Forking the historical text: Incarnations, autofabulation, and beyond (potential source text for yet unwritten incarnations)
Independent publishing and archival
Drawing on forking practices in software development, sampling practices in audio production, my work with collage art, and the speculative archival work of Saidiya Hartman, I've been trying to develop new artistic forms more sensitive to the networked nature of our histories and futures. Enter incarnations: a literary form in which you rewrite a historical text and set it in a far future, and write it from the perspective of your future self. The form also functions as a strategy for intervening in processes of “copyright”-making by challenging traditional conventions of authorship and (self-)publishing. Finally, incarnations also fall under a new, umbrella genre of speculative writing I call autofabulation, conceived as an explicitly anti-colonial, anti-imperial, and anti-oppressive artform intended to allow its practitioner to actively work towards liberation. This event will also include generative prompts that encourage participants to engage in their own forms of speculative archival work, including—but not limited to—writing their own incarnations.
Content/trigger warnings: Discussions of colonialism, slavery, white supremacy, capitalism, anthropological dehumanization, mental health (depression), death, and transitioning; brief references to parental abuse, parental death, illness (cancer), economic apartheid, torture, lynching, amputation, medically transitioning, and transphobia; oblique references to current U.S./world politics
Dear [REDACTED],
A week ago, I was certain what I would offer you in this space.
I've had the honor of teaching others about incarnations and autofabulation three times now: last summer, to creative nonfiction writers at a seminar hosted by Tin House, a small press and esteemed literary institution; and twice in the last few months during two virtual workshop series hosted by Relatively Queer, a small community of queer and trans creatives that I was invited to join as a co-facilitator after meeting one of the other co-facilitators in the Tin House seminar. They listened to me read an incarnation aloud during the seminar, and were compelled to correspond with me via e-mail about archival work, speculative writing, and the mechanisms of (neo)colonialism (among other topics), and soon I was formalizing what I'd developed around autofabulation into a workshop curriculum and presentation slides.
My original intention was simply present you with a slightly modified, more “tech-oriented” version of the materials I'd previously created, but a series of strange and unpredictable events this week has pushed me off this path and onto another one.
Bear with me, if you will.
More background: I was admitted to the Tin House seminar after submitting an unfinished draft of the second chapter of a book project written as a series of a letters to my younger self. I wrote the first chapter, and had the idea to turn it into a book project, after a publication reached out to solicit a piece from me, the first and only time this has happened to me since I began taking the work of writing professionally seriously. The editor who solicited the piece reached out because she had read an early draft of my forthcoming essay collection as a reader for one of the small presses to which I had submitted it; they didn't accept it, but another of their readers was the one who connected me to the small press that eventually did accept it for publication. The essay collection only came together in the first place because I took all of the writing I did in 2023, during the first year of my medical transition, and then assembled it into a little book, the idea being to use the sales from the book to fund mutual aid projects like the one I started in January 2023, Art, Strike!, which was essentially the catalyst for everything I wrote that year.
This is a lineage.
The connective tissue here (the line of this lineage) is one of tiny interactions. My publisher, tRaum Books, noted recently that they've never held an open submission period. Every book they've ever published has found them through one connection here or elsewhere in the vast and sprawling network of small connections people make online. My book is no exception. The correspondence I've had with tRaum's founder, Rysz, has produced some of the most impactful writing I've ever read and/or written; as is the case with my correspondence with alks, my former Art, Strike! co-editor, whom I met in a comment thread on a now-defunct, short-lived, and little-known microblogging platform; as is the case with some new correspondence that began this week on precisely the topics of this session with a relative stranger on the fediverse; as is the case with my connections to and with the Relatively Queer community; as is the unidirectional correspondence I've had with my younger self in the aforementioned epistolary essays.
As is, perhaps, the correspondence we are embarking on right now.
Black and white timeline of the events detailed in the preceding section (2023 to 2025). Dots along a straight line in the center labelled, from left to right: Art, Strike! (mutual aid project); The Ecology of Art, Strike! (essay collection); Split/Lip Press tiered rejection (connects me to my publisher, tRaum Books); Under the Sun reaches out (essay solicitation); The Trans Girl's Guide to Grey's Anatomy, chapter two (unfinished draft); Tin House seminar; Relatively Queer (virtual workshop series); FluConf 2025.
exhortation
Draw a straight line across a blank page. What series of events brought you to this moment? What tiny interactions, online or otherwise, facilitated your ability to be present here? Who is part of your lineage? What else is that lineage comprised of? Mark these on the line with labeled dots. Go as far into your history as necessary to get as clear a sense as possible of how you got here. Honor momentous occasions. Honor mundane ones equally. How integral have small connections been to your journey through this life? How integral are they certain to be moving forward?
