CRITICAL FABULATION: SOUNDING THE SILENCE OF BURNED ARCHIVE

Daniel Tia, Koko Akissi Thérèse D’Avila Kouassi

Abstract


The inquiry into the archive in an age of epistemic anxiety requires a radical ontological shift from the petrified document to the fluidities of the somatic repertoire. This research interrogates the burned archive, a site of spectral absence where the written trace has been systematically immolated by colonial and patriarchal hegemony, by situating the crisis of historical evidence within the liminal spaces of the African Diaspora. In this vein, the current study engages with the visceral textures of Gayl Jones’s Corregidora and the archival interrogations of Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, two seminal works that navigate the aporia of the unrecorded. While Jones explores the transgenerational transmission of trauma through the blues-voice as a vessel for history when the physical record is reduced to ash, Hartman navigates the state’s forensic remains to reclaim the subversive vitality of those rendered as mere data points. Although scholarship has extensively parsed these texts through lenses of trauma and intersectionality, a profound methodological lacuna remains regarding the specific mechanics of the aural trace as a rigorous historical foundation. This exegesis postulates that the epistemic anxiety of the present can only be resolved by acknowledging the song and the wayward gesture as legitimate archival deposits. Accordingly, the main interrogation that emerges is: How does the synthesis of critical fabulation and the aural repertoire reformulate the archive as a site of ontological resistance rather than a monument to erasure? To address this, the current analytical proposes to bridge the silences of the state record through disciplined imagination and narrative reconstruction. To do so, a comparative methodological framework anchored in critical fabulation is essential. This cross-textual instrument will contribute to examining the issues of historiographical recovery and somatic memory. Despite these significant roles, this method must be cautiously applied, as it risks the ethical peril of over-ventriloquizing the subaltern subject and blurring the boundary between empirical fact and speculative recovery. Consequently, this project unfolds across two analytical trajectories: Anatomy of Archival Violence and Resonance of the Repertoire.

Keywords


performance; somatic memory; epistemic justice; aural repertoire; historiographical erasure

Full Text:

PDF

References


Al-shwillay, D. I. (2021). Property and Possession in Gayl Jones’s Novel Corregidora: A Study in African American Literature and Literary Theory. Psychology and Education Journal, 58(1), 5625-5635. https://doi.org/10.17762/pae.v58i1.1967

Bruce-Jones, E. (2020). Review of the Book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval, by S. Hartman. Feminist Review, 125(1), 177-179. https://doi.org/10.1177/0141778920917910

Butler, O. E. (1979). Kindred. Doubleday. Retrieved from https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/literature-and-writing/kindred-octavia-e-butler

Campt, T. M. (2012). Image matters: Archive, Photography, and the African Diaspora in Europe. Duke University Press. Retrieved from https://books.google.ro/books/about/Image_Matters.html?id=hJ-zKNXpOpEC&redir_esc=y

Campt, T. M. (2017). Listening to Images. Duke University Press. Retrieved from https://www.dukeupress.edu/listening-to-images

Casey, O. J. (2025). Imagining the (Extra)ordinary: History without Archives in Saidiya Hartman’s Critical Fabulation. Black(ness) in German African Studies. 121-133. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111446721-008

Cobo Piñero, M. R. (2014). Gayl Jones’s Corregidora and Song for Anninho: Historical Revision, Female Diaspora, and Music. Ilha do Desterro, (67), 37-61. https://doi.org/10.5007/2175-8026.2014n67p37

Derrida, J. (1995). Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (E. Prenowitz, Trans.). University of Chicago Press. Retrieved from https://books.google.ro/books/about/Archive_Fever.html?id=UD321u7ERI0C&redir_esc=y

D’Hoop, A., & Grandjean, N. (2025). Une histoire de la traite esclavagiste : dramatiser la perte, fabuler les vies perdues. Les Temps qui restent, (5), 441-452. https://doi.org/10.3917/tqr.005.0441

Edwards, B. H. (2003). The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism. Harvard University Press. Retrieved from https://books.google.ro/books/about/The_Practice_of_Diaspora.html?id=tLRYCS9uFUYC&redir_esc=y

Fanon, F. (2008). Black Skin, White Masks (R. Philcox, Trans.). Grove Press. Retrieved from https://books.google.ro/books/about/Black_Skin_White_Masks.html?id=m5ysTujFqbgC&redir_esc=y

Ferrari, C. E. (2025). (Re)making Generations: Gayl Jones’s Corregidora and Black Women’s Ecologies. ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 32(4), 925-945. https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/isaf014

Foucault, M. (1972). The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language (A. M. Sheridan Smith, Trans.). Pantheon. Retrieved from https://books.google.ro/books/about/The_Archaeology_of_Knowledge.html?id=dglDzQEACAAJ&redir_esc=y

Fuentes, M. J. (2016). Dispossessed lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive. University of Pennsylvania Press. Retrieved from https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1c5chbv

Harpin, T. (2013). L’horreur au cœur de l’autorité des mères : l’inceste dans Corregidora de Gayl Jones, révision et création. L. Machet, S. Ravez, & P. Sardin (Eds.), Les mères et l’autorité : Mythes et réalités (pp. 145-158). Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux. Retrieved from https://www.academia.edu/12554669/Lhorreur_au_c%C5%93ur_de_lautorit%C3%A9_des_m%C3%A8res_linceste_dans_Corregidora_de_Gayl_Jones_r%C3%A9vision_et_cr%C3%A9ation

