Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History

Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History is an essential work by Haitian scholar Michel-Rolph Trouillot, and a groundbreaking book for a generation of historians and researchers. Basing himself on historical events such as the Battle of the Alamo, the Holocaust, chattel slavery in the Americas, and, in particular, the Haitian Revolution, the author writes an unprecedented discourse on the power operating in the doing and recording of history, allowing for certain narratives while silencing others.

Trouillot masterfully unpicks historical discourse, pointing out the conventions and tensions that permeate the elaboration of sources, archives, narratives and, ultimately, history itself. Taking its time on the West’s refusal to recognize the Haitian Revolution, the book reveals how the most successful slave revolt in history was transformed into a non-event by the dominant symbolic and economical order. Trouillot also shows the implications of the erasure of this historical process in public intellectual discourse.

Traversing history and anthropology, Caribbean, post-colonial and African-American studies, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History is recommended reading for anyone who wants to understand how history works, and the power and silencing that forged official narratives.

About the author
Michel-Rolph Trouillot was born in Port-au-Prince in 1949, in a family of scholars and intellectuals. His life was marked by immigration and exile. In 1968, he left Haiti in a wave of activist students escaping from the oppressive Duvalier dictatorship. In 1971, he found solace in the home of an aunt living in Brooklyn, New York; at that time, convinced of theater’s power for social change, he joined a theater company of Haitian exiles, Tanbou Libète [Freedom Drum].
In 1978, he studied Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University, where he achieved his Ph.D. and began his career as an anthropologist. He directed the Institute for Global Studies in Culture, Power and History at Johns Hopkins University. In 1998, he became a professor at the University of Chicago.
He was one of the most innovative thinkers of Afro-Caribbean diaspora, and his work influenced various academic fields, including Anthropology, Social Sciences, History and Caribbean Studies. His legacy includes books such as Haiti: State Against Nation (1990);
Silencing the Past, (1995) and Global Transformations (2003). In 2011 he received the Caribbean Philosophical Association’s Frantz Fanon Lifetime Achievement Award. He passed away in 2012, in Chicago.

About the translator
Sebastião Nascimento holds a Bachelor’s degree in Law and a Master’s in International Law from Universidade de São Paulo (USP), as well as PhD in Social Sciences from Universität-Flensburg, in Germany. He has conducted academic research and worked in various contexts in Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia, Africa, Europe and the Middle East. He has been working for years in the promotion of accessibility and the production of a broad repertoire of books, papers and films translated from and to German, Catalan, Occitan, Danish, Swedish, Spanish, Ladino, French, Dutch, Afrikaans, Yiddish, English, Italian, Kreyòl, Portuguese and Romansh, including its respective regional variations, in an effort to include virtually all colonial languages of the African-Atlantic world and its diasporas. Some of his recent translations for Brazilian editions include Aimé Césaire: Textos escolhidos (2022), by Aimé Césaire; Pele negra, máscaras brancas (2020) e Alienação e liberdade — Escritos psiquiátricos (2020), by Frantz Fanon; and Brutalismo (2021), Políticas da inimizade (2021), Crítica da razão negra (2018) and O fardo da raça (2018), by Achille Mbembe.

About the collection
The Encruzilhadas collection intends to build a panorama of titles by Brazilian and international authors dealing with contemporary issues such as anti-racism, feminisms, and decolonial thinking. Under the coordination of José Fernando Peixoto de Azevedo, Doctor of Philosophy and professor at ECA/USP, the collection presents authors who are reflecting on the present and attempting to shed light on how certain processes, as they’re faced, understood and transformed, change historical perception.

Specifications
Author Michel-Rolph Trouillot
Language Portuguese
Translator Sebastião Nascimento
Page count 264
Publisher Cobogó
ISBN 978-65-5691-147-2
Cover Thiago Lacaz
Format Softcover
Size 14 x 21 cm
Year 2024
Price R$ 92.00
CDD 901 24-92440