**History as Contested Space — A Deep Dive into Michel Rolph Trouillot’s ‘Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History’
**

If we consider what Haitian anthropologist Michel Rolph Trouillot writes about the unthinkability of the Haitian revolution, one has another vantage point from which to appreciate Bwa Kayiman, the ceremonial and political birthplace of the Haitian revolution, gathering that took place on August 14th, 1791 at Morne Rouge in the then San Domingue, and what we call a space of eco-political knowledge.

Trouillot writes that “The Haitian Revolution thus entered history with the peculiar characteristic of being unthinkable even as it happened. Official debates and publications of the times, including the long list of pamphlets on Saint-Domingue published in France from 1790 to 1804, reveal the incapacity of most contemporaries to understand the ongoing revolution on its own terms. They could read the news only with their ready-made categories, and these categories were incompatible with the idea of a slave revolution. (…) If some events cannot be accepted even as they occur, how can they be assessed later? In other words, can historical narratives convey plots that are unthinkable in the world within which these narratives take place? How does one write a history of the impossible?”

If thinkability is what produces systems of enslavement and colonisation, then we would take unthinkability at any given time. The fact that the Haitian revolution was unthinkable is actually what enabled it despite the too many odds. The most important event that led to the toppling of one of the most violent systems in human history was/is considered unthinkable. Go figure. So, 235 years after Boukman Dutty and Cecile Fatiman summoned the people to Bwa Kayiman to break their chains and swear with them a ritual for social, political, spiritual and economic liberation, we will take time to read slow, reflect and think from ‘Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History’ here in Berlin as the place where the unthinkable was born, as the place where the impossible was birthed, to dive into. Which is to say that if from 1791-1804 the world didn’t have the capacity nor cognitive parameters to imagine a group of enslaved people coming together to manifest and revolt for their liberation, it is because our histories might have never meant to be contained or containable within the imaginary of the oppressors. These histories thrive in the absence of light, in the absence of the myth of enlightenment.

In the seminar History as Contested Space — A Deep Dive into Michel Rolph Trouillot’s ‘Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History’, we will dive deeply into the work of different artists who have been thinking and working around history, keeping open the question: How does one write a history of the impossible?

By listening, looking closely and engaging with artistic works that explore the question of history, we will debate and trace how these artists write histories of the impossible, histories that are difficult to grasp within official narratives and established histories. Revisiting and questioning the creation of sources, the formation of archives, the construction of narratives, and the subsequent production of historical meaning. With Bwa Kayiman and the Haitian Revolution as a central aspect of Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, we will map and connect these questions to our present and to the different geographies present in the class, asking: What had to happen for something to become history? What had to be excluded for a particular history to emerge? And which histories were difficult to imagine, or even to recognize as possible, within dominant categories?

Block Seminars at HKW (10:00 - 17:00)

Dates:

25.11.26 

09.12.26 

16.12.26 

13.01.27

20.01.27 

03.02.27 

10.02.27