Musical Fabulation

“Musical fabulation” comes from Saidiya Hartman’s “critical fabulation,” a term she coined in her 2008 essay “Venus in Two Acts.” Critical fabulation is her methodology for critically imagining undocumentable moments from the archives of transatlantic slavery. Because the archive of slavery is overdetermined by violence and erasure, Hartman looks to write a counter-history of the dispossessed by reading between the lines, acknowledging the violence that the archive preserves (and enacts) but also trying to write beyond it. As a musician, I’m interested if one can critically fabulate musically. What would it mean, or sound like, to do musical fabulation? Here is a first attempt.