Also known as: Silencing the Past, Michel-Rolph Trouillot
Last updated: April 16, 2026
A theory of historical production arguing that power enters history at four moments — fact creation, fact assembly, fact retrieval, and retrospective significance — and that silences are structural, not merely accidental. Trouillot's central case is the Haitian Revolution, which he argues was 'unthinkable' within dominant Western categories even as it unfolded, and whose internal silences (most famously the erasure of Colonel Sans Souci within Christophe's palace-naming) show how power shapes not only which histories are told but which are possible to tell.
silencing-past — Michel-Rolph's major theoretical work; the academic counterpart to Lyonel's literary project
Trouillot's Chapter 2 'The Three Faces of Sans Souci' in Silencing the Past is the definitive analysis of both the man and the silencing — the palace naming as a double killing, the archival suppression, and why Haitian nationalist historiography needed to forget him.
Trouillot's Silencing the Past documents Sylla as one of Sans-Souci's most important allies and analyzes how the sustained Bossale resistance created the conditions that forced the Creole generals to defect — the causal chain behind Haitian independence.
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Michel-Rolph Trouillot. "Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History." Beacon Press, 1995. Rasin.ai, https://rasin.ai/connections/sources/trouillot-silencing-past. Accessed 2026-05-05.