Session Abstract

Historians, like all writers, hope to tell stories that fascinate and engage our readers.  The professional standards of the discipline often paint imagination as a danger: if evidence should drive the analysis, surely an over-active imagination will tempt us to make the past conform to simplistic narratives or to a predetermined argument.  Even in an age where we have presumably given up on the ideal of a detached, neutral historian, the expectations and underlying anxieties linger. Rather than assume that imagination has no place in historical scholarship, the scholars assembled for this roundtable discussion have used imaginative approaches to enhance their analytical process. In particular, as biographical studies have seen a resurgence, we hope to consider the use of more imaginative forms of writing and scholarship.

Historians who examine marginalized people have long found that reading fiction provides one way to get at essential truths obscured by archival biases and evidentiary elisions.  Jon Sensbach has used microhistorical techniques in his most recent book, Rebecca's Revival, a biography of an Afro-Moravian woman in the Atlantic World, and will reflect on his thoughts on taking creative liberties in that project.  The remainder of the panelists are junior scholars experimenting with fiction as handmaiden to scholarship.  Jenny Shaw has written imagined scenarios in order to counteract her skewed sources on the lives of two unnamed laboring women--a "wench" and a "whore" in early Barbados.  Marisa Fuentes assigns a particularly powerful novel on 18th century slavery, The Book of Night Women, to force students to grapple with the troubling notion of agency, resistance, and history.  

For writers hoping to bring readers into a fresh way of looking at the past, bringing the dry "facts" of the past to life requires writing in a more novelistic narrative fashion.  Kristen Block has considered the visual aspects of her protagonists'/subjects' movements through the landscape of the colonial Caribbean, and offers a way to bring readers to analytical insights while enjoying the ride.  And sometimes it's just the joy of escaping the drudgery of footnotes that pushes historians to take a stab at writing a fictional companion to a scholarly project, as did Anna Lawrence when she started to write about black preacher Jarena Lee during National Novel Writing Month last November, with surprising results.