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Critical Fabulation
3 march 2024
Saidiya Hartman's concept of "critical fabulation" emerges from her engagement with the limitations and silences within historical archives, particularly those concerning the lives of enslaved Africans and their descendants. In her seminal essay "Venus in Two Acts," Hartman confronts the challenges of writing about lives that the archive often records only in fragments, if at all, focusing on the scant traces of two young girls aboard a slave ship in the early 19th century.
Critical fabulation, as Hartman conceives it, is a methodological innovation that blends historical and archival research with critical theory and narrative imagination. It is an attempt to fill in the gaps and silences within the historical record, not by claiming to represent the unvarnished truth of the past, but by using storytelling to speculate about the lives, thoughts, and experiences of those who have been marginalized or erased by history. This approach allows Hartman to speculate on the possibilities of what might have been, to give voice to those who were silenced, and to imagine lives that were not fully captured in historical documents.
Hartman employs critical fabulation as a way to challenge the authority of the archive and to question who gets to speak and who is silenced. By mixing rigorous historical research with a creative and imaginative approach to storytelling, Hartman seeks to make visible the lives of those who have been historically marginalized. This method does not claim to recover the "true" experiences of those lives in a literal sense but instead aims to honor and evoke the complexities of their existence in the face of historical erasure.
Critical fabulation, then, is both a critique of traditional historical methods that rely solely on the archive and a creative practice that acknowledges the limits of what we can know about the past. It is an ethical and imaginative act that seeks to do justice to the lives of those who have been l§eft out of history, by imagining the spaces between the facts and by telling stories that resist the finality of the archive's silence.
- Essay: Venus in Two Acts
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