Silencing the Past

Trouillot in the preface beautifully notes how how learned that "anyone anywhere with the right dosage of suspicion can formulate questions to history with no pretense that these questions themselves stand outside history". This is an important theme highlighted in session 1 that can implications for the methodology of History as a discipline. He goes on to further add that "We are never as steeped in history as when we pretend not to be, but if we stop pretending we may gain in understanding what we lose i false innocence".
A major theme that the reading highlights is the difference between the sociohistorical process and the knowledge of that process and how the boundaries between these two are often blurred. The tripartite structure of words, concepts and theory is an interesting conceptual tool in this regard.
Trouillot quotes Tzveta Todorov suggesting that there is nothing new even in the claim that everything is an interpretation, except the euphoria that now surrounds the claim. Can the same be now said of Subaltern studies as a discipline?
"The past does not exist independently from the present. Indeed, the past is only past because there is a present, just as I can point to something over there only because I am here". This once again connects to the discussion in the first session regarding the project of history writing: knowing about the past to understand the present and "predictions" about how the future would be shaped.