Read the following passage carefully.
In his seminal analysis of historical production, anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot posits that history is not simply the objective aggregation of past events, but rather a narrative process deeply inscribed with power dynamics that generate 'silences' at specific, identifiable moments. Traditional historiography frequently operates under the positivist assumption that archives serve as neutral repositories of empirical data, awaiting the historian’s impartial excavation. Trouillot dismantles this paradigm by delineating four distinct junctures at which silences enter the historical record: the moment of fact creation (the making of sources); the moment of fact assembly (the making of archives); the moment of fact retrieval (the making of narratives); and the moment of retrospective significance (the making of history in the final instance).
Crucially, Trouillot emphasizes that these silences are not merely passive omissions or accidental gaps resulting from the ravages of time. Instead, they are active, structural exclusions dictated by the prevailing epistemological frameworks of the era. For instance, in the context of the Haitian Revolution, the structural impossibility of enslaved insurgents being recognized as political agents by their European contemporaries resulted in a silence at the moment of fact creation. Colonial administrators and plantation owners, blinded by the ontological categories of eighteenth-century racial hierarchies, literally could not process the organized, ideological nature of the uprising. Consequently, they failed to document it as a political revolution in their primary reports, instead categorizing it as an inexplicable natural disaster or a temporary breakdown of order.
Furthermore, the moment of fact assembly compounds this initial exclusion. Archives are inherently curated entities; the preservation of certain documents over others requires institutional resources and ideological alignment with state power. Documents that contradict the dominant teleology are frequently discarded or miscategorized. However, Trouillot cautions against reducing this process to mere conscious conspiracy. The silences generated during fact assembly are often the mundane byproduct of quotidian bureaucratic procedures and classification taxonomies that systematically privilege state-sanctioned perspectives.
Even when subversive or contradictory documents manage to survive the rigorous winnowing of the assembly moment, the subsequent moment of fact retrieval can effectively re-silence these sources. This third stage is governed by the prevailing academic paradigms, disciplinary boundaries, and funding structures of the historian's own era. Historians may encounter anomalous documents in the archive but choose to relegate them to footnotes, dismiss them as unreliable, or ignore them because they do not fit the established historiographical models they are attempting to validate. Thus, the ultimate historical narrative is always a heavily mediated product, reflecting not the totality of what occurred, but rather the surviving fragments of a relentlessly filtered record, shaped by overlapping manifestations of power.
Based on the passage, evaluate the following statement as True or False:
According to the text, the failure of colonial administrators to recognize enslaved insurgents as political agents during the Haitian Revolution constitutes a silence generated primarily during the moment of fact assembly, as bureaucratic procedures effectively filtered out this perspective.
Cevap: Cevap