Work · Haiti / United States
Silencing the Past
1995
Michel-Rolph Trouillot's study of how power enters history at every stage, from the making of sources to the telling of narratives.
Trouillot, a Haitian anthropologist, argues that silences enter history at four moments: when sources are created, when archives are assembled, when facts are retrieved into narratives, and when history is given retrospective significance. His central case is the Haitian Revolution, which he shows was long treated by Western observers as 'unthinkable' even as it happened.
The framework is widely used in theatre history to ask where performers vanish from the record.