Annabel Tang

 

In her essay “Venus in Two Acts”, scholar Saidiya Hartman coins the term “critical fabulation”, a method of reading that strains against the limits of a hegemonic archive, using fictional narrative to fill in the gaps left by historical research on enslaved communities and other peoples relegated to marginalia. My research project will utilize Hartman’s technique of critical fabulation to explore the contradiction of memory in the aftermath of trauma. If remembering is a crucial process of grief and mourning yet necessarily flawed, fragmented, and nonlinear, how do we make sense of this contradiction? How can we—if we can at all—locate those who are missing in history or reconstruct homelands if memory fails us or tells us false truths?