French Colonizer La Barre: Bourdieu's Analysis

What Trouillot believes is that these correspondents reflect more than simple ignorance. They reflect a french colonizer worldview that firmly believes that the Negro is intrinsically docile and incapable of handling his or her own autonomy— a ‘scientifically-based’ justifier for lording over their slaves— the fact that he was proved wrong does not invalidate his worldview, but captures the disjuncture between what the colonizer believes is possible and what comes to pass.. French Colonizer La Barre cannot predict a slave revolt because his conception of his slaves is a long-standing intellectual inheritance spanning negatively-charged racial descriptors such as “nègre” from early Middle Age Christendom, all the way to the explicit formulations …show more content…
Bourdieu asserts that one cannot think beyond the boundaries of one’s epoch because one lacks the tools necessary to conceive of a future that does not employ the same rules and boundaries emanating from one’s current intellectual tradition. But while Bourdieu captures the same unthinkability of the future from one’s present that Trouillot also captures, the conceptualization of “tools” as the element necessary to correctly imagine epochs beyond one’s own is misleading because it attempts to posit that one can employ intellectually imagined ‘tools’ that are somehow devoid of any of the intellectual traditions inherent to the time during which the tools were manufactured, and person manufacturing said tools, that then somehow allows you to accurately think of the unthinkable. Thus, instead of Bourdieu's “tools”, we can better capture the unimaginability of future epochs with the term “Hegemony”, originally conceived by Antonio Gramsci, and also used by William Raymond in Marxism and