Accepted Panels

Michel-Ralph Trouillot (1997) has argued that silencing is often a violent and exclusionary structuring process. By silencing minority historicity, hegemonic cultures foreground their own histories at the expense of vulnerable, dispossessed, and marginal peoples. Unpromoted historicities are absent from the record, and thus majority accounts are continuously reproduced around dominant narratives. The absence of alternative historicities becomes an axiomatic violence – a structuring, constant, routinized lens through which to see (or not) the world. This axiomatic violence speaks directly to a model of governance that perpetuates hegemonic accounts and excludes minority histories.