Silencing the Past Response

Townsend acknowledges in History’s Babel that these silences within history exist. However, he does not actively engage with these silences with the intensity that Trouillot displays in Silencing the Past, nor in any of the details surrounding his narrative of the AHA and professionalization of history as a discipline within the social sciences.

Trouillot’s Silencing the Past is accomplishes this engaging investigation into silences because of how he examines the production of historical narratives by working in an opposite direction from that of most historians and even from that of other disciplines in the humanities. From my understanding in this book, a majority of historians start with what information they know and gathered building their historical narrative from there. His argument throughout the book is rooted in achieving contexts in which to fully examine history.  

In order to even attempt to accomplish this, Trouillot looks into the silences that he finds present within historical narratives in an attempt to demonstrate how power is something that subtley functions within history. He demonstrates this by recognizing his own location within his research and his own power to shape the narrative while providing a reexamination of the events that took place in Haiti at the turn of the 19^th century. He focuses on the silences beneath the history of the revolution by examining the three faces of Sans Souci. In doing this, he highlights the tensions within the revolution and its complexities such as the fact the revolution did not revolve around the singular struggle between slave and French Master. Trouillet then tracks the many different trajectories that stem around this particular revolution, as well as bringing to light the silences surrounding the revolution at the hands of notable historians.