Haiti and the Unthinkable: Michel-Rolph Trouillot's Silencing the Past (1995)

This talk is centered around Michel-Rolph's Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995, Beacon Books). This book is about the discourse of history, the production of such a discourse, the status of the event, indeed about the production of facts themselves. Chapter 3 is the central chapter in many ways, where Trouillot explains why the Haitian Revolution became a non-event and the implications of its evisceration from the public and intellectual discourse of the West. The Haitian Revolution was itself the unthinkable; but what was truly unthinkable, an idea that white Western civilization could not and did not want to comprehend, was the idea that the black person, just like the white person, also had an aspiration for freedom and similarly desired liberty. No thinker in the West was truly willing to entertain this possibility.