Workshop: "History and Critical Fabulation: Limits and Possibilities of a Method" II

“By playing with and rearranging the basic elements of the story, by re-presenting the sequence of events in divergent narratives and from contested points of view, I have attempted to undermine the status of the event, to displace the accepted or authorised account, and to imagine what might have happened, what might have been said, or what might have been done.”

This is how literary scholar Saidiya Hartman defines the method of ‘critical fabulation’ in her seminal and widely cited essay *Venus in Two Acts* (2008). This methodological framework is a call for creativity in dealing with the gaps in historical tradition, so as to enable these pasts, too, to find a place within the historical narrative.

The ‘critical fabulation’ approach is distinctive in two respects: on the one hand, in its aim to respond to the silence of the archives using decidedly literary means; and, on the other hand, in its roots in feminist and postcolonial theory, whereby the approach is closely linked to research into the history and post-history of the enslavement of Black people in the transatlantic context. This has both aesthetic and epistemological implications. In German historical scholarship, ‘critical fabulation’ has so far received little attention. Yet it offers the potential not only for a different approach to source criticism, but even more so for a critique of silences: how should, can and are historians permitted to deal with that which has not become a ‘source’? Is it enough to remain silent about it? Or are there ways to speculate methodically about these pasts as well, and to present this in a historically valid manner? What role does the form of writing play in this? And how do ‘critical fabulation’ and the questions it raises relate to other approaches to writing history ‘from below’ (such as microhistory or dense description)? 

Precisely because none of this is straightforward or self-explanatory, we would like to invite you to a workshop comprising two sessions. The first session will focus primarily on an in-depth theoretical examination of critical fabulation. During the second session, we will then discuss participants’ own texts written in the intervening period and the applicability of the method to historical scholarship.

Anyone at an advanced Master’s level or above who is interested is welcome to attend, regardless of their prior knowledge.

Please send registrations to: anna.domdey@uni-erfurt.de