Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History

The power to shape history by controlling the process of fact assembly and classification. Archival power determines what sources are collected, how they are organized, and which are deemed credible, thereby setting the rules for what can be said about the past. It operates within institutions like state archives and museums but also through academic guilds and even tourist sites.

A moral relationship to the past that is grounded in an honest engagement with the present. For Trouillot, historical authenticity is achieved by acknowledging how current power dynamics and injustices shape our representations of that past rather than by perfectly re-creating a past event. A representation that trivializes the living presence of past horrors (such as a theme-park exhibit on slavery) is therefore inauthentic.

A theoretical position holding that historical narratives are fictions with no special claim to truth, as they are “emplotted” in ways life is not (5). Trouillot critiques this view for denying the autonomy of the sociohistorical process. He argues that the constructivist view cannot explain why some narratives, and not others, become powerful enough to pass as accepted history.

Two primary methods of silencing used in historical narratives. Formulas of erasure are tropes that directly cancel the fact or relevance of an event, such as omitting the Haitian Revolution from a history of world revolutions. Formulas of banalization empty an event of its revolutionary content by focusing on trivial details or external causes, making the event seem less significant than it was.

The fundamental ambiguity of the word history, referring to both the sociohistorical process of what happened (historicity 1) and the narrative of those events (historicity 2). Trouillot’s analysis is built on acknowledging the irreducible distinction, yet equally irreducible overlap, between these two dimensions. Power moves silences from one historicity into the other, and that transfer is where Trouillot identifies the mechanism by which events get shaped, distorted, or suppressed before they ever reach a finished narrative.

A four-stage framework for analyzing how silences enter the production of history. These conceptual moments are: firstly, the moment of fact creation (the making of sources); secondly, the moment of fact assembly (the making of archives); thirdly, the moment of fact retrieval (the making of narratives); and finally, the moment of retrospective significance (the making of history in the final instance). At each stage, power determines what is included and what is left out: Sources go uncollected, archives exclude certain voices, narratives foreground particular facts, and commemorations fix which version circulates as the authoritative record.

A theoretical position that emphasizes the firm distinction between the past as it actually happened and what is written about it. Trouillot argues that this viewpoint, which treats the historian’s role as simply revealing objective truth, ignores the power inherent in the construction of any historical narrative. The positivist view presents power as irrelevant to the making of the story itself.

The fourth and final moment of historical production, where a historical narrative is endowed with meaning and importance. Commemorations and public discourse fix which version of an event circulates publicly, closing off alternative narratives and settling an event’s place in collective memory. Actors themselves can engage in creating retrospective significance, as when Henry Christophe named his palace Sans Souci to symbolically erase his rival.

Trouillot builds the book’s argument around silencing, which he defines as an active and transitive process of producing absences in the historical record. Trouillot argues that one “silences a fact or an individual as a silencer silences a gun” (48). These silences are created at each of the four moments of historical production and are a fundamental effect of how power shapes historical narratives.

A term describing an event so radical that it defies the conceptual categories and ontological assumptions of the time in which it occurs. Throughout his argument, Trouillot uses the Haitian Revolution to demonstrate this mechanism: The event challenged the West’s framework for understanding race, slavery, and revolution, making the revolution impossible to narrate or comprehend on its own terms even as it was happening.