UC Riverside

In Beside Ourselves: Trauma, Self-Relation, and Autofabulation, I consider the narrative problem of trauma through new terms of engagement inspired by survivors themselves. Despite the hegemonic expectation for documentarian forms, survivors use a diverse array of techniques to tell their own stories. I develop the term “autofabulation” to describe survivors’ use of the fictional, fabricated, and fantastic. My usage of fabulation is derived from historian Saidiya Hartman’s “critical fabulation” and performance studies scholar Tavia Nyong’o’s “Afro-fabulation.” Hartman describes critical fabulation as a methodology that combines research with imagined narrative in order to address archival gaps occasioned by violence. Nyong’o builds from Hartman’s premise with Afro-fabulation, which enacts a “tactical fictionalizing of a world that is, from the point of view of black social life, already false” to critique structures of oppression in the present while also projecting a vision of a better world.I add the auto- prefix to critical/Afro-fabulation to indicate both 1) that artists use this to represent their own experiences and 2) that the process creates another “auto” or self. The combination of critical autonomy and a relationship between the “selves” in the text is especially important when reading survivor narratives in particular. The intentional use of fabulation resists what Nyong’o calls “demands for legibility and transparency,” thus subverting the adjudicative skepticism faced by survivors. The self-relation involved in the act of constructing another self also responds to the internal separation and dissociation that survivors experience, but does so in a way that does not totalize or pathologize “brokenness.” Like autofabulated narrative itself, the relationship between the selves is mediated by the survivor. In the process, the autofabulative mode creates an other self, which opens up new possibilities for self-relation for survivors, and, by extension, relation between survivors and audiences. When audiences replicate the racist, misogynist, and/or homophobic logics that disempowered the survivor in the first place, the survivor’s trauma is further compounded. Conversely, autofabulation models a reading practice that prioritizes survivors’ agency and authoritative control of the narrative, thus expanding analysis beyond the binary of un/believability.