Silence, Power, and the Archive: Reading Marisa J. Fuentes and Michel-Rolph Trouillot

Abstract

Abstract

This review examines the intersecting arguments of Marisa J. Fuentes’s Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (2016) and Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995), situating both within contemporary debates on power, epistemic violence, and the politics of historical knowledge. Trouillot’s foundational analysis reveals how silences structure history at every stage—from the creation of facts to their retrospective interpretation—demonstrating that historical production is inseparable from relations of domination. Fuentes extends this theoretical frame into the gendered and racialized domains of the colonial archive, focusing on eighteenth-century Bridgetown, Barbados, where the fragmented traces of enslaved and free women of color expose the archive as a “technology of violence.” Her method of reading against the grain uncovers both the violence and the possibilities within archival fragments, foregrounding the ethical dilemmas of representing lives marked by erasure. Read together, Trouillot and Fuentes articulate a critical practice that redefines silence not as a void but as an active condition of historiography. They compel historians to treat the archive as a contested space where power and knowledge converge, urging a reimagining of historical methodology that attends to absence, affect, and the ongoing colonial grammars of representation. The review concludes that both works illuminate the necessity of confronting the limits of what can be known, while envisioning a more reflexive and decolonial practice of reading, writing, and remembering history.

Keywords

archival silence; epistemic violence; historiography; Marisa J. Fuentes; Michel-Rolph Trouillot; colonial archives; Black women’s history; power and knowledge; decolonial critique; historical methodology