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Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. By Michel-Rolph Trouillot. (Boston: Beacon, 1995. xxii, 191 pp. $22.00, ISBN 08070-4310-9.)
This short book of five essays, part philosophical, part historical, part autobiographical, probes the meaning of history: how it is produced, who contributes to it, and the genuineness or authenticity of the product. It attempts to steer the historian's craft toward a more responsible and self-conscious course, away from the clashing rocks of Auguste Comte and Jacques Derrida. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, a gifted Haitian intellectual, begins by examining the two-sided, overlapping nature of historicity. The practice of history necessarily generates an ambiguous twilight between reality and text, between the doers and the sayers of deeds. Power shapes what happened and what is said to have happened, raising the decibel level of some voices while imposing silence on others. Power shapes sources, their assembly into archives, their selective use by privileged individuals, and the contextualization in which certain events attain their putative significance.
In gross these ideas have become familiar fare in the academy, but Trouillot brings subtlety...