As a child and teenager, in order to escape a household rife with violence and abuse, I spent a tremendous amount of time in libraries. My favorite sections were those where books were for sale, usually for pennies, and often books you'd never find available for checking out (books that were out of print, wholly unpopular, self-published, or otherwise perceived to be relatively valueless). One of these was a writing textbook published sometime in the latter half of the 20th-century; I took it home with me and didn't crack it open for many years after, and only did when I was in my early 20's and facing a stubborn case of writer's block.
One of the chapters was about style; in order to get the writer thinking about what comprises style, it exhorted the reader of the textbook to take a passage written by another writer, and replace all the nouns, verbs, and adjectives in it with nouns, verbs, and adjectives of their own. Everything else was to remain the same: the pronouns, the conjunctions, the structures of the sentences. The idea was to wear another writer's rhythm like a glove, to try it on for the length of a paragraph and see what it felt like. The author's style (their essence), the textbook argued, was not in the content of their writing, but in the unique ways in which they chose to present that content to the reader.
I tried it out for myself with a passage from a short story from my big blue The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women (even then, a decade before admitting to myself I was a trans woman, I was always drawn to writing by women, and the main characters of my stories were always women, too).
Immediately, the writer's block vanished. Abandoning the passage I'd tried on like a glove, but remaining deeply inspired by it, I wrote and completed a short story for the first time in years. It was terrible, and I wouldn't show it to anyone even if you paid me, but I did finish it. And the exercise stayed with me.
Many years later, I began taking computer science classes at my local community college with the intention of minoring in the discipline once I transferred to a four-year university. I'd been playing with code since childhood, when my parents enrolled me in a small, free summer program at my elementary school that included curriculum on HTML programming; it was then that I built my first website, which sported nothing more than a menu for an imagined restaurant. I'd taken computer science classes in high school, part of the school's requirements for graduation, being a public science and technology magnet high to which I'd had to apply in a process not dissimilar in intensity to the process I'd go through again four years later, and then again many years after that, in order to make my way into higher ed. But it wasn't until the community college classes that I learned of Git, and version control systems, and the forking of a codebase that can occur during a solo project as you take it in a slightly new direction, or a collaborative project when one or more decide to spin it off into their own.
Many years after that, in Pasadena, California (a city which I like to call Robledo, after the fictionalized version in Octavia E. Butler's Parable of the Sower), I found myself in the midst of a profoundly disabling depressive episode, catalyzed by the diagnosis of my stepfather with stage four colon cancer, the assurance of his imminent death, and my brewing awareness that I was trans and that I needed, more than anything, to muster the courage to tell him before he passed. Trusting a whim whipped up by a long-ago learned strategy for combatting depression—taking on a silly art project—I sat before some blank canvasses I'd bought years before and began cutting up the copious political flyers residents of a city receive in the mail promoting this or that local candidate, or local resolution. I taped the words onto the canvas to form a cheeky critique of the economic apartheid my city, like all others, was deeply invested in maintaining: eliminating rent control, protecting the rights of landlords and property owners, criminalizing homelessness, and so on, and so forth. This was my first collage—the first of what would soon be many.
Less than a year after that, after my stepfather's death—after my failure to come out to him in time, after coming out to my partner and then the world, after starting my medical transition—I wrote a hermit crab essay, a genre-agnostic literary form in which the author takes an otherwise “unartistic” format (like a recipe, product review, or job application) and uses it as the shell for a piece of writing that subverts and/or transcends the format. A tiny excerpt from a pages-long run-on sentence in the piece, titled “Job Application”:
...I am trying to learn to trust my whims more instead of talk myself out of them (I can talk myself out of—or into—anything, which I learned far too late is a very, very bad thing)...
