Slavery’s Archive and Critical Fabulation: The Violence of Slavery’s Narration

This paper explores the methods historians and interdisciplinary scholars deploy to narrate Caribbean slavery and the transatlantic slave trade. Analyzing Saidiya Hartman’s method of “critical fabulation” in her article “Venus in Two Acts” (2008), I think through the distinctions and similarities of that method with “reading against” and “along the bias grain” and speculation as strategies to contend with the silence of enslaved people and the violence described in these archives. Drawing on a range of scholars who offer clarification of Hartman’s method, I put pressure on “imaging what cannot be verified” in the spaces of silence in the slave trade records and offer a caution and a path through the ethics of representing captive Africans and their documentary vulnerabilities. This clarification, I argue, is necessary to avoid misinterpretation of “critical fabulation” and the conflation of this method with the close reading practices Hartman employs in other scholarship. Using records from the Royal African (slave trading) Company of the seventeenth century in which the characterization of the “refuse slave” renders dying captive Africans the most historically unnarratable subjects, I contend that hesitating at the limits of this archive is the most ethical approach to not reproducing their degraded position. There is something specific about the violent archives of slavery that require attention to the limits of the documents, the impossibility of representation, and the ethics of our desire to “fill in” voices, thoughts, and self-identification of the captives so profoundly suppressed.