Historical archives are sites of violence, omitting or erasing the voices of the marginalized. To counter this archival silence, Saidiya Hartman (2008) has proposed critical fabulation as a method of retelling the past that »troubles the line between history and imagination«. Rather than attempting to fill the gaps in the archive, critical fabulation takes them as a starting point to re-imagine the past – not as History with a capital H, but as histories with multiple potential storylines.
Drawing on the lives and histories of Black people in Switzerland and of queer women in Iran, Jovita dos Santos Pinto and Niloofar Rasooli will discuss the role of critical fabulation in their own work and its potential to disrupt hegemonic narratives in historiography. How can archival silence be addressed through critical modes of storytelling? What possibilities arise when we analyze sources beyond the traditional archive – such as artifacts, oral histories, or the built environment? And how do we uncover and shape alternative languages, narratives and stories?
Asking what might have been not only reshapes how we narrate the past but also reframes our understanding of the present. What role can critical fabulation play in countering contemporary anti-black racism and anti-queer violence? How can we bridge the gap between research and activism? And how might critical fabulation be applied to public history?
Niloofar Rasooli (she/her) is a writer and a dreamer from Iran, with a radical passion about the intersection of anti-colonial queer feminism, erased memories and archives, resistance, rebellion, revolution, and the reclamations of the built and lived environment in Iran and the Global South. Previously, Niloofar worked as a journalist in Iran and is currently very busy writing her doctoral thesis at the Department for History and Theory of Architecture at ETH Zürich.
In her doctoral thesis, Jovita dos Santos Pinto (she/her) scrutinizes post_colonial public spheres in Switzerland from a black feminist perspective. Since January, she has been a research assistant at the University of Lucerne. She is co-founder of the Network of black nonbinary and female folx - Bla*Sh and initiator of the platform histnoire.ch. She is a member of the Independent Commission of Inquiry on the Death of Roger Nzoy Wilhelm. Her political and research interests include post_colonialism, anti-racism, Afropea and Black Europe, and Black feminism as critical social theory.
Monique Ligtenberg (she/her) is a lecturer and postdoctoral researcher at ETH Zurich, where she studies the colonial provenance and present of natural history collections in Switzerland. Additionally, she is a founding member of the decolonial city tour project Zürich Kolonial and curator of the exhibition »Colonial Traces: Collections in Context« at the exhibition space ETH extract.