Date of Award

2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

English (Ph.D.)

Department

English

First Advisor

Dohra Ahmad

Second Advisor

Elda Tsou

Third Advisor

Raj Chetty

Abstract

One of the key problems of the archive of enslavement, borne out of the violent erasure of enslaved identities, is the struggle to reconstruct and honor those lost identities. Recognizing Speculative Literature: Conceiving Identity in the Archives of Enslavement investigates postcolonial archival processes and the resulting documents to identify a spectrum of speculative literary genres that can be used to supplement traumatic archival erasures, often of female voices and identities, to further understand the power dynamics. To clarify, I use the term ‘speculative literature’ here to refer to a mode of literature that relies on the few fragments that may exist within archival texts, photos, documents, etc. and entangles them to create a restoration of hypothesized identity, history, or perspective where there was only previously a mere fragment or mention, if that. Because it is founded on fragmented source information, it can only amount to a speculative notion of what could be missing from this supposedly representative archive as ‘prologue’ within history. My intention is to challenge the established conception of the genre to focus on texts that deal specifically with speculation as a methodology to supplement erasures. I also aim to destabilize rigid genre conceptions of fiction, novels and poetry, and nonfiction, memoirs and autobiography. Challenging these genre conceptions allows a more nuanced understanding of speculative literature to develop which can be identified, and writers can then continue to write into these speculative modes. While there are some common authorial tactics in the dissertation’s chapters, allowing for a new and broader understanding of speculative literature makes room for creation of new supporting documents out of the flawed and fragmented archives of enslavement. We are simultaneously narrowing the existing conception of the speculative literature genre, to then broaden those boundaries across forms, allowing for more opportunity to supplement archival absences.

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