oa Truth and dare: Fiction writing and academic research

This paper considers some of the potentialities and possibilities of developing literary fiction writing as a form of practice-based research in academia. It starts by pointing out some of the common oppositions between literary fiction and academic work before introducing archival research as described by historians Arlette Farge and Ann-Laura Stoler. For these scholars, the archive is a place where individual voices can be unearthed, where archival absences and blind spots can be examined, and where the form as much of the content of the archive can be productively scrutinized. Approached in this way, the archive can be a fertile terrain for fictional and literary forms of writing. This is something that author Saidiya Hartman takes up in her genre-bending books, even though Hartman points out how crucial it is to work with the tensions that stem from telling stories of the voices that have been repressed in the archive. Turning to the author’s own experience of venturing out of the field of art history in order to write literary fiction, this paper describes how this process impacts both research practice and writing process. In conclusion, the paper tentatively considers what roles fiction writing can play in heritage and memory studies. It suggests that as a form of practice-based research, fiction and literary writing can help us to consider new sites of investigation, encouraging us to make connections between individual and collective memories and thereby play an innovative role in researching and presenting conflicted or difficult heritage.