This approach to trusting my whims had drawn me that day into a downtown Pasadena bookstore, where the employees' kindness in trying not to misgender me at a stage in my transition when I felt extremely self-conscious about my gender presentation had made me want to apply to work there (“Job Application” hermit crabs the application I would have filled out had it not been for the fact that the bookstore was apparently very anti-stealing, and asked multiple questions on the form about what you would do in the case of witnessing theft, and, given my staunch belief in the necessity of abolishing the concept of property, plus the fact that a few Reddit threads noted the bookstore's extremely hostile attitude towards its employees, all this made me turn the application into a hermit crab essay instead of actually applying).
Inside the bookstore, though, and before the interaction with the kind employees, trusting my whims made me pick up, for no articulable reason, a book on Martin Luther, about whom I knew little save for his most well-known act: nailing 95 theses to a church door in 1517 and subsequently ushering in the Protestant Reformation. I took the book home with me and began to read it, and all I could see was myself.
The book begins:
In Spring 2017 I was asked to speak from Luther's pulpit. I knew that this would be an emotional experience, because I had spent the last twelve years writing a biography of the reformer. Few biographers get so close to where their protagonist lived and worked, and others who had spoken from the Wittenberg pulpit had told me of its effect on their lives. I knew too that the event would bring back strong memories of my father, who had died just ten months before, and who had been a minister of religion when I was growing up in Melbourne, Australia.
Moments after reading it, I began to type:
In Spring 2117 I was asked to speak in Rivera’s apartment. I knew that this would be an emotional experience, because I had spent the last twelve years of my life writing a biography of the abolitionist. Few writers get so close to where their protagonist lived and worked, and others who had spoken from the Robledo apartment had told me of its effect on their lives. I knew too that the event would bring back strong memories of my stepfather, who had died just two months before, and who had been an organizer around abolitionism when I was growing up in a U.S. American colony.
The Rivera in the second excerpt is me.
This was the first incarnation.
Black and white timeline of the events detailed in the preceding section (1991 to 2023). Dots along a straight line in the center labelled, from left to right: turbulent household/obssession with libraries; first exposure to programming; purchase of writing textbook; first short story completed in years; first exposure to version control systems; diagnosis and death of stepfather; first collage; purchase of book on Martin Luther; first incarnation.
exhortation
Consider a project of yours that you care about. What events pocked your journey towards it? What texts did you need to access in order to begin? How did you use them? When and why? Who wrote them? What whims did you need to trust in order to begin this journey? What traumas did you needlessly endure theretofore? What coping mechanisms did you develop in response? What have all of these prevented you from doing? Enabled you to do? What firsts did you need to hurdle over in order to get there? How did these coalesce, over time, into this particular project? How have they endlessly shaped it? Draw another straight line across a second blank page. Mark your answers with labeled dots. Go as far back as birth, if needed. Recognize the unceasing current of happenstance. Locate it in all that seems predictable, assured.
I have a standard definition of incarnations and autofabulation that is included in the abstract for this presentation, but I think the best way to define these terms is to quote directly from my work.
First, an excerpt from the source text for the first incarnation I wrote that explicitly defined the terms:
In 2001, everything changed. Cercas exploded onto the literary scene with his novel Soldiers of Salamis, which sold more than a million copies worldwide, won numerous awards, and was quickly turned into a major film. The novel, which tells the story of how a journalist named Javier Cercas finds an anonymous Republican soldier who spared the life of the fascist ideologue during the Spanish Civil War, swapped the university campus for the reporting trip. But the metafiction was still there, this time in modified form. It no longer involved Escheresque circularity but rather something much more directly self-referential. Cercas had inserted himself—name, image, and likeness—directly into the novel.
Today, we’re used to this kind of writing. It’s called autofiction, and it can be found everywhere in contemporary fiction. In fact, it is to thank for some of the biggest names in literature today: Karl Ove Knausgaard, Sheila Heti, Ben Lerner, Rachel Cusk, Maggie Nelson. The list of practitioners is long. Autofiction describes fictional writing in which the author, narrator, and protagonist share a name, many biographical details, or, most often, both. It is frequently seen as the fictional corollary to memoir, and thus as a genre of “life writing” that prioritizes introspection.
This can come in different flavors: some prefer Knausgaardian novella-length digressions that give rhythm to the mundane chores of daily life, others favor the vibes of the Nelsonian graduate school theory classroom, replete with sex, gender, and philosophy. But no matter what the approach, they all lead in the direction of the self.
