“No gates on the frontier”

This special issue of Cultural Dynamics grows out of an interdisciplinary symposium celebrating the life and scholarship of Michel-Rolph Trouillot, held on 1 March 2013 at the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, New York University.¹ Doing justice to Trouillot’s work means honoring his indispensable contribution to scholarship and his profound commitment to critical thinking. By “critical thinking” I do not mean the clichéd and vague generalization that equates critical thought with being somehow analytical. Of course Trouillot was analytical, incisively so. But his critical thinking was also politically engaged, activist in intention, as some of the contributors to this issue observe. Trouillot’s abiding concern with epistemology was a form of critical thinking that, specifically, asks us to constantly question what we know, and how we know it. Trouillot understood that seeking answers requires interrogating the questions. His was, among other things, a quest for justice both as it is conceptualized and as it is practiced.

Trouillot left a major body of work whose analytical point of departure is the experience and conduct of power. His interest in methodologies of ethnography and theory building, memory and historiography, and the relationship between poetics and empiricism ranged from the micro-level of Caribbean peasantries to the macro-level of globalization. Taken as a whole, Trouillot’s work represents a combination of vast erudition, perceptive insight, and sustained commitment to moral good in its broadest scope, in which he, seemingly effortlessly, entwined local and global in some of the most original thinking that both the humanities and Atlantic studies has enjoyed.

Over a decade ago, I made a foray into exploring the relationship between the anthropological concept of culture, the Caribbean studies concept of creolization, and ethnographic inquiry (Khan, 2001). I drew inspiration from Trouillot’s (1992) earlier review essay on the Caribbean region, which discussed the demarcations and coincidences between Caribbean studies and anthropology (p. 19). I was particularly struck by his discussion of “gatekeeping” concepts. Anthropologists, he contended, “often blocked the full investigation” of the cultural and historical complexity of an area by posting gatekeeping concepts, which bind an object of study and reduce peoples and places to a few shorthand “‘native’ traits mythified by theory” (Trouillot, 1992: 22). Trouillot (1992) reasoned that such concepts “act as theoretical simplifiers to restore the ethnographic present and protect the timelessness of culture” (p. 22). I found this discussion immensely helpful as I developed my own interests in understanding the ways that interpretive categories and other constructions of knowledge are defined and valorized. Trouillot (1992) also contended that “[g]atekeeping has never been successful in the Caribbean” (p. 22). This immunity derived from the region’s complexities (what he referred to as “heterogeneity” and “historicity”), which “opened up new vistas, deflecting energies from theoretical simplification” (Trouillot, 1992: 22). I wondered about this particular aspect of his argument, based on what I took to be a different treatment of terms. “Heterogeneity” and “historicity” are also, I pondered, interpretive categories (not empirical facts), which also have the capacity to act as anthropological gatekeeping “master tropes”—as “hierarchy,” “honor-and-shame,” “caste,” and “filial piety” (Trouillot, 1992: 22–23) have done in their characterization of other parts of the world, such as India, the Mediterranean, China, and so on. The gatekeeper that I discussed as illustrative of my position was the concept of creolization.

Upon further reflection today, I think that Trouillot perhaps would respond that the historicity and heterogeneity inherent in processes of creolization lend it a flexibility that is not found in the examples he gave of anthropology’s gatekeeping concepts. His explanation of why the Caribbean cannot be pinioned by gatekeeping was “not because Caribbean reality is messier than any other but because anthropological theory has yet to deal with the mess created by colonialism” with such convenient “handles” as honor-and-shame, and so on (Trouillot, 1992: 22). The question is whether, and how, gatekeeping concepts, anthropological or otherwise, can be defied (and defined), whether there are certain qualities or features of a place or region that resist such condensation. However we might position ourselves in relation to this question, the idea that the Caribbean region possesses qualities (like historicity and heterogeneity) that defy the ideological truncation and reduction of peoples and places is imperative in looking at how gatekeeping concepts are constituted, how they differ, and thus how different parts of the world are imagined vis-a-vis each other. Even if we agree that Caribbean studies has been shaped by gatekeeping concepts (e.g. creolization, matrifocality, or the plantation), in the spirit of Trouillot’s objectives we must ask from what epistemologies these concepts have emerged, why they are tenacious, what ideological work they perform, and for what stakes? Ways of knowing and ways of being are intimately linked, revealing, as David Scott (2012) notes, the conjunction of epistemological and ethical dispositions (p. viii).

Trouillot asks us to pay close attention to what the unequal relations of power are that guide the analytical strategies of gatekeeping. How do we know what we know? In other words, in his notion of “no gates on the frontier” (Trouillot, 1992: 21), Trouillot holds the gates open, guiding us toward productive paths of inquiry, with acute perceptiveness about the detours and peregrinations to which scholarly inquiry is, and should be, prone. His work propels us to think more creatively, more critically, more meticulously, and with passion.