Hartman, S. (1997). Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth-century America. Oxford University Press. Retrieved from https://books.google.ro/books/about/Scenes_of_Subjection.html?id=kqr4H0sqEPYC&redir_esc=y

Hartman, S. (2008). Venus in Two Acts. Small Axe, 12(2), 1-14. https://doi.org/10.1215/-12-2-1

Hartman, S. (2019). Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals. W. W. Norton & Company. Retrieved from https://books.google.ro/books/about/Wayward_Lives_Beautiful_Experiments.html?id=Qj1kDwAAQBAJ&redir_esc=y

Johnson, J. M. (2020). Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World. University of Pennsylvania Press. Retrieved from https://books.google.ro/books/about/Wicked_Flesh.html?id=fKfsDwAAQBAJ&redir_esc=y

Jones, G. (1975). Corregidora. Random House. Retrieved from https://books.google.ro/books/about/Corregidora.html?id=20c8PgAACAAJ&redir_esc=y

Lowe, L. (2015). The Intimacies of Four Continents. Duke University Press. Retrieved from https://books.google.ro/books/about/The_Intimacies_of_Four_Continents.html?id=UMMECgAAQBAJ&redir_esc=y

Mbembe, A. (2002). The Power of the Archive and its Limits. In C. Hamilton et al. (Eds.), Refiguring the Archive (pp. 19-27). Kluwer Academic Publishers. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0570-8_2

McKittrick, K. (2006). Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. University of Minnesota Press. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/content/qt2bz2s32r/qt2bz2s32r_noSplash_dc2a14c5e92405433a01020b36b8ef85.pdf

Morrison, T. (1987). Beloved. Alfred A. Knopf. Retrieved from https://books.google.ro/books/about/Beloved.html?id=ZFA7r28Wjh4C&redir_esc=y

Moten, F. (2003). In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. University of Minnesota Press. Retrieved from https://books.google.ro/books/about/In_the_Break.html?id=DdmXwwEACAAJ&redir_esc=y

Orihuela, S. B. (2022). Jones, Gayl. In P. O’Donnell, S. J. Burn, & L. Larkin (Eds.), The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction 1980-2020. Wiley-Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119431732.ecaf0084

Ricoeur, P. (2004). Memory, History, Forgetting (K. Blamey & D. Pellauer, Trans.). University of Chicago Press. Retrieved from https://books.google.ro/books/about/Memory_History_Forgetting.html?id=RoVbjzBQXTUC&redir_esc=y

Sharpe, C. (2005). Gayl Jones’ Corregidora and “Days that Were Pages of Hysteria”. J. Misrahi-Barak (Ed.), Revisiting Slave Narratives I (pp. 159-176). Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée. https://doi.org/10.4000/books.pulm.11405

Sharpe, C. (2016). In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Duke University Press. Retrieved from https://books.google.ro/books/about/In_the_Wake.html?id=GqB6jwEACAAJ&redir_esc=y

Spillers, H. J. (1987). Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book. Diacritics, 17(2), 64-81. Retrieved from https://www.mcgill.ca/english/files/english/spillers_mamas_baby.pdf

Stoler, A. L. (2009). Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton University Press. Retrieved from https://books.google.ro/books/about/Along_the_Archival_Grain.html?id=XIrTNRvwiysC&redir_esc=y

Taylor, D. (2003). The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Duke University Press. Retrieved from https://books.google.ro/books/about/The_Archive_and_the_Repertoire.html?id=IZsSlR5-fzIC&redir_esc=y

Tomasic, M. (2023). Something Moves: Affect in Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments and Rebecca Hall and Hugo Martínez’ Wake: The Hidden

Trouillot, M. R. (1995). Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Beacon Press. Retrieved from https://books.google.ro/books/about/Silencing_the_Past.html?id=qNkBDlueIxUC&redir_esc=y

Weheliye, A. G. (2014). Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Duke University Press. Retrieved from https://www.dukeupress.edu/Habeas-Viscus




DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.46827/ejls.v7i1.723

Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.


Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

The research works published in this journal are free to be accessed. They can be shared (copied and redistributed in any medium or format) and\or adapted (remixed, transformed, and built upon the material for any purpose, commercially and\or not commercially) under the following terms: attribution (appropriate credit must be given indicating original authors, research work name and publication name mentioning if changes were made) and without adding additional restrictions (without restricting others from doing anything the actual license permits). Authors retain the full copyright of their published research works and cannot revoke these freedoms as long as the license terms are followed.

Copyright © 2018-2026. European Journal of Literary Studies (ISSN 2601-971X / ISSN-L 2601-971X). All rights reserved.

This journal is a serial publication uniquely identified by an International Standard Serial Number (ISSN) serial number certificate issued by Romanian National Library. All the research works are uniquely identified by a CrossRef DOI digital object identifier supplied by indexing and repository platforms. All the research works published on this journal are meeting the Open Access Publishing requirements and standards formulated by Budapest Open Access Initiative (2002), the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing (2003) and Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities (2003) and can be freely accessed, shared, modified, distributed and used in educational, commercial and non-commercial purposes under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Copyrights of the published research works are retained by authors.