Fiction, Non-Fiction, Creative Non-Fiction, Lies, and Counterfactuals
Playful Engagement With The Past
HIST 3812
Sept 12 w/ Dr. Graham
I believe that the study of history ought to be fun and that too often historians (I include myself in this category) take an overly stuffy approach to the past.
Maybe it’s our conditioning in graduate school, or maybe we’re afraid that if we get too playful with our field we won’t be taken seriously as scholars.
Whatever the reason, I think history has just gotten a bit too boring for its own good. This course is my attempt to lighten up a little and see where it gets us. - Mills Kelly
ABM isn't a Harry Turtledove counterfactual novel.
It's more like speculative fiction, but from a historical starting point.
What are our methods?
Take Wikipedia for instance. How does it create knowledge?
Where do our methods admit the possibility of poetry?
Creative non fiction vs Saidiya Hartman's 'Critical Fabulation'
Does this have to be written? Could it take other formats?
Critical Fabulation /2
"So is it possible to reiterate her name and to tell a story about degraded matter and dishonored life that doesn’t delight and titillate, but instead ventures toward another mode of writing?
"If it is no longer suffcient to expose the scandal, then how might it be possible to generate a different set of descriptions from this archive? To imagine what could have been? To envision a free state from this order of statements? ""
"The dangers entailed in this endeavor cannot be bracketed or avoided because of the inevitability of the reproduction of such scenes of violence, which define the state of blackness and the life of the ex-slave. To the contrary, these dangers are situated at the heart of my work, both in the stories I have chosen to tell and in those that I have avoided."
The archive is inseparable from the play of power that murdered Venus and her shipmate and exonerated the captain. And this knowledge brings us no closer to an understanding of the lives of two captive girls or the violence that destroyed them and named the ruin: Venus. Nor can it explain why at this late date we still want to write stories about them...
...By advancing a series of speculative arguments and exploiting the capacities of the subjunctive (a grammatical mood that expresses doubts, wishes, and possibilities), in fashioning a narrative, which is based upon archival research, and by that I mean a critical reading of the archive that mimes the figurative dimensions of history, I intended both to tell an impossible story and to amplify the impossibility of its telling.
Fabula & the subjunctive tense
playing, rearranging the elements of the story & sequence to create divergent, contested views
makes visible the construction of the past
'narrative restraint', refusal to fill gaps or provide closure an imperative of the method
point is not to 'give voice' but imagine what cannot be said
"It is a history of an unrecoverable past; it is a narrative of what might have been or could have been; it is a history written with and against the archive."
What worked about the Last American Pirate
multimodal
braided narratives that emerge through and via various media
trusting ecosystem: it looked like history, it felt like history
What constitutes truth in a video game?
why 'authenticity' is bullshit
procedural rhetoric
Lessons for playful engagement - What have we learned?
Does 'playful' = unserious?
Where does a 'playful' mindset leave us?
Next Class
What do you need to know before you can come back to class confident you will do well?