Not so for Cercas. His autofictional novels deal with a different kind of intimacy: the intimacy of how to report a newspaper opinion column. Against the popular stereotype of the armchair op-ed writer, opinion journalism, like its newsroom corollary, relies a great deal on facts and, often, on first-hand reporting. Opinion writers might report on the history of feminism or the history of their own family. But the best report all the same. What marks the difference between what they write and what those in a newsroom write has a lot to do with self-reflection, that is, the extent to which opinion journalists avow the persuasive techniques they use in their own writing. Op-ed writing, after all, doesn’t just identify a problem, it proposes a solution.
And now, an excerpt from my incarnation of it:
In 2041, everything changed. Rivera exploded onto the abolitionist scene with her Manifesto for Abolishing Democracy and Civilization, which was distributed to more than a million readers worldwide, sparked numerous burnings, and was quickly banned by several major nation-states. The book, which tells the story of how an abolitionist named Erica Rivera discovers an anonymously written text that accurately prophecies the end of the U.S. empire, swapped the nefarious corporation for the colonial project writ large. But the autofiction was still there, this time in modified form. It no longer involved funhouse-mirror reflexivity but rather something much more prescient and incisive. Rivera had inserted the near-future—in name, image, and likeness—directly into the novel.
Today, we’re used to this kind of writing. It’s called autofabulation, and it can be found everywhere abolitionists and anarchists are. In fact, it is to thank for some of the biggest name in anticolonial agitation today: Aro Nusar, Hi Hi, E.R.E.R., Cheus, I-El. The list of practitioners is long. Autofabulation describes fictional writing in which the author draws on historical knowledge to prefigure a future for themselves that has yet to become. It is frequently seen as the artistic corollary to clairvoyance, and thus as a genre of “prophetic writing” that prioritizes introspection.
This can come in different flavors: some prefer Riveran essay-length incarnations that give new life to the mundane nonfictional writing of the past, others favor the I-Elian community-based antitheory, replete with handwritten annotations, generative exercises, and iterative collaborations. But no matter what the approach, they all lead in the direction of the future.
For Rivera, her autofabulist work deals with a particular kind of intimacy: the intimacy necessary for understanding one’s place in history and trajectory through time. Against the popular stereotype of the armchair activist, autofabulation, like its spiritual corollary, relies a great deal on a deep and strategic entanglement with space-time and, often, on first-hand experience building community. Autofabulists might report on the future of feminism by excavating a “speculative archive” of their potential path through it, based on the real experiences they’ve already had within it. What marks the difference between what they write and what those in traditional literature write has a lot to do with self-reflection, that is, the extent to which autofabulists avow the prophetic techniques they use in their own writing. Autofabulation, after all, doesn’t just identify the conditions of an immediate present, it proposes a shape for the foreseeable future.
Autofabulation—and in particular, this manifestation of it, the incarnation—weaves together all the threads I described in the previous section. It is as much influenced by version control systems and collage art, as it is by the humble writing textbook I stumbled upon as a teenager, as it is by the (speculative) archival work of Saidiya Hartman.
To both explain and tell the story of how I learned of her work, here follows an excerpt from the source text for the incarnation I presented to the people in my Tin House seminar:
In 1910, Dr. Kleiweg de Zwaan went to Sumatra to take facial casts of Nias Islanders. He covered their faces with plaster and brought the masks home. Now in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam you can see a wall lined with the plaster casts of these men’s faces, eyes squinted, mouths shut against the intrusion. This is one kind of research. De Zwaan lacked the imagination to see that Nias Islanders were also people, just like him.
At its worst, heavily researched nonfiction risks becoming not only anti-feminist, but also inherently western and White, in privileging disembodied intellect—the clinical voice, the pretext of objectivity, as well as outside authority—over one’s own lived experience, body, and imagination (though as Toni Morrison has pointed out, imagination itself can be conscripted or constrained by the same biases that drive such clinical research).
In contrast, one of the powers of autotheory is its push toward embodiment and invention. It refuses the objective voice, the pretense of neutrality, the fabrication that we can be all brain and no body, with body’s accompanying pleasures, embarrassments, and disappointments. It brings in the vulnerable elements of personal narrative and of one’s own body.
