Silencing the past: power and the production of history

Michel-Rolph Trouillot c2015 © Beacon Press

Chapter 1: The Power in the Story

Theorizing Ambiguity and Tracking Power (p. 22-30)

History is always produced in a specific historical context. Historical

actors are also narrators, and vice versa.

The affirmation that narratives are always produced in history and the overlap between process and narrative. Thus, although this book is primarily about history as knowledge and narrative, 27

it fully embraces the ambiguity inherent in the two sides of historicity.

History, as social process, involves peoples in three distinct capacities:

1) as agents, or occupants of structural positions; 2) as

actors in constant interface with a context; and 3) as subjects, that

is, as voices aware of their vocality. Classical examples of what I

call agents are the strata and sets to which people belong, such as

class and status, or the roles associated with these. Workers, slaves,

mothers are agents. 28 An analysis of slavery can explore the sociocultural,

political, economic, and ideological structures that define

such positions as slaves and masters.

By actors, I mean the bundle of capacities that are specific in

time and space in ways that both their existence and their understanding

rest fundamentally on historical particulars. A comparison

of African-American slavery in Brazil and the United States

that goes beyond a statistical table must deal with the historical

particulars that define the situations being compared. Historical

narratives address particular situations and, in that sense, they

must deal with human beings as actors. 29

But peoples are also the subjects of history the way workers are

subjects of a strike: they define the very terms under situations

can be described. Consider a strike as a historical event from

a strictly narrative viewpoint, that is, without the interventions

that we usually put under such labels as interpretation or

explanation. There is no way we can describe a strike without making

the subjective capacities of the workers a central part of the

description. 30 Stating their absence from the workplace is certainly

not enough. We need to state that they collectively reached

the decision to stay at home on what was supposed to be a regular

working day. We need to add that they collectively acted upon

That decision. But even such a description, which takes into account

the workers' position as actors, is not a competent description

of a strike. Indeed, there are a few other contexts in which

such a description could account for something else. Workers

could have decided: if the snowfall exceeds ten inches tonight,

None of us will come to work tomorrow. If we accept scenarios of

manipulation or errors of interpretation among the actors, the

possibilities become limitless. Thus, beyond dealing with the

workers as actors, a competent narrative of a strike needs to claim

access to the workers as purposeful subjects aware of their own

voices. It needs their voice(s) in the first person or, at least, it needs

to paraphrase that first person. The narrative must give us a hint

of both the reasons why the workers refuse to work and the objective

they think they are pursuing-even if that objective is

limited to the voicing of protest. To put it most simply, a strike is

a strike only if the workers think that they are striking. Their subjectivity

is an integral part of the event and of any satisfactory

description of that event.

Workers work much more often than they strike, but the capacity

to strike is never fully removed from the condition of workers.

In other words, peoples are not always subjects constantly confronting

history as some academics would wish, but the capacity

upon which they act to become subjects is always part of their

condition. This subjective capacity ensures confusion because it

makes human beings doubly historical or, more properly, fully

historical. It engages them simultaneously in the sociohistorical

process and in narrative constructions about that process. The

embracing of this ambiguity, which is inherent in what I call the

two sides of historicity, is the first choice of this book.

The second choice of this book is a concrete focus on the process

of historical production rather than an abstract concern for the

nature of history. The search for the nature of history has led us

to deny ambiguity and either to demarcate precisely and at all

times the dividing line between historical process and historical

knowledge or to conflate at all times historical process and historical

narrative. Thus between the mechanically "realist" and

naively "constructivist" extremes, there is the more serious task

of determining not what history is-a hopeless goal if phrased in

essentialist terms-but how history works. For what history is

changes with time and place or, better said, history reveals itself

only through the production of specific narratives. What matters

most are the process and conditions of production of such narratives.

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.

Tracking power requires a richer view of historical production

than most theorists acknowledge. We cannot exclude in advance

any of the actors who participate in the production of history

or any of the sites where that production may occur. Next to professional

historians we discover artisans of different kinds, unpaid

or unrecognized field laborers who augment, deflect, or reorganize

the work of the professionals as politicians, students, fiction

writers, filmmakers, and participating members of the public. In

so doing, we gain a more complex view of academic history itself,

since we do not consider professional historians the sole participants

in its production.

This more comprehensive view expands the chronological

boundaries of the production process. We can see that process as

both starting earlier and going on later than most theorists admit.

The process does not stop with the last sentence of a professional

historian since the public is quite likely to contribute to history if

only by adding its own readings to-and about-the scholarly

productions. More important, perhaps, since the overlap between

history as social process and history as knowledge is fluid,

participants in any event may enter into the production of a narrative

about that event before the historian as such reaches the

scene. In fact, the historical narrative within which an actual

event fits could precede that event itself, at least in theory, but

perhaps also in practice. Marshall Sahlins suggests that the Hawaiians

read their encounter with Captain Cook as the chronicle

of a death foretold. But such exercises are not limited to the peoples

without historians. How much do narratives of the end of the

Cold War fit into a prepackaged history of capitalism in knightly

armor? William Lewis suggests that one of Ronald Reagan's political

strengths was his capacity to inscribe his presidency into a

prepackaged narrative about the United States. And an overall

sketch of world historical production through time suggests that

professional historians alone do not set the narrative framework

into which their stories fit. Most often, someone else has already

entered the scene and set the cycle of silences. 31

Does this expanded view still allow pertinent generalizations

about the production of the historical narrative? The answer to

this question is an unqualified yes, if we agree that such generalizations

enhance our understanding of specific practices but do

not provide blueprints that practice will supposedly follow or

illustrate.

