Critical Fabulation within and Against the Archive

• In Event: Bloodlines on the Leaves: Afrofuturist Storyworlding at the Edge of the End of the World

Abstract

The final presentation will demonstrate the generative possibilities of Critical Fabulation (Hartman, 2008). Coined by Saidiya Hartman (2008) in her seminal text Venus in Two Acts, critical fabulation acts as a Black feminist intervention to the violences of the archive of the Atlantic slave trade and its’ afterlives. Where Black peoples were rendered as numbers within slave ledgers, values measured for profit, and the like, Hartman emphasizes how a “story predicated upon impossibility” (p. 2) may be evinced by “listening for the unsaid, translating misconstrued words, and refashioning disfigured lives” (p. 2-3). It is a method of writing “within and against the archive” (Hartman, 2008, p. 12) that does not attempt to speak for the actors that have been invisibilized in the archive, but rather to intimate what might have been. To that end, the third arc of Bloodlines blends archival data on affronts to Black life in the academy to story how Victoria pieces Prof. Kiele’s life together in the artifacts of her life -- half notes on administrative meetings rife with racial microaggressions, a to-do list detailing the interiority of her life away from campus, and the photographs visualizing Kiele’s places of reprieve.

Author

• Mary Senyonga, Sacramento State University