One reason Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts has been so popular, and that other works of autotheory including Cvetkovich’s book Depression: A Public Feeling have been so powerful, is that they are vulnerable books, divulging very personal details in ways that are neither confessional nor egoistic, but are instead an offering to readers: here is mine. In this way, they have the power of giving voice to experiences and lives that are more often sidelined, discounted, silenced, marginalized.
And here follows an excerpt from my incarnation of it, which was eventually published by queer/trans indie publishing pillar fifth wheel press's GARLAND:
Almost sixty years ago, at a moment of great upheaval in the imperial core, I had yet to understand what was ahead of me. I was attempting to squeeze some sliver of economic survival out of a writing practice, and had hastily cobbled together an experimental hybrid novella titled EUPHORIUM. At the time, a service called QueryTracker allowed me to seek out literary agents, a relic of a profession, from a time when art was still largely mediated by capitalist exchange. I found an agent who I believed would understand the work I was trying to undertake and did my due diligence in researching her. She kept a list of the books she was reading on a pre-collapse networked database called Goodreads, and there I spotted a book I’d never heard of: Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. At the time, I couldn’t afford to buy the book and I didn’t have a library card, but I did find a free-to-access scholarly journal article discussing the book and its central conceit: critical fabulation.
Critical fabulation is one kind of research attuned to the fact that the archive is necessarily lacking. Archives regularly draw on what history leaves a record of, and what history leaves a record of is defined and delimited by settler colonialism, white supremacy, cisheterosexism, and biases along all sorts of lines of apartheid that allow the details of one person’s life to be easily excavatable, and the details of another’s to be completely erased. At its worst, archival work is a patchwork quilt filled with gaping holes. It risks telling a narrative that is not only wholly false, but also carelessly upholds what the archivist’s milieu already believes about the subject of the archive. In privileging what is available—the clinical record, the objective document, the authoritative report—over what one senses, intuits, and imagines both about what is and what cannot be available, the archive becomes as fictional a tale as any novel or short story.
Saidiya Hartman’s concept of critical fabulation, as I understand it, was to foreground this idea, to lean into it, to push through it—and to draw attention to the impossibility built into this ambition. In “Venus in Two Acts,” Hartman explores a Black female figure both omnipresent in the archive of Atlantic slavery, and yet whose story or history, or stories or histories, cannot be told, cannot be excavated. She writes: “The intent of this practice is not to give voice to the slave, but rather to imagine what cannot be verified… It is a history of an unrecoverable past; it is a narrative of what might have been or could have been; it is a history written with and against the archive… I have attempted to jeopardize the status of the event, to displace the received or authorized account, and to imagine what might have happened or might have been said or might have been done.”
One reason that Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments has been so popular, and that other works of critical fabulation have been so powerful, is that they are vulnerable texts, divulging the very personal experience of doing archival work in ways that connect one’s present to the past, offering readers a methodology for doing the same: here I am, here we are. In this way, readers have the power not of giving voice to experiences and lives that have been silenced or marginalized, but rather understanding the silencing and marginalizing more deeply, and to do so through an active process of participation, through a terrifyingly incomplete process of connection, reconnection, and disconnection, as a fragmented collage of past, present and future.
Hartman writes: “As I understand it, a history of the present strives to illuminate the intimacy of our experience with the lives of the dead, to write our now as it is interrupted by this past, and to imagine a free state, not as the time before captivity or slavery, but rather as the anticipated future of this writing.”
So, yes, I can write to you to tell you that incarnations are the practice of forking a historical text, setting it in the far future, and centering yourself in this new narrative (for example, by narrating it from the perspective of your future self, as I do in the second incarnation in this section, or by narrating it from the perspective of some other future figure who is writing about you, as I do in the other incarnations I've shared so far), a narrative explicitly defined by its certainty in the triumph of anti-colonial and anti-imperial forces (for example, as is the case for all my incarnations, a storyworld in which the U.S. American empire collapses in the year 2089). And I can tell you that autofabulation is an umbrella term for an emerging genre of work that combines introspective, critical, historical, and speculative writing in order to giving the writer (at least a few of) the tools necessary to determine how they can participate in ensuring such a narrative/storyworld becomes reality.
