Trouillot (2015) stated that his book “Silencing the past” deals with questions of “production of historical narratives” which “involves the uneven contribution of competing groups and individuals who have unequal access to the means of such production” (p.xix).The author explores the concept of history as both, the historical process and our knowledge about this process. The roles of people in history are twofold: that of “actors” and that of “narrators” (p.3).In the nineteenth century, a historical scholarship was mainly influenced by positivism, according to which the role of historians was to “reveal the past, to discover or, at least, approximate the truth” (p.5). The “truth” from this perspective is distinguished between “what we say or write about it” (p.4). This approach rendered the role of “power” as “unproblematic” and “irrelevant” (p.5).Contrary to the positivist, the constructivist viewpoint (which became influential in the 1970s) bypasses the notion of truth and emphasizes the form of the historical narrative. From this perspective, there is no clear distinction between historical processes and the narratives about these processes. This view denies the autonomy of one narrative over the other. The author argues that the distinction between truth and fiction is ambiguous if the truth is dependent on evidence that has “epistemic validity” that matters only in “Western-educated populations,” because of lack of “the proper sense of time or sense of evidence” in some non-European populations (p.7). Trujillo explains that “the epistemological break between history and fiction is always expressed concretely through the historically situated evaluation of specific narrative” (p.8). Different “collective experiences” (p.8) either support or “impose a test of credibility” of historical narratives because it “matters to them” (p.13) because of the “stakes involved in those narratives” (p.14).Trouillot (2015) explores the process of historical knowledge as the process of collective “remembering,” the process which the author compares to the process of “remembrance” by an individual (p. 14). The author refers to research on individual memory, which suggests that memories are not accurate representations of events of past life that are “accessible at will, “ but are constructed revelations about the past from an individual's position at a certain point in time. The author emphasized, “does not exist independently from the present '' (p. 15). “The past-or, more accurately, -vastness, is a position” (p.15).The development of historical knowledge as the process of collective remembering is confounded by two questions: 1) what is the starting point of the history, and 2) which events are included or excluded from the history. To illustrate the complexity of these two questions, Trouillot brings to our attention two examples. First, in many examples of historical events “the collective subjects who supposedly remember [specific historical events] did not exist as such at the time of the events they claim to remember” (p.16) (such as European discovering New World or Makedoneans expanding their influence in Ancient Greece). The formation of these collective subjects goes hand in hand with “the continuous creation of the past” (p.16). Second, the “historical continuities” of the events and the “correlation between the magnitude of events as they happened and their relevance for the generations that inherit them through the history” is questionable (p.16) ( one example is a study of slavery in Americas which suggests that “in no way we can say that the magnitude of US slavery outdid that of Brazil or the Caribbean” (p.17), and the “perpetuation of US racism is less a legacy of slavery than a modern phenomenon…” (p.19).Trouillot describes two assumptions (defined by the author as “choices” (p.24) of the book. First, is the author's assertion that peoples’ “ subjectivity is an integral part of the event and of any satisfactory description of that event” (p.24). Second, the author's assertion is that by studying the “overlap” between the process and condition of history production, we can “discover the differential exercise of power that makes some narratives possible and silences the others” (p. 25).The author defines “four crucial moments” (p. 26) in the process of development of historical knowledge and asserts that silencing is inherent at each of these processes: 1) the fact creation (the making of sources), 2) the fact assembly (the making of archives), 3) the fact retrieval (the making of narratives), 4) the moment of retrospective significance (the making of history) (p.25). The “[s]ilences,” according to the author, may “expose when and where power gets into the story” (p.28). “Tracking power” exposes the process of production of historical knowledge, because the power contributes to knowledge creation and interpretation. One example is the creation of “facts and sources” because “facts are never meaningless” and because the facts “are not created equal” (p.29).
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