To Inherit Absence: Film, Fiction, and the Ethnographic Method of Critical Fabulation

Abstract (English)

This paper explores the use of film as method in a multimodal ethnographic project on now-adult children whose parents were forcibly disappeared during the 22-year dictatorship of Yahya Jammeh in The Gambia. Rather than reflecting on a completed film, the paper considers what it means to plan a film within a broader research framework shaped by narrative phenomenology, visual anthropology, and collaborative fieldwork. The decision to make a film — still in development — is a methodological gesture that responds to the representational challenges posed by disappearance, silence, and unresolved grief. In a context where truth was long suppressed, imagination and fiction are not oppositional to knowledge, but integral to it. Drawing on hermeneutic and narrative phenomenology (Mattingly 2010; Ricoeur 1984; Merleau-Ponty 1962), the project centers storytelling as a mode of sense-making. The film will explore what I call a “spectrum of knowing”: from wholly imagined narratives constructed in the absence of explanation, to fragmented accounts shaped by euphemism, fear, rumor, and emotional rupture. These stories challenge assumptions about children as insulated from violence or unknowing. Silence — personal, familial, political — functions not as emptiness but as an active form of socialization, fear, and survival (Trouillot 1995; Foucault 1961). Inspired by Saidiya Hartman’s (2008) concept of critical fabulation, the project approaches film not as illustration but as a speculative, reparative method—a way of reckoning with what is unknowable, withheld, or erased. Through animation and layered narration, the film seeks to engage the speculative labor of memory: how people come to know what they were never told. It builds on feminist and decolonial approaches to ethnographic form (Fabian 1990; Glissant 1997; Pinkston 2020), treating fiction not as escape but as method, an alternative mode of theorizing when conventional forms of writing fall short. The film’s structure and aesthetic are meant to work performatively: not to clarify disappearance, but to evoke the atmospheres of grief, fragmentation, and imagination that shape the afterlife of violence. Echoing Toni Morrison’s notion of re-memory, the project embraces opacity and creative reconstruction as legitimate ethnographic tools. In responding to this panel’s call to think fiction as method, I argue that filmmaking — especially in its speculative, collaborative dimensions — offers a way to render audible what political violence has made unspeakable: a grammar of absence that is affective, embodied, and unfinished.