Joanna Brown
AHRC Techne funded doctoral student
The Listening: fictionalising fugitive voices and fragmented lives in the slavery archive.
Royal Holloway, University of London
Year of enrolment: 2021
Email: joanna.brown.2020@live.rhul.ac.uk
This creative research project confronts and questions the violence of the slavery archive through an
experimental blend of contemporary narrative, historical fiction and autobiography.
The novel ‘The Listening’ amplifies the voices of Black British women to create a chorus of stories of
resistance, fugitivity and self-determination. In twenty-first century London, a young Black woman researching the British Caribbean slavery archive hears
the life stories of enslaved women through archival fragments.
The project will explore how innovative archival practice can inform experiments with narrative form, stretching the cohesion of the novel to accommodate the
fragmentation of multiple narrating subjects. 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 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.