To what extent should imaginative reconstruction and storytelling be used when writing Black British History?
In the influential 2008 essay Venus in Two Acts American historian Saidiya Hartman proposes "critical fabulation", a method of historical inquiry that uses creative storytelling, fiction and critical theory to reconstruct the lives of racialised, oppressed and enslaved individuals denied in formal archives, imagining their possibilities while acknowledging the impossibility of accurately reconstructing their realities. Hartman claims that to reduce these individuals to their encounters with racialised power is an act of violence within the archive that cannot be considered truer history-writing than imaginative reconstruction. This thesis provides a valuable analytical framework for an analysis of British history-writing, which is incomplete without a serious examination of the experiences, contributions and voices of Black and brown people. Here there are two key considerations: firstly, the histories told are the histories recorded, and a state which has historically deemed the lives of racialised "others" as insignificant and ahistorical results in institutions that deny these individuals space in the public record (Okundaye, 2024, 8). Secondly, there has been a wilful denial to grant the stories and voices of these individuals entry into the canon of British history until recently (Pirker, 2011, 58, 59).
To challenge these obstacles writers such as Sam Selvon, Stuart Hall and Jason Okundaye have produced counter-histories using memory, imaginative reconstruction and creative storytelling to locate subaltern voices representing their own perception of history, culture and social issues, as opposed to the conscious downward gaze of the formal archivist (Open University). Imaginative reconstruction is taken to mean the creative process of piecing together incomplete information or fragmented memories to form a coherent history, reconstructing past thoughts and events guided by evidence but supplemented by contemporary and emotive interpretations. This mode of historical inquiry allows for a more inclusive and honest account of British history. Crucially, Black history-writing informs a developed understanding of the archive as a physical and social space that exists not as an inert historical collection, but a space in active, dialogic relation to the questions which historians put to the past (Hall, 2001, 92 in Okundaye, 2024, 16). This essay will conclude that imaginative reconstruction and storytelling are vital to writing Black British history and should be employed and accepted as a method of historical inquiry to a significant extent. It is important to note that there is a research gap whereby most considerations of imaginative reconstruction as a mode of historical inquiry are written in the context of the United States and the legacy of transatlantic slavery; there should be more analysis on the topic in the context of Black British history.
In Revolutionary Acts : Love & Brotherhood in Black Gay Britain (2024), Jason Okundaye explains how the institutional lack of interest in the lives of Black people and particularly Black queer people in Britain denies these individuals a space in the public record. Thus, "much Black British history is unknowingly contained within people’s most private spheres" or in their "memories of events, people and a different time." In short, a Black person in Britain "may have witnessed and participated in astonishing events or lively subcultures, but the memory and recollection of these will falter and eventually die with them" (Okundaye, 2024, 8). Despite an acute awareness of the existence of a Black gay culture in mid-20th century London, Okundaye describes this as "unknown and undocumented". Beyond evidence of certain social circles and patterns, there is "nothing more" (Okundaye, 2024, 10). When the histories of racialised or gendered populations prove elusive or unstable in narratives of national history, the honesty of the formal archive is challenged. More significantly, the capacity of traditional modes of historical inquiry to represent the lives of these individuals is put into question - "Queer things cannot have straight histories" (Okundaye, 2024, 15).
As Kennetta Hammond Perry writes, although "the actions, intentions, and policy prescriptions of British officials are constitutive elements of the history of postwar race politics, they do not tell the whole story" (2015, 5). Without the voices and stories of Black individuals, British history is misleadingly incomplete (Fryer, 1993, 6 in Pirker, 2011, 48). Therefore, the formal archive and the modes of historical inquiry that sustain it to produce the stereotypical narrative of British history cannot be considered the only authority, especially in contrast to alternative modes of historical inquiry that aim to integrate Black history. Historians should not underestimate or neglect the importance of imaginative reconstruction, especially as the absence of documentation of Black individuals reduces their lives to their encounters with racialised power, captured "in exorbitant circumstances that yield no picture of the everyday life," no pathway to their thoughts and no glimpse of their vulnerabilities (Hall, 1996, 224 and Hartman, 2008, 2). Stuart Hall's autobiography Familiar Stranger: Life Between Two Islands (2017), is a powerful counter-history; reconstructed from memory and crafted into a narrative told from a first-person perspective, Hall and editor Bill Schwarz reconstruct inner thoughts and diasporic experiences to address both theoretical and political problematics (Hall, 2019, 185). As Hall explains, you "have to make the detour from the language of straight description to the language of the imaginary" to understand hidden perspectives (Hall, 2024, 4). Black writers make varied use of the archive, sometimes directly quoting or referring to its documents, and other times inventing documents which mirror the archive’s elements to write their own stories and thereby contest the power of the archive and show the past to be infinitely open to interpretation (Walter, 2013, 3).