But these simple, textbook definitions cannot do justice to the magic of writing, or reading, incarnations. As someone who has written and published a handful, and worked on but left unpublished several others, and as someone who returns to read these incarnations over and over again, enough to have memorized entire chunks of them, I can tell you: every incarnation is utterly exhausting to write (and sometimes to read). As I write, I have to hold in my head, all at once: the history being traced by the source text; the future being written by someone far away in time and space as though it is their present, looking back on what will be my history; my own present, as well as the present of the person who will read this today or tomorrow; and everything that will unfold in between these present and that future, which I will eventually traverse, and throughout which others will read this in their own time. It's dizzying. It's mesmerizing. It's terrifying.
The category under which this talk is filed is “Independent publishing and archival,” and as someone who has been doing a lot of both over the last two years, dizzying, mesmerizing, and terrifying are exactly how I would describe this work. I've found that last term, “terrifying,” especially useful as a framework for understanding archival work as it relates to trans and nonbinary peoples, Black and Indigenous peoples, and people of color. There is so much horror to be found and to experience in these archives, so much that is frightening and chilling and appalling, if only because there is a direct throughline between what is there, what isn't (and cannot) be there, and what is and has been unfolding around us right now.
From the transcript of a Relatively Queer session where I talk more about Saidiya Hartman:
Saidiya Hartman is a Black woman writer and academic, whose work has been really influential, for I think all of us [transcriber's note: this is in reference to the three co-facilitators for Relatively Queer, which includes me], especially because it goes beyond reparative archiving. And I’m not super familiar with all of her books, but I had the pleasure of like, sort of, kind of, auditing a course at the Brooklyn Institute around her 2007 book Lose Your Mother, which is about how the slave trade and its associated destructions of archival materials, not just in the form of tangible objects, but also familial connections, how this causes slaves and their descendants to “lose their mothers,” their histories, their countries, their kin and their past.
So she develops this methodology for addressing this that she calls critical fabulation. And it comes out of her own understanding of her own archival or historical work as being a bridge between theory and narrative. In an interview, she says, “I work intuitively, and will follow a trail of documents or my instincts until the project emerges. When writing, I will ask what are some of the key terms that I’m thinking with or that I'm writing against.” For her, archival work is always extremely personal. She writes that “narrating counter-histories of slavery has always been inseparable from writing a history of present, by which I mean the incomplete project of freedom,” and that “this writing is personal, because this history has engendered me.”
So that last quote, and this one, come from an essay of hers, called “Venus in Two Acts,” in which she reflects on her attempts to confront the limits of the archive while writing Lose Your Mother. And she’s reflecting on writing that book and feeling like she’s failed in some way in addressing one particular Black female figure that appears over and over again in the archives relating to the slave trade. In that essay, she goes over the fact that, actually, the archive is almost excessive, in that there is such a meticulous documentation of the violence perpetrated by slave owners against slaves. And she writes: “Scandal and excess inundate the archive: the incantatory stories of shocking violence penned by abolitionists, the fascinated eyewitness, reports of mercenary soldiers eager to divulge what decency forbids them to disclose, and the rituals of torture, the beatings, hangings, and amputations enshrined as law.”
And this quote really doesn’t do justice to just how explicit and graphic the archival materials she's working with are, and she describes some of that in the essay. But because she’s relying on archival materials being produced by oppressors—white lawyers, white surgeons, captains, etc.—she writes that her own writing “falters before the archive’s silence and reproduces its own omissions. The irreparable violence of the Atlantic slave trade resides precisely in all the stories that we cannot know, and that will never be recovered. This formidable obstacle or constitutive impossibility defines the parameters of my work.”
So by the end of “Venus in Two Acts,” what Hartman essentially does is create a non-story or an archival fiction about the Black female figure called Venus. And this story, or non-story, it explores her own wishes for the story she wants to tell. It explores the ways in which the archive both supports and contradicts that story; the ways in which the archive can neither support nor contradict it; and what are the limits of even trying to write that non-story. And she acknowledges it’s totally possible that she hasn’t really succeeded at anything except just drawing attention to the impossibilities built into archival work.
