Choral Stories and Interdependent Vocality

2026

The need for another kind of story is distinct from the proliferation of diverse stories of the same kind. The crux of this calling from Saidiya Hartman’s work, is bound to the failure of historicizing enslaved, colonised and othered lives by way of imperially-infused archives that are structured by the very absence of these lives. Rather than seeking recovery of such erasure following the historiographic script, Hartman departs from this failure as a catalyst to rethink practices of historical imagination that can narrate the past without repeating its foundational conditions of violence – a method she terms ‘critical fabulation’. This method strains against “the limits of the archive” while making the “production of disposable lives” visible at the non-sites of archival absence where the workings of power and authorized memory can be witnessed. Beyond ‘giving voice’ to those denied recognition, Hartman’s reinvention of historical method shifts from the primacy of individual protagonists and particular events that obscure the experiences of the many, gesturing rather to shared conditions of resistance, joy, refusal, and care in the rejection of an assigned fungible status from the taxonomic purview of an imperial archive. Oscillating between first and third person, intimacy and extimacy, these other kinds of stories are enabled through the polyphony of the chorus, that while precarious, is irreducible to the monotone status of ‘singular being’ trapped in an epistemic designation of victimhood alone. It is through this prism of what failure discloses and the different kinds of stories it compels, that the chorus emerges as both narrative vehicle, collective figure, and experimental process of performative assembly.

Patricia Reed, "Choral Stories and Interdependent Vocality", in West Space Online, 2026. Link