The Listening: fictionalising fugitive voices and fragmented lives in the slavery archive

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This creative research project seeks to develop new ways of recovering and amplifying Black British women's life stories in a historical fiction narrative. My novel, The Listening, will voice a chorus of autobiographical 'liberatory' narratives of women of African descent in nineteenth-century Britain and the Caribbean. These told stories will be woven through the contemporary narrative of a young Black woman researching the slavery archive in twenty-first century London.Black subjectivity and voice are persistently fragmented, side-lined and silenced in the source material of the slavery archive. How do we tease out and 'hear' the life stories and perspectives of Black female subjects - enslaved and free - in art galleries, libraries, archives and museums? Alternative modes of historiography - led by new ways of 'listening' to archival material - are needed to 'access the inner lives of the enslaved' (Gill 2017). My creative practice places archival fragments such as runaway advertisements in 'conversation' with each other to enable 'listening' for new narrative possibilities. I develop character sketches and voiced life stories in direct response to these fragments, using methodological strategies such as 'critical fabulation' (Hartman, 2008) and 'reading along the bias grain' (Fuentes, 2016). By re-situating archival fragments in the context of an imagined life story, I hope to provoke new questions, points of connection and possible lines of enquiry in the slavery archive.The project will explore how innovative archival practice can lead experiment with narrative form, stretching the cohesion of the novel to accommodate the fragmentation of multiple narrating subjects. The critical component will explore the ways in which archival research and imaginative writing interact with and inform each other. Writing into archival gaps, I intend to show that fiction's findings can expand our sense of archive while inviting new audiences to engage with its possibilities.