Project description
Fiction fills gaps that history leaves behind
History is often told by those in power. But what about those whose lives were never written down? From Irish laundries to Indian peasant uprisings and enslaved communities across the Black Atlantic, the stories of the historically ‘unimportant’ remain out of reach. Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the Waking the Dead project explores how contemporary fiction steps into this archival gap, using imagination to give voice to the voiceless. Inspired by ideas like Saidiya Hartman’s ‘Critical Fabulation’, the study looks at how writers craft lives from fragments, challenging what we think we know about the past. It is the first study to unite these literary recoveries across Ireland, India, and the Black Atlantic into one powerful conversation.
Objective
Waking the Dead examines the problem of the archival gap — the impossibility of knowing much of the lives of the historically ‘unimportant’ — and asks how contemporary fiction imagines these lives anew. For decades, cutting-edge scholarship studying colonialism and its aftermath in Ireland, India and the Black Atlantic have worked on the same problem: if archives, the central object of study in mainstream historiography, only contain the written records of the powerful, then how can historians know anything substantial about the lives of the powerless? My study will expand this field of research by investigating contemporary fiction’s dynamic engagement with the archival gap, and what aesthetic, formal and thematic strategies writers employ to imagine individual lives we can know very little about.
After the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, the scholarly rekindling of interest in Saidiya Hartman’s concept of ‘Critical Fabulation’ — of imaginative embellishment of sparse archival traces — demonstrates the ongoing importance of these questions. The influential Subaltern Studies school of Indian historiography has read peasant insurgencies as evidence of a collective political consciousness otherwise lost to history. And recently in Irish Studies, there has been an interdisciplinary burst of creative methodologies studying the gender violence of the Magdalen Laundries and the Mother and Baby Homes in the absence of records withheld by the perpetrator institutions themselves.
But the right to imagine, to infer, to fill in these gaps is the licence freely given to writers of fiction. This study asks what they do with this licence, and how their dynamic relationship to the archival gap probes at the very limits of historical knowledge. This will be the first interdisciplinary study of contemporary global fiction’s engagement with the archival gap and the first to connect the common projects of ‘recovery’ in Ireland, India and the Black Atlantic.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-GF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - Global Fellowships
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Call for proposal
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(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2024-PF-01
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T12 YN60 Cork
Ireland
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