History as the Fruit of Power to Silence Others
Shakespearean critic Philip C. McGuire once deconstructed some of the Bard’s plays in terms of the “open silences” on the stage: characters with no lines or blocking directions specifically noted in the playtext that nevertheless impact the plot depending on how a director (or an actor) interpretatively chooses to portray the character in the scene during these open silences. As McGuire stated, depending on the actor/director, “meanings and effects that differ, sometimes profoundly, yet remain compatible with the words that Shakespeare did pen” [1] suddenly present significantly different performances—and different audience conclusions and impressions, changing some of the details in the narrative without altering the broad framework of the plot itself. source: University of Chicago Ten years later, Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot applied a similar principle to the art of the historical narrative in his book, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of H