There’s really no sense of closure or a solution to the problem she's describing in “Venus in Two Acts,” but she notes that that’s important. She writes: “Narrative restraint to the refusal to fill in the gaps and provide closure is a requirement of this method. The intent of this practice is not to give voice to the slave, but rather to imagine what cannot be verified, a realm of experience which is situated between two zones of death, social and corporeal death, and to reckon with the precarious lives which are visible only in the moment of their disappearance.”
So, in contrast to reparative archiving— Oh, excuse me.
[transcriber's note: brief silence]
Sorry! I just needed to cough.
In contrast to reparative archiving [transcriber's note: this is in reference to an earlier part of the presentation that explores Lae'l Hughes-Watkins's work with reparative archiving], which seems to take a more material approach to reparations, Saidiya Hartman’s work highlights the utility of imagining, speculating, and negotiating with the limits of archival materials, and trying to exceed the limits of the archive oneself, as well as reckoning with the limits of archival materials, and contesting those limits in a variety of ways.
And this is the kind of the most difficult part of all of this for me to sit with, hence the dizzy emoji [transcriber's note: a large dizzy emoji appeared on the presentation slide during this part of the session]. She also advocates for methodologies that include things that feel like antithetical to academic work or archival work, which includes things like: refusing to provide or refusing to even seek out a sense of closure; denying that closure for the reader; and maybe even also being open to failing, which I think can be its own kind of success.
*Black and white illustration of the incarnatory forking of Living I Was Your Plague: Martin Luther's Life and Legacy by Lyndal Roper. A straight line just off of the left edge of the page begins with a dot labeled with this source text. Diagonal lines branch off of the dot and off the page in forward directions. Further down the straight line is another dot, labelled “there is no writing without editing, there are no futures without presence, and there is no such thing as predestination”. Diagonal lines also branch off of this dot and off the page in forward directions.*
exhortation
Consider a project you care about, yours or someone else's. Reflect on what it means to offer it freely to others: to allow them to remix, adapt, fork, and incarnate it as they please, to treat it as an open source. What are the potential risks therein (to you, to them, to the project, to your communities)? What are the potential benefits? What kind of world does this approach to a project leave behind? What kind of world might it inaugurate? For the last time, draw a straight line on yet another blank page, but start the line somewhere off of the page's left edge. Label the left edge of this line with a dot and the name of your project. Who would you want to incarnate your work? How would you hope for them to do so? How would you have to treat your own project in order to court these future developments? Draw diagonal lines that begin at the dot at differently angled forward directions. Somewhere along one of those lines, place a single dot. Can you see the future ahead of you yet? Can the future ahead see you?
I told you at the start that, “A week ago, I was certain what I would offer you in this space,” the epistolary greeting and the you of this quoted sentence implying a singular correspondent.
I alluded near the end of this correspondence to the importance of “refusing to provide or refusing to even seek out a sense of closure; denying that closure for the reader; and maybe even also being open to failing, which I think can be its own kind of success.”
This letter may have ended somewhat abruptly, without providing clear or concrete answers to many implied and unasked questions, including what incarnations mean for conceptions of “copyright” and “intellectual property”; how they may come to transform (self-)publishing; and what kinds of technologies might be best suited (or need to be invented) for an incarnated, autofabulated world.
Additionally, this letter may appear in a public setting, and it may even benefit those who read it but for whom it is not meant, but ultimately, this letter is intended for you, and only for you—whoever you are, whenever you are.
But you know already what this world is. You already know what is happening. You know what you and I must do.
We may not yet know exactly how, but we've always been quick studies.
To quote myself once more:
there's a girl out there watching and now probably laughing, saying, “girl, i literally laid the roadmap out for you.” and she did. and she has.
Black and white illustration of the incarnatory forking of this letter. A straight line just off of the left edge of the page begins with a dot labeled “Forking the historical text: Incarnations, autofabulation, and beyond”. Diagonal lines branch off of the dot and off the page in forward directions. Further down the straight line is another dot, labelled with a question mark. Diagonal lines also branch off of this dot and off the page in forward directions.
exhortation
Incarnate some or all of this letter. Send it to someone you (want to) know and care about.
Relevant resources
Art, Strike!, an online art/literary publication founded on the principles of mutual aid
“Job Application,” hermit crab essay
“The Trans Girl's Guide to Grey's Anatomy,” epistolary essay written to my younger self
“Venus in Two Acts,” by Saidiya Hartman, PDF download (131 KB)