Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History

Chapter 5 begins with a personal anecdote at Chichén Itzá to establish the central problem of historical engagement. Trouillot’s inability to connect with the Mayan past, despite his academic knowledge, illustrates his argument that history is more than an abstract collection of facts, while also illustrating for the author (and for the audience) the struggle facing those who desire to connect with history. His desire to see a “gruesome trace of history” and his subsequent disappointment highlight a common but flawed expectation (142): that the past can be directly accessed or touched as a physical object. The “verdant coat of silence” covering the sacrificial well is a metaphor for the inertness of historical sites when divorced from living human connection (141). This narrative opening allows Trouillot to frame his theoretical argument in experiential terms. By confessing his own “failure to communicate with a past so magnificently close” (142), he positions his subsequent analysis as a search for a more meaningful way to understand history’s function in the present.

Trouillot develops his concept of historical authenticity by contrasting the planned Disney’s America park with a philosophical parable by Jorge Luis Borges. The Borges story, in which a 20th-century author rewrites Don Quixote word-for-word, demonstrates that identical texts can have vastly different meanings depending on their historical context. Applying this logic to the Disney exhibit, Trouillot argues that the core issue is not potential factual inaccuracy. Just as the 20th-century author is able to faithfully re-create the original text, this act of re-creation changes the meaning, thus showing how the issue is the context of consumption. The proposed Disney exhibit’s authenticity is compromised by its intended audience and the setting of an amusement park, which would inevitably trivialize the historical existence of slavery in the United States. Trouillot defines authenticity as residing “not in the fidelity to an alleged past but in an honesty vis-à-vis the present as it re-presents that past” (148). The obscenity, therefore, lies in the relationship between the contemporary consumer and the historical representation, especially within a society where the legacies of slavery, such as institutionalized racism, persist. This critique directly addresses Power’s Role in the Production of History, showing how a powerful corporation can create a historical product that sanitizes the past for commercial consumption, severing the actual historical occurrence from its uncomfortable and ongoing consequences in the present.

The critique of the Disney project is a platform for a broader indictment of academic history’s detachment from public life. Trouillot argues that a professional “fetishism of the facts” leads many historians to avoid contemporary controversies (151), effectively ceding the narrative field to corporations, politicians, and media figures. This stance, which presents itself as objective and non-ideological, is revealed to be a position in itself, one that reinforces the separation of the past from the present. Trouillot contends that this retreat from public engagement is a failure of responsibility. He calls for historians to acknowledge that their work is always situated within the present and to engage with the ongoing struggles that are the living legacies of historical events. Authenticity, in this view, requires historians to be “actors and narrators” who connect their knowledge of the past to the moral and political questions of their own time (150). Trouillot, in writing his book and drawing on his own experiences, shows how he puts this theory into practice.

The Epilogue provides a real-world illustration of the theoretical arguments developed in Chapter 5. The scene on Harry Truman Boulevard in Port-au-Prince is a microcosm of history being actively produced and contested. Significantly, it takes place in Trouillot’s own hometown, rather than in Mexico or Portugal, bringing the narrative full circle to the author’s own experiences of history. The physical displacement of statues—Truman on the grass, Columbus in the sea, and Péralte’s name on an empty pedestal—is a tangible act of re-narrating the past, seen from a perspective which is innately familiar to Trouillot himself. Rather than a formal academic debate, this is a popular intervention in the monumental landscape, carried out by the city’s most marginalized citizens. The overthrow of the Duvalier dictatorship created a moment where the official, state-sanctioned history could be challenged. The crowd’s act of dumping the Columbus statue, spurred by the dual meaning of the Creole word “kolon” as both “Columbus” and “colonist” (156), demonstrates a grassroots reinterpretation of a colonial symbol. This event shows history being taken “in their own hands” (153), confirming Trouillot’s claim that historical meaning is not fixed but is constantly being negotiated, silenced, and reclaimed through present-day actions.