Sam Selvon's The Lonely Londoners (1956) is a pre-eminent example of imaginative reconstruction and creative storytelling. As the narrative proceeds the reader can speculate that there is a convergence between the author and the principal protagonist Trinidadian Moses Aloetta, such that Moses emerges as the author of his own tale (Schwarz, 2013). By flattening the levels of narrative discourse and confusing narrator and speakers, Selvon illuminates the "contested character of history, narrative, event, and fact, to topple the hierarchy of discourse and engulf authorised speech in the clash of voices" (Hartman, 2008, 12). Selvon achieves this by writing entirely in creolised English; he explained: "I tried to recapture a certain quality in West Indian everyday life but I had difficulty starting the novel in straight English. Then I started both narrative and dialogue in dialect and the novel just shot along" (Fabre, 1988, 66). Thus, in style and context, The Lonely Londoners represented a major step forward in the process of linguistic and cultural decolonisation and demonstrates how alternative modes of historical inquiry facilitated the articulation of the voice of the Black working-class immigrant that had hitherto been denied recognition in the canon of British history (Nasta, 2006, 10). To deny The Lonely Londoners historical validity because it is a literary fiction would be a misrepresentation of the lived realities of postwar Caribbean migrants.
However, imaginative reconstruction also produces tensions. Writing history based on memory will inevitably result in omissions, revisionism and misremembering (Okundaye, 2024, 15). As Okundaye notes, "I could have had the same conversations with these men ten years ago, or again in ten years’ time, and leave with different conclusions or interpretations" (2024, 16). However, Black history-writing informs a developed understanding of the archive as a physical and social space that exists not as an inert historical collection, but a space in active, dialogic relation to the questions which historians put to the past (Hall, 2001, 92 in Okundaye, 2024, 16). Another critique of this mode of historical inquiry, raised by Hartman, is that it replicates "the very order of violence that it writes against" by placing yet another demand upon these individuals, requiring that their lives "be made useful or instructive", finding in them "a lesson for our future or a hope for history" (Hartman, 2008, 14). Crucially, "the loss of stories sharpens the hunger for them. So it is tempting to fill in the gaps and to provide closure where there is none ... To fabricate a witness" (Hartman, 2008, 8). The irreparable violence of racial prejudice resides precisely in all the stories that we cannot know and that will never be recovered, and this constitutive impossibility defines the parameters of Black history-writing. However, this is a productive tension as it allows Black history-writing to emphasise the "incommensurability between the prevailing discourses and the event," amplify "the instability and discrepancy of the archive," flout "the realist illusion customary in the writing of history," and produce counter-histories "at the intersection of the fictive and the historical" (Hartman, 2008, 12).
In conclusion, imaginative reconstruction and storytelling are vital to writing Black British History and should be employed and accepted as a method of historical inquiry to a significant extent. Refusing to do so raises important questions regarding what it means to think historically about matters still contested in the present and about life eradicated by the protocols of intellectual disciplines (Hartman, 2008, 9, 10). This mode of historical inquiry allows us to locate a subaltern voice representing its own perception of history, culture and social issues. Black history-writing takes us back to the archive, exposing the instability of the archive’s truth claim to show how it is culturally constructed. Studying the ways that memory, imaginative reconstruction and creative storytelling engage the archive reveals that traditional documentary modes of historical inquiry are just as open to interpretive pressure (Walters, 2013, 4). This re-examination enables us to posit and imagine pasts that exceed the formal archive, and forge a more inclusive and honest narrative of British history.
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Centre Image Cover Art:
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