Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (20th anniversary edition)

**Foreword by Hazel V. Carby****A modern classic about power and the making of history, with a new foreword by a prominent scholar** Michel-Rolph Trouillot places the West’s failure to acknowledge the most successful slave revolt in history, the Haitian Revolution, alongside denials of the Holocaust and the debate over the Alamo and Christopher Columbus in this moving and thought-provoking meditation on how power operates in the making and recording of history. __Silencing the Past__ analyzes the silences in our historical narratives, what is left out and what is recorded, what is remembered and what is forgotten, and what these silences reveal about inequalities of power. Weaving personal recollections from his lifetime as a student and teacher of history, Trouillot exposes forces less visible—but no less powerful—than gunfire, property, and political crusades. This twentieth-anniversary edition of Trouillot’s pioneering work features a new foreword from renowned scholar Hazel V. Carby that speaks to the continuing influence of __Silencing the Past__ on the fields of anthropology, history, and African American, Caribbean, and postcolonial studies—as well as to the book’s unique pedagogical value as an introduction to historical analysis. Foreword by Hazel V. Carby A modern classic about power and the making of history, with a new foreword by a prominent scholar Michel-Rolph Trouillot places the West’s failure to acknowledge the most successful slave revolt in history, the Haitian Revolution, alongside denials of the Holocaust and the debate over the Alamo and Christopher Columbus in this moving and thought-provoking meditation on how power operates in the making and recording of history. Silencing the Past analyzes the silences in our historical narratives, what is left out and what is recorded, what is remembered and what is forgotten, and what these silences reveal about inequalities of power. Weaving personal recollections from his lifetime as a student and teacher of history, Trouillot exposes forces less visible—but no less powerful—than gunfire, property, and political crusades. This twentieth-anniversary edition of Trouillot’s pioneering work features a new foreword from renowned scholar Hazel V. Carby that speaks to the continuing influence of Silencing the Past on the fields of anthropology, history, and African American, Caribbean, and postcolonial studies—as well as to the book’s unique pedagogical value as an introduction to historical analysis. The 20th anniversary edition of a pioneering classic that explores the contexts in which history is produced—now with a new foreword by renowned scholar Hazel Carby. Now part of the HBO docuseries Exterminate All the Brutes, written and directed by Raoul Peck Placing the West's failure to acknowledge the Haitian Revolution—the most successful slave revolt in history—alongside denials of the Holocaust and the debate over the Alamo, Michel-Rolph Trouillot offers a stunning meditation on how power operates in the making and recording of history. This modern classic resides at the intersection of history, anthropology, Caribbean, African-American, and post-colonial studies, and has become a staple in college classrooms around the country. In a new foreword, Hazel Carby explains the book's enduring importance to these fields of study and introduces a new generation of readers to Trouillot's brilliant analysis of power and history's silences. In this provocative analysis of historical narrative, Michel-Rolph Trouillot demonstrates how power operates, often invisibly, at all stages in the making of history to silence certain voices. From the West's failure to acknowledge the Haitian Revolution, the most successful slave revolt in history, to the continued debate over denials of the Holocaust, and the meaning of Columbus's arrival in the Americas, Trouillot shows us that history is not simply the recording of facts and events, but a process of actively enforced silences, some unconscious, others quite deliberate. Placing the West's failure to acknowledge the most successful slave revolt in history alongside denials of the Holocaust and the debate over the Alamo, Michel-Rolph Trouillot offers a stunning meditation on how power operates in the making and recording of history.