No gates on the frontier

This special issue of Cultural Dynamics grows out of an interdisciplinary symposium celebrating the life and scholarship of Michel-Rolph Trouillot, held on 1 March 2013 at the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, New York University.1 Doing justice to Trouillot’s work means honoring his indispensable contribution to scholarship and his profound commitment to critical thinking. By “critical thinking” I do not mean the cliched and vague generalization that equates critical thought with being somehow analytical. Of course Trouillot was analytical, incisively so. But his critical thinking was also politically engaged, activist in intention, as some of the contributors to this issue observe. Trouillot’s abiding concern with epistemology was a form of critical thinking that, specifically, asks us to constantly question what we know, and how we know it. Trouillot understood that seeking answers requires interrogating the questions. His was, among other things, a quest for justice both as it is conceptualized and as it is practiced. Trouillot left a major body of work whose analytical point of departure is the experience and conduct of power. His interest in methodologies of ethnography and theory building, memory and historiography, and the relationship between poetics and empiricism ranged from the micro-level of Caribbean peasantries to the macro-level of globalization. Taken as a whole, Trouillot’s work represents a combination of vast erudition, perceptive insight, and sustained commitment to moral good in its broadest scope, in which he, seemingly effortlessly, entwined local and global in some of the most original thinking that both the humanities and Atlantic studies has enjoyed. Over a decade ago, I made a foray into exploring the relationship between the anthropological concept of culture, the Caribbean studies concept of creolization, and ethnographic inquiry (Khan, 2001). I drew inspiration from Trouillot’s (1992) earlier review essay on the Caribbean region, which discussed the demarcations and coincidences between Caribbean studies and anthropology (p. 19). I was particularly struck by his discussion of “gatekeeping” concepts. Anthropologists, he contended, “often blocked the full investigation” of the cultural and historical complexity of an area by posting gatekeeping concepts, which bind an object of study and reduce peoples and places to a few shorthand “‘native’ traits mythified by theory” (Trouillot, 1992: 22). Trouillot (1992)

Frontier · Political science · Sociology · Caribbean and African Literature and Culture · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Cuban History and Society · Law

• The Caribbean Region

  Michel-Rolph Trouillot•Annual Review of Anthropology•1992

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• The Futures of Michel-Rolph Trouillot

  David A Scott, David Scott•Small Axe A Caribbean Journal of…•2012

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• Journey to the Center of the Earth

  Open Access•Aisha Khan•Cultural Anthropology•2001

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