Description
Book SynopsisThis collection of writings from Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot includes his most famous, lesser known, and hard to find writings that demonstrate his enduring importance to Caribbean studies, anthropology, history, postcolonial studies, and politically engaged scholarship more broadly.
Trade Review“
Trouillot Remixed is an invaluable collection. One is struck again by the clarity of Michel-Rolph Trouillot's arguments about power and the status of the historical; one is called by his precise attention to what is at stake and the skill with which he connected the intimate and the world, or rather, his multiple commitments ‘to both home and the world.’ To begin from Trouillot is to reconstitute all, to reimagine all.” -- Christina Sharpe author of * In the Wake: On Blackness and Being *
“Michel-Rolph Trouillot produced a distinctive presence in the scholarly worlds of anthropology and Caribbean studies. By the sheer force of his example, he invited us to recognize not only the irreducible complexity of the Caribbean as a horizon of inquiry but also the intellectual duty to take up the challenge of reinventing the categories through which we apprehend and engage this complexity.
Trouillot Remixed offers us a thematically distilled selection of his work that will provoke us to appreciate his contribution in fresh and unexpected ways.” -- David Scott, Columbia University
"A collection of his writing that reveals the importance and potency of his work. . . . This reader includes the scholar’s famous writings as well as lesser-known pieces and offers an opportunity for readers to explore his vital contributions to Caribbean studies and to get a broad view of Trouillot’s theories and observations of the cultures and realm he so acutely studied." -- Jordannah Elizabeth * New York Amsterdam News *
"This book should permit students to enter into the special world of MRT’s intellectual concerns, his creative and original interrogation of the foundations of anthropology, history, and Caribbean studies, his relentless questioning of the very categories with which we think." * New West Indian Guide *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
Prelude: Remembering the Songwriter: The Life and Legacies of Michel-Rolph Trouillot / Yarimar Bonilla 1
Overture: Trouillot Remixed / Yarimar Bonilla, Greg Beckett, and Mayanthi Fernando 14
Part I. Geography of Imagination
Interlude 1. Between the Cracks
1. Anthropology and the Savage Slot: The Poetics and Politics of Otherness 53
2. The Odd and the Ordinary: Haiti, the Caribbean, and the World 85
3. The Vulgarity of Power 97
4. Good Day, Columbus: Silences, Power, and Public History (1492–1892) 103
Part II. The Otherwise Modern
Interlude 2.
Ti Dife Boule: Radio Haiti Interview, 1977 / Translated and annotated by Laura Wagner 129
5. The Otherwise Modern: Caribbean Lessons from the Savage Slot 142
6. The Caribbean Region: An Open Frontier in Anthropological Theory 160
7. Culture on the Edges: Creolization in the Plantation Context 194
8. The Perspective of the World: Globalization Then and Now 215
Part III. The Fields in Which We Work
Interlude 3. Discipline and Perish 235
9. Making Sense: The Fields in Which We Work 239
10. Caribbean Peasantries and World Capitalism: An Approach to Micro-level Studies 276
11. The Anthropology of the State in the Age of Globalization: Close Encounters of a Deceptive Kind 296
12. From Planters' Journals of Academia: The Haitian Revolution as Unthinkable History 319
Part IV. A New Duty Arises
Interlude 4. Theorizing a Global Perspective 341
13. Adieu, Culture: A New Duty Arises 347
14. The Presence in the Past 374
15. Abortive Rituals: Historical Apologies in the Global Era 386
16. The Interrupted March to Democracy 406
Liner Notes: A Comprehensive Bibliography of Michel-Rolph Trouillot 421
Index 433
Credits 441
