From organizing histories of wayward lives: the political necessity of imagining the impossible in the dialogue between Saidiya Hartman and Asad Haider

Abstract

This article discusses the relationship between forms of historical narratives and their theoretical, practical, and political consequences, focusing on the method of "critical fabulation" developed by Saidiya Hartman. Faced with the limitations, gaps, and partialities of the traditional historical archive, Hartman openly introduces imagination and politically oriented writing to narrate the silences of existences relegated to the non-historical. Drawing on theorist Asad Haider's analysis of Hartman's work, this paper investigates the theoretical-political effects of her writing. Methodologically, the research is characterized as a bibliographical study involving a cross-examination and in-depth reading of the works of both authors. It concludes that Hartman’s method destabilizes the dichotomy between fiction and empiricism, transforming what was relegated to the condition of the invisible, the unthinkable, and the impossible into the visible, the thinkable, and the possible. By focusing on the daily practices of rebellion, agency, and resistance of the colonized—rather than the description of the suffering imposed by the oppressor—the text argues, in alignment with Haider, that imagining the past is a precondition for emancipatory political organization in the present and, consequently, for building the future. Thus, it outlines a horizon of mass struggle that is autonomous and independent of the State, where historical destiny is not teleological, but a constant, open-ended dispute.