Waking the Dead: Fiction and the Archival Gap in Ireland, India and the Black Atlantic

Waking the Dead examines the problem of the archival gap — the impossibility of knowing much of the lives of the historically ‘unimportant’ — and asks how contemporary fiction imagines these lives anew.

For decades, cutting-edge scholarship studying colonialism and its aftermath in Ireland, India and the Black Atlantic have worked on the same problem: if archives, the central object of study in mainstream historiography, only contain the written records of the powerful, then how can historians know anything substantial about the lives of the powerless?

My study will expand this field of research by investigating contemporary fiction’s dynamic engagement with the archival gap, and what aesthetic, formal and thematic strategies writers employ to imagine individual lives we can know very little about.After the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, the scholarly rekindling of interest in Saidiya Hartman’s concept of ‘Critical Fabulation’ — of imaginative embellishment of sparse archival traces — demonstrates the ongoing importance of these questions.

The influential Subaltern Studies school of Indian historiography has read peasant insurgencies as evidence of a collective political consciousness otherwise lost to history.

And recently in Irish Studies, there has been an interdisciplinary burst of creative methodologies studying the gender violence of the Magdalen Laundries and the Mother and Baby Homes in the absence of records withheld by the perpetrator institutions themselves.But the right to imagine, to infer, to fill in these gaps is the licence freely given to writers of fiction.

This study asks what they do with this licence, and how their dynamic relationship to the archival gap probes at the very limits of historical knowledge.

This will be the first interdisciplinary study of contemporary global fiction’s engagement with the archival gap and the first to connect the common projects of ‘recovery’ in Ireland, India and the Black Atlantic.