Cultural Dynamics

Both a tribute and ritual of remembrance, “And then came culture” elaborates the intensely political critique that Trouillot commanded throughout his life. Whether writing about Haiti, the silences of history, neocolonialism, or the relations between state and nation, he fought hard against the academic generalities and benign consensus that hid the realities of racism and erasure. One of the words that most haunted him—its uses and abuses—was the word “culture.” I trace that compelling concern throughout his work, most especially in a piece called “Adieu, Culture: A New Duty Arises,” a necessary warning about and corrective to the limits of liberal discourse.

This essay discusses Ti dife boule sou istoua Ayiti (Burning Issues in Haitian History) (1977), Trouillot’s first published book, which is currently being translated to English for the first time. Ti dife boule is a complex and innovative text that lays the groundwork for Trouillot’s later thought, but remains the least known of his publications because it was composed in Haitian Creole, was never circulated widely, and has long been out of print. This Marxist critique of colonial history through the prism of Haitian history shows how Haiti’s Revolution (1791–1803) holds the clues to interpreting and critiquing Haiti’s recent history. Instead of following the epic tradition glorifying revolutionary heroes, Trouillot critiques the European-inspired traditions of governance displayed by Haitian rebel generals and re-examines the contributions of the Haitian slave masses in the revolution. In a well-documented yet accessible manner, drawing from Haiti’s popular storytelling tradition, proverbs, and songs, Trouillot explores the rivalries, murders, and gamesmanship that mark the formation of the Haitian State and traces their harmful effect upon the evolution of the State in independent Haiti. Ti dife boule’s translators conclude this essay by reflecting upon possible reasons why Trouillot only recently authorized its translation to English.

This article provides an intellectual biography of the late anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot. Using the metaphor of Trouillot as a songwriter, it foregrounds the unique constellation of themes, approaches, and preoccupations that defined Trouillot’s life and work, regardless of genre.

In her 1984 poetry collection, Chronicles of the Hostile Sun, Trinidadian-Canadian author Dionne Brand examines the radicalism of the Grenada Revolution (1979–1983) vis-a-vis mainstream North American politics, which were decidedly antirevolutionary during the late 20th-century Cold War. Brand uses poetry to imagine what it means to claim sovereignty in the postindependence Caribbean. This article argues that Brand’s poetry unsettles “facts” about the revolution’s history by discrediting American imperialist rhetoric and policy in the Caribbean. Drawing on Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s concept of the North Atlantic universal as a fiction or colonial construct, I examine Brand’s efforts to undo US narratives that portray the Grenada Revolution as undemocratic and oppressive. Brand writes the Grenada Revolution in a way that reveals it as a collective project of Caribbean people whose goals and values have points of similarity as well as points of difference from those in the Global North. My analysis explores the way in which Brand sets up literary texts, and poetry in particular, as an alternative form of historical narrative in response to US-centered North Atlantic universals.

In 1991, Michel-Rolph Trouillot published Haiti: State against Nation, which forcefully argued that in Haiti the peasantry is the nation. The peasantry is described as the “productive class,” from whom the state and urban elite extract value through a system of tariffs on agricultural exports, primarily coffee, and imported staples. The burden on the peasantry is further exacerbated by the country’s growing dependence on predatory loans from foreign states and International Financial Institutions. When Trouillot’s work was published, Haiti was on the eve of its first democratic elections. Amidst the optimism of those elections, he cautioned that the historical rift between state and nation had not yet been reconciled. In the years since the publication of State against Nation, much has changed. Here, I revisit Trouillot’s work in light of recent history to ask who, or what, is the nation today?

Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s scholarship examines the world economy in relation to structural alliances between state leaders and commodity traders. His work suggests that the majority of formerly enslaved agricultural producers in the Caribbean became a politically marginalized “reconstituted peasantry.” In Ti Dife Boule sou Istwa Ayiti, Trouillot employs narrative tools characteristic of oral storytelling and magical realism to analyze such relationships during the Haitian Revolution. The text, written in Haitian Creole, interjects on debates about the relationship between colonial economies and metropolitan governments, the historicity of uneven development, and the foundational rupture between the Haitian state and nation. This article argues that Trouillot selects Grenn Pwomennen, a true product of syncretism, an erudite scholar clothed in the uniform of Haiti’s ubiquitous peasant working class, to artfully demonstrate that the solution to Haiti’s challenges remains with its peasant classes. Published in 1977, within the context of his immigration and personal sense of responsibility for the Haiti he left behind, Ti Dife Boule sou Istwa Ayiti reveals itself to be an ideal text for civic education and politicization among Haitians who only understand Creole.

Given the risk of a diminishing interpretation of the accomplishment and ambition of Michel-Rolph Trouillot, his scholarly project can be profitably framed as a subversively ironic “Anthropology of the West.” Formal affiliation with Caribbean studies aside, Trouillot increasingly directed his versatile and formidable intellectual talents toward challenging the universal conceits of the “North Atlantic.” Especially in the publications that appeared in the wake of the Cold War (namely, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, and Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World), he undertook a knowing interrogation of the narratives, concepts, and knowledge-making procedures that have legitimated the worldly power of this geopolitical province. A potently witty and learned critic of the tales that the West has told the world (and itself) about itself, Trouillot undertook the near “unthinkable”: conceiving of North Atlantic centers of “civilization” as fields—however powerful—inhabited by “natives” of a kind, he intellectually savaged Western “civilization.”

This article traces a few elements of Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s critique of anthropology, which was, I argue, part of his broader anthropology of the West. The article first considers Trouillot’s analysis of the conditions of possibility for anthropology’s emergence as a field formation, including the asymmetries and silences produced by academic disciplines like anthropology and history. It then attends to Trouillot’s attempts to remake and redeem anthropology from within, focusing in particular on two approaches: distinguishing between one’s object of study and one’s object of observation, and taking seriously the epistemological status of what he called the native voice. Finally, the article fleshes out these two approaches through a consideration of my own work on Islam and secularism in France, discussing persisting ethical, political, and epistemological quandaries that may—despite ethnographers’ best intentions—be constitutive to anthropology’s status as what Trouillot termed the Savage slot.