Summary
Haitian historian whose Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History is, in the forty-third essay of Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, a set of essays on the slave rebellion in Saint-Domingue using the same method as Guha’s subaltern history — maintaining and yet interpreting colonial silence (Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, PDF p.485-486).
Details
- The rebellion his book treats began in 1791 in Saint-Domingue and ended with the declaration of an independent republic in 1804; so unusual, unexpected and shattering were its effects that it was virtually unthinkable for Europeans (PDF p.485).
- Subsequent historians wrote according to what Trouillot calls guild practices, which silenced the rebellion’s eruptive force, and the silences continue: “Amazing in this story is the extent to which historians have treated the events of Saint-Domingue in ways quite similar to the reactions of its Western contemporaries.” (quoted PDF p.485).
- The net effect is what he calls “the fixity of the past”: history reified and solidified into an inaccessible, irrecoverable distance that communicates itself as silence (PDF p.485).
- Said adds that Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which Trouillot does not mention, is that silence’s purest model, Marlow’s narrative voice silencing the Africans and even Kurtz (PDF p.486).