Imagining the Past: Resurrected Narratives

Imagining the Past: Resurrected Narratives
Learn more about the writers and the event at https://worldvoices.pen.org/session/i...
Saturday, May 14, 2022

Featuring: Joy Bivins, Nadifa Mohamed, John R. Keene, Saidiya Hartman

The past holds secrets, occlusions, and untold stories that can both validate and pierce present assumptions. What stories are worth retrieving, and why? What are the perils of the archive? How do writers live within this tension, and can good fiction respect what is unknowable while imagining it anyway? In her essay “Venus in Two Acts,” MacArthur-winning writer and scholar Saidiya Hartman described the merits of “critical fabulation,” or intertwining research with theory and fiction to account for violent historical erasure within the archive. MacArthur-winning poet and translator and fiction writer John Keene, in his acclaimed collection Counternarratives, “counter[s], challenge[s], or subvert[s] established narratives about race and slavery in the history of the Americas” and “disrupt[s] and disorient[s] our settled notions about the agency of the enslaved and exploited, and about the intelligibility of history itself” (Kenyon Review). Recent Booker and Costa Prize finalist Nadifa Mohamed’s “determined, nuanced and compassionate exposure of injustice,” The Fortune Men, fictionalizes the story of Mahmood Mattan, a merchant seaman wrongly accused of murder and executed in Wales in 1952. These authors discusstheir work, and how fiction can open up narrow and regressive understandings of history. This conversation is moderated by Joy Bivins, director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.