing history
could be interwoven together to create an accurate, credible account of events
from a new, previously unheard, perspective.
He recognized the importance of detecting how choices made by the
narrator empower some actors and disempower others. “Only a focus on that
process can uncover the ways in which the two sides of historicity intertwine
in a particular context. Only through
that overlap can we discover the differential exercise of power that makes some
narratives possible and silences others.”[2] Trouillot’s Silencing the Past:
Power and the Production of History focused on the historic event
Haitians call the “Haitian revolution” and the European colonizers referred to
as “the slave rebellions.” In the
process of telling this story from a native Haitian perspective Trouillot made
a valuable contribution to historiography by identify four junctures in the
process of writing history when important other perspectives might be omitted.
“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).”[3]
[1] Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing
the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press,
2015), 2.
[2] Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing
the Past, 25.
[3] Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing
the Past, 26.
