The Silent Past: Power and the Production of History
by (u. S.) Michel-rolf Truillot
About This Novel
This is a modern work on how history is made. The author's perspective goes far beyond the cliché that history is written by the victors. By telling the story of the Haitian Revolution and the differences in celebrations commemorating Columbus' landing in different countries, the author discovers four key moments when silence entered history. The author's analysis reveals the entanglement of forces in the birth of history, arguing that this entanglement applies not only to archives but also governs the processes and practices through which history is authenticated, sanctioned, and organized into intellectual domains. Silence, he points out, is inherent in history because any event loses some of its components when it enters history. History means not only the socio-historical process but also our knowledge of that process, but the boundary between these two meanings is often quite fluid. He distinguished history, memory and novels, and proposed a storage model of history, arguing that this model is neither fixed nor changeable at will, and that if the model was complete, then history would not be formed. Through a sharp interrogation of history, the author's elegant writing and quick thinking allow the silent past to speak. Only when people begin to seriously examine what history is, can they take history and the future into their own hands.
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