Burning It All Down

This week I read Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, first published with Beacon Press in 1995 and then reissued in 2015 with a new introduction by Hazel V. Carby.

In this brief and beautifully written study, Trouillot explores the relative absence of the Haitian Revolution in both scholarly and popular imaginings of the history of the Americas or the history of the West, the relative (and sometimes nearly complete) silence about the Haitian Revolution in accounts of the modern world, and shows how that silence was partly a result of deliberate suppression but more fundamentally a result of a social order that simply prevented (and still prevents) people from seeing certain things as possible in or as central to our stories about the past.

Throughout the work, Trouillot focuses on what he calls “historicity,” the “two sides of history”:  that which happened, and that which is said to have happened, and he emphasizes how people in history—all of us—are always shifting back and forth between these two aspects of the past, as agents and as narrators. Focused as he is on how certain events from the past are (not) remembered, Trouillot’s work could be regarded as a history of agency-through-narration.

Trouillot wrote this work in the wake of, and in the midst of, culture wars swirling around public reckonings with or portrayals of the past:  the 500^th anniversary of Columbus’s landing in the Bahamas, the Disney Corporation’s plan to build an American History-related theme park in Virginia that would somehow portray slavery “realistically” and be a fun family destination, debates about the “real” history of the Alamo and the heroism (or lack thereof) of Davy Crockett, battles over Smithsonian exhibits about the Enola Gay and the end of World War II in the Pacific, and controversies over a proposed national history curriculum.

Thus this meditation on the construction of the past is, for me, a construct from the past, a primary source for understanding where debates about “Western Civilization” stood circa the last decade of the 20^th century.

In that regard, I found the following paragraph telling:

One will not castigate long-dead writers for using the words of their time or for not sharing ideological views that we now take for granted.  Lest accusations of political correctness trivialize the issue, let me emphasize that I am not suggesting that eighteenth-century men and women should have thought about the fundamental equality of humankind in the same way some of us do today.  On the contrary, I am arguing that they could not have done so. But I am also drawing a lesson from the understanding of this historical impossibility.  The Haitian Revolution did challenge the ontological and political assumptions of the most radical writers of the Enlightenment.  The events that shook up Saint-Domingue from 1791 to 1804 constituted a sequence for which not even the extreme political left in France or in England had a conceptual frame of reference.  They were “unthinkable” facts in the framework of Western thought. (p. 82, emphasis in original)

I find it telling that Trouillot felt it necessary to include a disclaimer or defense against charges of “political correctness” in this work, and I find it useful that he framed such accusations as a way of “trivializing” important historical arguments.  For that is exactly what such accusations were meant to do, in the same way that cries of “critical race theory” about anything and everything are meant to delegitimize and trivialize important scholarly insights today.

And this disclaimer of Trouillot’s also makes me wonder about his conception of both the immediate audience for his book and the broader landscape of intellectual life in the Anglophone world in 1995.  This important work of historiography was published not with an academic press but with Beacon Books, one of the (now few remaining) presses that publish scholarly works for the general educated reader.  By publishing with Beacon Press, Trouillot must have been expecting, or at least hoping for, a broader audience for his ideas than would have been the case if this work had been published with one of the major university presses.

But I wonder:  did Trouillot first seek or explore publishing with an academic press?  The acknowledgments at the front of the book describe a long list of academic venues, journals, and communities where he honed the arguments of his work.  He was clearly committed to pursuing scholarship that had relevance beyond the walls of academe; he was indeed a public intellectual.  But how did such a sweeping and insightful scholarly work, a work of historiography that should be on every graduate reading list, not end up with a major academic press. Was that Trouillot’s choice?  Or was it perhaps that whatever academic publisher he approached had no “conceptual frame of reference” for the work Trouillot wrote and the work he hoped it would do?

Someone who knows the man and his work better than I do would be able to resolve this puzzle. But here’s what I do know:  Trouillot anticipated that some among his audience would whip out a cheap accusation of “political correctness” as an attempt to derail his entire project.  But any reader who had made it as far as page 82 would already know better. By this I mean that any reader who had made it as far as page 82 would be a reader with a more capacious critical repertoire than someone whose only recourse is to cry “PC culture run amok!” and flee any deeper engagement with a work.

Or so one would think.  One would think, therefore, that Trouillot’s attempt to forestall accusations of “political correctness” was directed at some of those educated-but-cynical general readers who were less interested in engaging his work than erasing its relevance.

But the more I think about this disclaimer, the more I think it is in fact directed at serious scholars, at fellow scholars, who might be disposed to dismiss a work that explains why American historians (among others) simply do not see the centrality of the Haitian Revolution as the most radical and significant episode in the so-called “Age of Revolutions.”  We have seen more recently with the 1619 Project that an interpretive centering of Black history or Black experience has drawn fire from some of the heavy hitters in our own field. Gordon Wood, Sean Wilentz, and others employed a scorched-earth policy when it came to their attempts to “debunk” the 1619 Project, not for its factual claims, but for its interpretive lens.  They gave a real-time demonstration about power and the production of history, about passive and active silences, about the importance of national narratives.  Their response to the public-facing historical project conceived by Nicole Hannah Jones and executed by a group of renowned scholars and historians has been the “history war” of our own moment, with “political correctness” swapped out for “critical race theory.”  Anything to defend the purported radicalism of the American revolution, I guess—a revolution whose architects could not and would not reckon with the notion that the “Spirit of ‘76” might have an analogue among Black revolutionaries throwing off the chains of slavery in Haiti.

In any case, I think Trouillot knew academe well enough to know that suggesting that a central historical event had been elided or ignored by American historians because they have been conditioned not to see it would draw far more ire from professional historians than it did from the general reading public.  But Trouillot also knew what Gordon Wood and Sean Wilentz, who were both active scholars during the “PC” wars of the 1990s, are either unwilling or simply unable to see:  the anathemas pronounced by gate-keeping academics who believe they are speaking to or for the guild are so easily weaponized by bad-faith actors who would burn the whole house of history to the ground if they could rather than be compelled to reckon with a past they do not wish to acknowledge.

If it’s more light you want, why choose a torch when a lamp would do?

Trouillot has explained why some people make that choice.  I encourage anyone who has not read his work to do so, especially since we all in the historical profession are currently coping with toxic levels of Alamo romanticism.

“Remember the Alamo?,” he wrote.  “That was a history lesson delivered by John Wayne on the screen. Davy Crockett was a television character who became a significant historical figure rather than the obverse.”

Historians at public colleges and universities in Texas may lose their jobs for saying as much, because those in power are keenly focused on the production of a mythic past for that slavers’ republic, a past in which Black lives not only do not matter, but do not even appear at all.  Because we can’t have the 1619 Project shaping the narrative, can we?

TL;DR:  read Trouillot, and be careful around open flames. The times are tinder-dry.