This incentive to creative, critical engagement is clear in the contributions to this special issue of Cultural Dynamics. Interdisciplinary and ranging across a wide terrain of interests, from poetry to ethnography, literary analysis to historiography, the authors explore the significance of Trouillot’s work, apply Trouillotian lessons to their own work, and reflect on Trouillot the person. We open with Colin Dayan, who combines reminiscence with a discussion of Trouillot’s circumspection about words–vocabularies that prefigure, confine, and confirm. For Trouillot, among the most fraught of words is “culture,” an obfuscation of race and racism that deflects social and political critique. Next, Mariana Past and Benjamin Hebblethwaite do a close reading of Ti dife boule sou istoua Ayiti, Trouillot’s first book, published in Haitian Kreyol in 1977 and translated into English by Past and Hebblethwaite almost four decades later. (They provisionally title it Controversial Issues in Haitian History.) Past and Hebblethwaite explore ways that Ti dife boule lays much of the groundwork for Trouillot’s later thinking, not the least being writing this populist oral history in Kreyol as a statement about language rights and social inequality in Haiti and the need for historical knowledge to be accessible to all. In the same vein, the book underscores the tensions and contradictions of social, political, and economic inequality in Saint-Domingue; charts their impact in contemporary Haiti; and offers revolutionary heroes alternative to those who are typically mythologized and celebrated today. Ti dife boule sou istoua Ayiti, Past and Hebblethwaite suggest, attests to Trouillot’s strongly activist conviction that it is the responsibility of intellectuals to correct ignorance and to counter caricatures and lies.

Next we turn to Yarimar Bonilla’s discussion of Trouillot the artist–activist–scholar. Bonilla emphasizes Trouillot’s approach to translation—between languages and within a language—as a commitment to establishing diverse points of entry into any given conversation. Only then can interlocutors unfamiliar with the idioms and interests of a discursive community be equal participants. In this way, as well, Bonilla explains, Trouillot understood that the problem is not empirical but ontological. The Grenada Revolution is the subject of Laurie Lambert’s article, in which she explores the work of Trinidadian-Canadian poet Dionne Brand as a way to imagine what it means to claim sovereignty in the post-independence Caribbean. Building on Trouillot’s notion of “North Atlantic universals,” Lambert examines Brand’s efforts to undo US narratives that portray the Revolution as undemocratic and oppressive by examining Brand’s use of literary texts, and poetry in particular, as alternative forms of historical narrative as a means to counter US-centered ways of knowing.

In his book Haiti: State against Nation, Trouillot argued that in Haiti the peasantry is the nation; yet, while the state lives at the expense of the nation, the peasantry is disfranchised. Katherine Smith looks at the years since the publication of Haiti: State against Nation, during which, she points out, much has changed. Smith revisits Trouillot’s work to consider who, or what, the nation is today, and what significance this has for understanding Haiti’s domestic and diasporic futures. Nathalie Pierre’s contribution takes as its approach the immigrant experience and Trouillot’s development as a scholar and an activist within the context of Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier’s inherited dictatorship, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr, and the Black Power and Civil Rights movements in the America that became Trouillot’s home. Reflecting on Ti dife boule sou istoua Ayiti, Pierre’s interest is in tracing what she sees as Trouillot’s transformation from, as she puts it, mere immigrant to dangerously creative artist. Harvey Neptune offers an interpretation of Trouillot’s oeuvre as an “anthropology of the west,” where Trouillot’s engagement with (and dedication to) the Caribbean region was part of a larger project of critical analysis of the North Atlantic. Trouillot’s work, Neptune argues, resists the ghettoization and trivialization that comes with being compartmentalized as “Third Worldly” thought. Mayanthi Fernando takes up Trouillot’s classic essay, “Anthropology and the Savage Slot.” Framing her discussion with Trouillot’s insight that once the concepts with which we work are launched, they take on a life of their own, Fernando inquires into the conditions of possibility that render particular phenomena into problems or questions: from what is an object of study constituted? Fernando acknowledges, and extends beyond, the issue of representing the “native” or subaltern voice into the terrain of ethics—what she calls the “ethics of ethnographic refusal.” There are times when not representing the “native voice” is the issue, when silence, even when it is the product of power, can be a method of eluding power’s reach. Although not saying so explicitly, this argument prompts for us the question of whether silencing the past (to borrow from Trouillot while minding his own connotations) can be an agentive act of refusal, perhaps analogous to what Edouard Glissant referred to as the right to “opacity.” We end with Millery Polyne’s poetry, his first poem evoking the lilting and raging energies of coercion and freedom, and the second channeling Trouillot as inspiring and heartening muse in a world of ivory tower expectations and assessments.

As Colin Dayan observes, Trouillot understood the porousness of the boundaries between history and fiction; he also understood the unease on the part of the dominant, feelings that motivate selective historiography. Trouillot’s career was dedicated to exposing this handiwork of power: the assertions and denials of its ways of knowing, the gatekeeping concepts that we valorize or at least take for granted. At the same time, Mayanthi Fernando notes that Trouillot’s trenchant critique was also accompanied by optimistic confidence that improvements and corrections were possible, that they would happen. Let us continue the Trouillotian tradition of looking askance at the gates, and of keeping the gates open.