Archives that erase marginalized lives require a critical fabulation method rather than empirical recovery

Evidence

Hartman’s hybrid memoir-history-theory follows the author retracing slave routes in Ghana while reflecting on the impossibility of recovery, of return, of representation itself. The book operationalizes “critical fabulation” — Hartman’s method for engaging archives that systematically erase Black lives — as a way of writing without sovereignty over one’s subject. For a doctoral candidate at the COMM/IP/AI/Equity intersection, Lose Your Mother models a methodology that refuses the consolations of empirical recovery, with direct relevance to questions of training-data archives, algorithmic memory, and the politics of who counts as a knowable subject in computational systems. — , The Braided Reading EPUB, 1022

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines critical fabulation as a method for writing about archives that systematically erase Black lives.
• XREF: Connects to the earlier mention of critical fabulation at 989, and to debates about training-data archives and who counts as a knowable subject in computational systems. — connects to: Emphasis on dramatic reversals obscures muted archival disruptions; Archival inaccessibility stems from governance principles, not cataloging failures — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 77; Colonial archives should be treated as ethnographic sites not extraction sources (+4 more)
• SEED: Potential essay angle: applying critical fabulation to AI training-data archives as a methodological critique of computational memory and erasure.

Broader Connections

• Emphasis on dramatic reversals obscures muted archival disruptions #corroborates (0.70)
• Reconstruction historiography erased Black agency and labor exploitation #exemplifies (0.70)
• Scarcity of evidence on African women philosophers reflects neglect, not absence of contribution #corroborates (0.70)
• Archival inaccessibility stems from governance principles, not cataloging failures #complicates (0.65) — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 77
• Important cultural records survive through mundane, unintended preservation. #complicates (0.65) — , The Rod and the Child, 1888
• Colonial archives should be treated as ethnographic sites not extraction sources #expands (0.60)
• Archival misplacement can expose documents stripped of their official framing #corroborates (0.60)