Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History

Trouillot opens Chapter 3 with a personal anecdote, a method that grounds his theoretical argument in lived experience. By contrasting two young Black students—one who embraces the history of enslaved resistance as an empowering necessity and one who wishes to move past it—he establishes the stakes at play in acts of historical narration. The contrast between the two students frames the central problem of the chapter. Trouillot presents the students’ opposing views as products of their different historical moments, demonstrating that the needs and uses of the past are not fixed. This narrative device allows him to pose an important question: If history is a source of both identity and pain, who controls its content and for what purpose? By beginning with this contemporary dilemma, Trouillot asserts that the academic act of writing history has direct consequences for how individuals understand themselves and their place in the world.

The chapter’s central thesis is that the Haitian Revolution has been systematically silenced because it was, and in many ways remains, “unthinkable” within the dominant Western worldview (72). Trouillot develops this concept, arguing that such a revolution was a logical impossibility within the era’s established categories of thought. Contemporary thinkers, he posits, simply could not conceive of the idea that enslaved people might rebel against their enslavement. He traces this intellectual framework back to the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, which produced a universal idea of “Man” that was implicitly white, European, and male (76). This philosophical tradition created a rigid hierarchy of humanity in which enslaved Africans were positioned as objects, not political subjects. The notion of their capacity for organized, self-liberating political action was inconceivable, which Trouillot believes explains why the revolution was a prime candidate to be silenced in historical terms. The letters from the French colonist La Barre, who dismissed a potential revolt as a “chimera” just before it erupted (72), serve as Trouillot’s primary evidence for this conceptual blindness. Comparing the revolution to a fantastical creature shows the extent to which it was deemed to be outside the boundaries of the possible. This demonstrates a key aspect of The Erasure of the Unthinkable: The revolution violated the fundamental ontology of the colonial world.

Trouillot argues that the immediate, contemporary failure to narrate the revolution laid the groundwork for its subsequent omission from historical records. When the 1791 uprising could no longer be denied, European and American observers did not revise their worldview to accommodate the new reality. Instead, they forced the event into pre-existing, familiar narratives. They interpreted the revolt as the work of outside agitators—royalists, British agents, or French Jacobins—rather than as an expression of the enslaved people’s own political will. This reaction exemplifies The Denial of Agency to Colonized and Enslaved People, as it attributes the cause of the revolution to anyone but the enslaved people themselves. For Trouillot, this initial act of misinterpretation is the first moment of silencing. The inability of contemporaries to see the revolutionaries as rational actors created a discursive precedent that later historians would inherit, ensuring the event could only be understood as an anomaly or a byproduct of European conflicts.

To explain how this silencing persists in modern historiography, Trouillot identifies two specific mechanisms: “formulas of erasure” and “formulas of banalization” (96). His primary example is the work of prominent historians like Eric Hobsbawm, whose study The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789-1848, covers the exact period in question yet barely acknowledges a radical revolution of that era. Banalization, on the other hand, is a more subtle form of silencing. It involves acknowledging the event but stripping it of its world-historical significance by trivializing its causes and consequences. Narratives that credit French commissars like Sonthonax for the abolition of slavery in Saint-Domingue serve to banalize the revolution by downplaying the fact that the rebels’ military power forced the French to make that concession. Trouillot’s two formulas reveal how Power’s Role in the Production of History is a structural feature of the discipline, ensuring that events that challenge the foundational narratives of the West remain marginalized or misinterpreted.