Unearthing Silences

Trouillot’s project in Silencing the Past simultaneously analyzes history and historiography through production, deconstruction, and re-production of historical narratives. Although his project is substantially different from Townsend’s, I would argue that both authors, because they look at the process of writing history, are concerned with "silences of the past."

Trouillot is primarily occupied with tracing how the writing of history, which he claims is "a story about power, about those who won,” (pp. 5), creates silences by focusing selectively on certain "mentions" (those of the winner). Through reexamining and exposing what he calls “silences” in history, Trouillot is also questioning the nature of “the past” and “the present.” Trouillot asserts “the past does not exist independently from the present,” (pp. 15) “the past is not history,” (pp. 143) and that Western historians’ “traditional attachment to the fixity of pastness (pp. 152) undermines the capacity for history to be “authentic” in that it establishes a relationship to the present as it “re-presents” the past (pp. 148). Trouillot argues that while you cannot avoid the production of silences at any stage of the historical process, it is our responsibility to critically examine the silences that we help to create and the underlying power dynamics.

Although we discussed last class how Townsend seems unconcerned with the history of women and minorities in the professionalization of history, I would argue that he still is concerned with history's silences.  For instance, Townsend spends a lot of time focusing on issues of unequal access to archives and sources (a silencing that Trouillot alludes to). The project of his book is also an effort to expand the definition of historian, effectively un-silencing all of the "history workers" who have not been considered historians because they are not PhD's in academia.  Finally, Townsend's book is telling a history that is often not told--the history of history as a discipline, which, in its introspective approach unearths silences in the profession that have been taken as givens.