Citing Silences: Finding a History ‘Outside’ the Archive

This thesis examines how the authorizing norms of Euro-Western historiography—organized by white supremacy—produce and maintain silences, excluding entire communities from historical narrative. Trouillot identifies silences as structural to historical narrative, operating at every moment of historical production. Yet the exit from silence appears guarded by the same norms that created it. Derrida's iterability shows that no context can be saturated and no meaning foreclosed. The archive is inherently open to future interpretation. Butler's topology of power reveals that these norms produce a constitutive outside, a zone of what cannot be said as history, that is structurally necessary for the inside to cohere but always threatens to destabilize it. Working within the authorizing norms reinscribes them. Transgression is necessary. Hartman's critical fabulation demonstrates a practice that neither fills the silence with fiction nor accepts the archive's violence as final. Working through the archival figure of Venus—a young African girl who appears in the historical record only through the trial of the slave-ship captain implicated in her death—Hartman cites the silence, lifting it from the context the archive imposed, where it served the ends of white supremacy, and placing it in a new context that exposes the violence. This thesis develops the hauntological irrealis to name the register this practice requires: a mode that neither asserts what cannot be asserted nor concedes the loss to the authorizing norms. The hauntological irrealis offers a mode of textual accountability to the silenced rather than to the evidentiary norms that produced their silences. Hartman's work serves as an existence proof for transgressive historiography.