Critical Fabulation / Curator as Fabulist

Stemming from black studies and subaltern studies, American academic Saidiya Hartman navigates archive criticism into a new thinking space, which is combined with race and gender perspectives and proposes a way to dissolve the impasse of reader apathy—"critical fabulation.” Hartman proposes that the urgency of the times requires care for ordinary individuals rather than elites, as the former have limited or no access to the means of representation and the possibility of creatively pushing against the normative framework of history. 

When viewed beyond the scope of black studies and within a broader postcolonial context, what kind of cultural landscape does critical fabulation reveal? 

This art sharing and research gathering, rather than looking to radical blackness moments that break the already false views of black social life under Hartman’s concept of critical fabulation, we will look instead to its extensions on critically reflecting the curatorial narratives of the minoritarian subjects in which…