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

这一创造性的研究项目旨在开发新的方法，以历史小说的叙事方式来恢复和放大英国黑人女性的生活故事。我的小说《倾听》（The Listening），将对19世纪英国和加勒比地区非洲裔女性的自传体“解放”叙事进行合唱。这些被讲述的故事将通过一个年轻的黑人妇女在21世纪伦敦研究奴隶制档案的当代叙事交织在一起。在奴隶制档案的原始材料中，黑人的主体性和声音一直是支离破碎、边缘化和沉默的。我们如何在艺术画廊、图书馆、档案馆和博物馆中梳理和“倾听”黑人女性主题的生活故事和观点——无论是被奴役的还是自由的？历史编纂的替代模式——以“倾听”档案材料的新方式为主导——需要“进入被奴役者的内心生活”（Gill 2017）。我的创作实践将诸如失控的广告之类的档案片段置于彼此的“对话”中，以“倾听”新的叙事可能性。我使用“批判性虚构”（Hartman, 2008）和“沿着偏见谷阅读”（Fuentes, 2016）等方法论策略，根据这些片段开发人物草图和有声生活故事。通过在想象的生活故事的背景下重新定位档案碎片，我希望在奴隶制档案中引发新的问题，连接点和可能的调查线。该项目将探索创新的档案实践如何引领叙事形式的实验，扩展小说的凝聚力，以适应多个叙事主体的碎片化。关键部分将探索档案研究和富有想象力的写作相互作用和相互告知的方式。写进档案空白，我想表明小说的发现可以扩展我们对档案的感觉，同时邀请新的观众参与其中的可能性。

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.