“Critical fabulations” / ‘black revisions’

critical and fictional movements, ‘alongside the archive and against it’, in Afrodiasporic poetics

Abstract

This article aims to foster a dialogue between criticism and fiction within the Afro-diasporic world. To this end, we draw on, on the one hand, the essays of Saidiya Hartman (2007,
2008) in Lose Your Mother and Venus in Two Acts and Christina Sharpe (2016) in In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. On the other hand, we draw on the Afro-Brazilian fiction of Ana Maria Gonçalves in Um defeito de cor (2006) and Eliana Alves Cruz in Água de barrela (2015). Given the highlighted original publication dates, we can see that these are contemporary works. In this vein, our hypothesis is that there is a circulation of ideas centered on the notion of the archive. These are works of and against the archive; they seek to supplement its gaps, silences, and its positivist
notion of truth through (counter)archives, with the writers blending research and experimentation. Here, we might consider how Afro-Brazilian fiction serves as the driving force behind critical concepts such as “critical fabulations” or “Black revisions.” Or vice versa. In the Portuguese
translation of The Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy (2012, p. 21) proposes a kind of “conceptual reorientation” that would broaden this diasporic field to include Brazil, previously a notable absence. From this perspective, we have a space of mutual relations between criticism and fiction that are, in turn, “unpredictable and unplanned, coming from the most diverse sources.”