Week 5 / Fall 2023: Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History
About 10 days ago, I sustained a concussion while playing basketball in my cute little adult league here in Rhode Island. I went up for a rebound and *pow* and *boom* I caught the elbows of two of my teammates on the bridge of my nose and one of my temples. It was pretty dramatic and broke my earring into three pieces and yet, somehow, I didn’t realize that I was concussed until 24 hours later when I had spent the entirety of the day feeling nauseated and headache-y. This to say that, this week, I struggled to read much for class. And instead spent something like 15-20 hours (what is time) grading papers for my TA post in Intro to Africana Studies. The experience has been challenging and the headaches and spotty vision have persisted, but I had to get things done because #gradschool, so I pushed through. Which I think is kind of gross, but here we are.
The grading gave me an opportunity to think more with Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past, which (loosely) thinks about the Haitian Revolution through the framework of historical production and the silences that inevitably occur when attempting to reproduce a historical event or phenomenon. It was particularly interesting to think about the book as a framework for what these (mostly first year) undergraduate students were writing about. The prompt from the professor was essentially to think about a historical event that has been silenced [can’t help but think Oprah here] and to consider how that silence occurred.
Specifically, in my own reading, I was interested in how Trouillot thinks about the silences that occur at particular points in the process: for instance, in the sources that are preserved or the context within which a retelling occurs. Fascinating stuff. At any rate, although I thought this prompt was interesting in theory, when I first read it, I deeply struggled to think about what I would choose to write about. And thus how I might support students through their own writing. So I was delighted to read such passionate and engaging papers from a couple dozen students, and to watch their wheels turn about power and its place in the production of history.
So, in short, I did not read much at the graduate level this week. But I did read almost 20,000 words of undergraduate-level writing. And I did learn a lot about grading: like the kind of pace I can sustain (while accounting for my brain’s current healing state), the parts of paper-writing and -reading that thrill me or grind my gears, how much I hate letter grades, how much I love writing really thorough feedback, how I hope students will come and talk to me about the comments I gave them, and how writing is a really vulnerable thing, and grading is a really powerful thing. And I hope that I will always find ways to be conscious of the power that I wield, and the thoughtful ways that I might use it, when I have someone else’s words in my hand.
Some things that my students taught me about through their work—as in, some silenced histories that are worth reading more about:
Parsley massacre (Dominican Republic)
Hawks Nest Tunnel disaster (West Virginia)
Seneca Village (modern day Central Park, New York)
Garifuna chief Joseph Chatoyer (Saint Vincent)
Assassination of Patrice Lumumba (Congo)
MOVE bombing (Philadelphia)
San Basilio de Palenque (Colombia) — which I have visited, but it was super interesting to read about it from a student’s perspective