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).

These moments are conceptual tools, second-level abstractions

of processes that feed on each other. As such, they are not meant

to provide a realistic description of the making of any individual

narrative. Rather, they help us understand why not all silences

are equal and why they cannot be addressed-or redressed-in

the same manner. To put it differently, any historical narrative is

a particular bundle of silences, the result of a unique process, and

the operation required to deconstruct these silences will vary accordingly.

The strategies deployed in this book reflect these variations.

Each of the narratives treated in the next three chapters combines

diverse types of silences. In each case, these silences crisscross or

accumulate over time to produce a unique mixture. In each case

I use a different approach to reveal the conventions and the tensions

within that mixture.

In chapter 2, I sketch the image of a former slave turned colonel,

now a forgotten figure of the Haitian Revolution. The evidence

required to tell his story was available in the corpus I studied, in

spite of the poverty of the sources. I only reposition that evidence

to generate a new narrative. My alternative narrative, as it develops,

reveals the silences that buried, until now, the story of the

colonel.

The general silencing of the Haitian Revolution by Western

historiography is the subject of chapter 3. That silencing also is

due to uneven power in the production of sources, archives, and

narratives. But if I am correct that this revolution was unthinkable

as it happened, the insignificance of the story is already inscribed

in the sources, regardless of what else they reveal. There

are no new facts here; not even neglected ones. Here, I have to make

the silences speak for themselves. I do so by juxtaposing the climate

of the times, the writings of historians on the revolution itself,

and narratives of world history where the effectiveness of

the original silence becomes fully visible.

The discovery of America, the theme of chapter 4, provided me

with yet another combination, thus compelling yet a third strategy.

Here was an abundance of both sources and narratives. Until

1992, there was even a sense-although forged and recent-of

global agreement on the significance of Columbus's first trip. The

main tenets of historical writings were inflected and bolstered

through public celebrations that seemed to reinforce this significance.

Within this wide-open corpus, silences are produced not so

much by an absence of facts or interpretations as through conflicting

appropriations of Columbus's persona. Here, I do not suggest

a new reading of the same story, as I do in chapter 2, or even

alternative interpretations, as in chapter 3. Rather, I show how

the alleged agreement about Columbus actually masks a history

of conflicts. The methodological exercise culminates in a narrative

about the competing appropriations of the discovery. Silences

appear in the interstices of the conflicts between previous interpreters.

The production of a historical narrative cannot be studied, therefore,

through a mere chronology of its silences. The moments I distinguish

here overlap in real time. As heuristic devices, they only

crystallize aspects of historical production that best expose when

and where power gets into the story.

But even this phrasing is misleading if it suggests that power

exists outside the story and can therefore be blocked or excised.

Power is constitutive of the story. Tracking power through various

"moments" simply helps emphasize the fundamentally processual

character of historical production, to insist that what

history is matters less than how history works; that power itself

works together with history; and that the historians' claimed

political preferences have little influence on most of the actual

practices of power. A warning from Foucault is helpful: "I don't

believe that the question of 'who exercises power?' can be resolved

unless that other question 'how does it happen?' is resolved

at the same time." 32

Power does not enter the story once and for all, but at different

times and from different angles. It precedes the narrative proper,

contributes to its creation and to its interpretation. Thus, it remains

pertinent even if we can imagine a totally scientific history,

even if we relegate the historians' preferences and stakes to

a separate, post-descriptive phase. In history, power begins at the

source.

The play of power in the production of alternative narratives

begins with the joint creation of facts and sources for at least two

reasons. First, facts are never meaningless: indeed, they become

facts only because they matter in some sense, however minimal.

Second, facts are not created equal: the production of traces is

always also the creation of silences. Some occurrences are noted

from the start; others are not. Some are engraved in individual or

collective bodies; others are not. Some leave physical markers;

others do not. What happened leaves traces, some of which are

quite concrete-buildings, dead bodies, censuses, monuments,

diaries, political boundaries-that limit the range and significance

of any historical narrative. This is one of many reasons why

not any fiction can pass for history: the materiality of the sociohistorical

process (historicity 1) sets the stage for future historical

narratives (historicity 2).us take it for granted. It does not imply that facts are meaningless

objects waiting to be discovered under some timeless seal but

The materiality of this first moment is so obvious that some of

rather, more modestly, that history begins with bodies and artifacts:

living brains, fossils, texts, buildings. 33

The bigger the material mass, the more easily it entraps us: mass

graves and pyramids bring history closer while they make us feel

small. A castle, a fort, a battlefield, a church, all these things bigger

than we that we infuse with the reality of past lives, seem to

speak of an immensity of which we know little except that we are

part of it. Too solid to be unmarked, too conspicuous to be can-

did, they embody the ambiguities of history. They give us the

power to touch it, but not that to hold it firmly in our hands hence

the mystery of their battered walls. We suspect that their

concreteness hides secrets so deep that no revelation may fully

dissipate their silences. We imagine the lives under the mortar,

but how do we recognize the end of a bottomless silence?