Throughout his career, the internationally renowned Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot unsettled key concepts in anthropology, history, postcolonial studies, Black studies, Caribbean studies, and beyond. From his early critique of the West to the ongoing challenges he leveled at disciplinary and intellectual boundaries and formations, Trouillot centered the Caribbean as a site both foundational to the development of Western thought and critical to its undoing. Trouillot Remixed offers a representative cross section of his work that includes his most famous writings and lesser-known and harder-to-find texts essential to his oeuvre. Encouraging readers to engage with Trouillot's scholarship in new ways, this collection demonstrates the breadth of his writing, his enduring influence on Caribbean studies, and his relevance to politically engaged scholarship more broadly.
Acknowledgments 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
Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1949–2012) was Professor of Anthropology and Social Sciences at the University of Chicago and the author of several books, including Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World and Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History.
Yarimar Bonilla is Professor of Africana, Puerto Rican, and Latino Studies at Hunter College, and Professor of Anthropology at The Graduate Center at the City University of New York.
Greg Beckett is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Western University.
Mayanthi L. Fernando is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz.