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Is it possible to exceed or negotiate the constitutive limits of the archive? 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. The conditional temporality of “what could have been,” according
to Lisa Lowe, “symbolizes aptly the space of a different kind of thinking, a space of produc-
tive attention to the scene of loss, a thinking with twofold attention that seeks to encompass
at once the positive objects and methods of history and social science and the matters absent,
entangled and unavailable by its methods.”34
The intention here isn’t anything as miraculous as recovering the lives of the enslaved or
redeeming the dead, but rather laboring to paint as full a picture of the lives of the captives
as possible. This double gesture can be described as straining against the limits of the archive
to write a cultural history of the captive, and, at the same time, enacting the impossibility of
representing the lives of the captives precisely through the process of narration.
The method guiding this writing practice is best described as critical fabulation. “Fabula”
denotes the basic elements of story, the building blocks of the narrative. A fabula, according
to Mieke Bal, is “a series of logically and chronologically related events that are caused and
experienced by actors. An event is a transition from one state to another. Actors are agents
that perform actions. (They are not necessarily human.) To act is to cause or experience an
event.”
By playing with and rearranging the basic elements of the story, by re-presenting the
sequence of events in divergent stories and from contested points of view, I have attempted
to jeopardize the status of the event, to displace the received or authorized account, and to
imagine what might have happened or might have been said or might have been done. By
throwing into crisis “what happened when” and by exploiting the “transparency of sources” as
fictions of history, I wanted to make visible the production of disposable lives (in the Atlantic
slave trade and, as well, in the discipline of history), to describe “the resistance of the object,”
if only by first imagining it, and to listen for the mutters and oaths and cries of the commodity.
By flattening the levels of narrative discourse and confusing narrator and speakers, I hoped to
illuminate the contested character of history, narrative, event, and fact, to topple the hierar-
chy of discourse, and to engulf authorized speech in the clash of voices.