Response to Silencing the Past

In Silencing the Past Michel Rolph Trouillot offers a adroit critique on how historical narratives are created and the “silences” which comprise them. Trouillot tries to negate some of these silences with his complex treatment of the Haitian Revolution. He highlights the “war within the war” and the internal struggles within the revolution, divides which had been ignored by earlier Haitian born scholars. Trouillot does not however offer any systematic solutions for fixing such silences. One can suspect that because, according to Trouillot silences are inherent in the creation of historical narratives (p 27). He goes on insinuate that historical narratives have finite intellectual space for the facts which comprise them (p.49). Therefore it can be asserted that according to the principles in Silencing the Past one cannot present events in their entirety as the recording of said events are inherently flawed and the narratives presented possess limited room for evidence.  

            Robert B. Townsend’s History’s Babel offers an example of how historians sought to correct for some of these “silences” (p. 80). While not explicitly referred to as such, Townsend asserts that the New History movement in the 1920s encouraged archivists to maintain documents which had previously been discounted as meaningless because ealier historians had primarily on political issues. The New History movement, which sought to broaden the focus of the historical enterprise and encouraged historians to use a panoply of source materials to determine “social facts” about their respective areas of interest.