Anthropology and the Savage Slot

Michel-RolphTrouillot: Anthropology and the Savage Slot by TigersEye99

In Memoriam: Michel-Rolph Trouillot

by Jason Antrosio, Brakette Williams and Drexel Woodson, American Anthropological Association

Michel-Rolph Trouillot

Michel-Rolph Trouillot, 62, world-renowned anthropologist and historian, died July 5, 2012 following long struggles to recuperate from an aneurism suffered in 2002. Born in Haiti on November 26, 1949, Trouillot came to the U.S. in 1969, during the worst years of the Duvalier dictatorship. He received a B.A. in Caribbean History and Culture from CUNY (1978). Trouillot publishedTi difé boulé sou Istoua Ayitiin 1977, the first non-fiction book about the Haitian Revolution written in Haitian Kreyòl. In 1978 he entered graduate school to study anthropology at The Johns Hopkins University, advised by Sidney W. Mintz and Richard Price, contributing to The Program in Atlantic History, Culture and Society.

Remembering Trouillot

Colin Dayan, The Boston Review
Michel-Rolph Trouillot died on July 5. I am still in shock. A transformative presence in multiple fields—anthropology (his main area), history, political economy, philosophy, and even literature—he redefined the meaning of scholarship. I remember his sustained assault on the celebrated uniqueness of Haiti; his hope long ago that the future of Haiti would be decided in the countryside; and the words, truer today than ever, describing Haiti as “the earliest testing ground for neo-colonialism.”

I met Trouillot in March 1987 at the Woodrow Wilson Center of the Smithsonian. I had just returned from a year’s sabbatical in Jamaica and Haiti, where I had gone to write a book calledHistory and Poetic Language in the Caribbean. The anthropologist Sidney Mintz introduced us. With his distinctive irony and warmth, Trouillot repeated thebig words—history and language—and asked whether I thought the terms of the project might not be a bit “too fashionable” to do justice to the complexities of the region.

When reality does not coincide with deeply held beliefs.....

When reality does not coincide with deeply held beliefs, human beings tend to phrase interpretations that force reality within the scope of these beliefs. They devise formulas to repress the unthinkable and to bring it back within the realm of accepted discourse.

- Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past

Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History

Michel-Rolph Trouillot

Reviewed by By Kenneth Maxwell

July/August 1996

Trouillot, a distinguished Haitian scholar who teaches at The Johns Hopkins University, has produced a sparkling interrogation of the past. He examines the suppression of the role of Africans in the Haitian Revolution to demonstrate how power silences certain voices from history. The background is the "war within the war." As Napoleonic France attempted to reestablish imperial control and eventually slavery, black creoles -- natives of the island or the Caribbean -- fought dissident groups composed of Bossales -- African-born ex-slaves mainly from the Congo.

An Unthinkable History: The Haitian Revolution as a Non-Event

This chapter from Michel-Rolph Trouillot's Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995) is online here.