Beyond exceptionalism: notes on Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s “The odd and the ordinary”

Abstract

article by Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1949-2012), The odd and the ordinary: Haiti, the Caribbean, and the World was written by the Haitian anthropologist in a paradigmatic moment in the history of his native country and his academic trajectory. 1 Since 1986, after the long and violent period of the Duvalier dictatorship, democratic initiatives took shape and new progressive political debates emerged in Haiti. 2 At this time, Trouillot, who had left Haiti in 1968, precisely because of political persecution, was establishing himself in the North Atlantic as a researcher and university professor. 3 Trouillot taught at Duke University, beginning in 1983, and for the next five years helped create the Caribbean Studies Program there (Woodson & Williams, 2013). Shortly after finishing his Ph.D. in the Atlantic History and Culture Program at Johns Hopkins University in 1985, he became a professor at this institution, where he remained until 1998, when he was hired by the prestigious Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, where he taught for the rest of his life. 4