Against archival abjection: Black annotation and critical fabulation as aesthetic-poetic interventions into the violence of the archive

<p dir="ltr">Struggles against epistemic devaluation abound as groups contest extractive knowledge practices and reductive categories of classification that produce/d them as racialized and (un)gendered. These struggles are accompanied by growing calls to “return to the archive” to both illuminate and work to repair the reverberating harms of enslavement, colonialism and empire, as well as their active forgetting. Acknowledging the significance of such demands, this article cautions that reparative returns to the archive must reckon with the complicity of the archive with colonialism’s wider violences. To this end, it develops the notion of “archival abjection” by identifying the archive’s constitution through power, authority and sovereignty. “Archival abjection” names a kind of epistemic precarity that manifests in the abjectifying capture of racialized, colonized and enslaved groups through inferiority and pathology. Drawing upon the work of Christina Sharpe and Saidiya Hartman, the article explores two poetic-aesthetic interventions responding to archival abjection: “Black annotation” and “critical fabulation”. These methods prompt us to critically and creatively engage with historical archives to bring about “disorientation” of their familiarity and authority and highlight their contemporary semiotic continuities. The article discusses the annotative practice of conceptual-visual artist Hank Willis Thomas to illuminate how he documents and seeks to undo archival abjection in the slavery/post-slavery archives. Probing critical fabulation as a “poetics of the document”, the article shows how it facilitates other significations—dreams, desires, critical positionings—vis-a-vis the social order, fabulating an archive of the “elsewhere” that sits alongside the violence of the historical then and the entangled now.</p>