Between the Jewish Baltic and the Black Atlantic

This project reads Jewish and Black women’s writing that seeks to narrate the lives of girls and women in the wake of the Holocaust and Transatlantic slavery. It focuses on the power of narration, exploring it as a form of reparation and wake-work in the face of loss and scattering. Drawing from Hannah Arendt’s work on narration as a form of redemption, as well as Saidiya Hartman’s methodology of critical fabulation, the project seeks to explore how the limits of the archives force us to imagine beyond and against their scope. In an attempt to access the unnamed lives and untold stories, I focus on critical and creative narrative practices, ones that attend to silences and erasures as well as excess as sites of resistance. Between the Jewish Baltic and the Black Atlantic, then, this project seeks to identify something like a shared commitment to narration as a remedy against destruction, but also to what we might call counter-narratives devoted to challenging and resisting anti-Semitic and anti-Black normative scripts and forms of domination, exclusion, and homogenization. The project aims at tracing these forms of resistance, and identifying shared commitments to a set of key concepts, such as singularity, liminality, alterity, waywardness, care- and wake-work, double-consciousness, critical fabulation, the subjunctive mood, the social organization of memory, manners of listening and dialoguing and laughing and remaining in silence, and modes of imagining otherwise and experimenting with tradition across traditions.