“Stories one tells in dark times”: Fabulation, fugitivity, and futurity in Olivia Wenzel's 1000 Serpentinen Angst

• Published in: The German quarterly 2024-01, Vol.97 (1), p.75-92
• Main Author: Roca Lizarazu, Maria
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Aesthetics; Cultural Context; Experiments; Futures; German literature; Historiography; Literary criticism; Novels; Politics; Subjectivity; Trauma; Violence; Wenzel, Olivia; World History
• ISSN: 0016-8831; 1756-1183
• DOI: 10.1111/gequ.12418

This article engages with aesthetic acts of experimentation in Olivia Wenzel's 1000 Serpentinen Angst . Building on recent scholarship on the politics of aesthetics in Wenzel's text, I argue that these experiments are intertwined with key themes in the book, particularly issues of racialization and of Black (im‐)possibility in present‐day Germany. In this context, my article focuses on a largely overlooked aspect of Wenzel's text, namely its surreal, fantastical, and speculative elements. Drawing on Tavia Nyong'o and Saidiya Hartman's notion of “(critical) fabulation,” I propose that Wenzel's writing mobilizes fantastic, imaginative, and speculative elements to unsettle oppressive realities and realisms in favor of alternative modes of world‐ and future‐making. Inspired by Tina M. Campt's work, I conceptualize these re‐makings as “fugitive” and quotidian strategies, developed in response to a broken world, which still have the potential to generate new infrastructures for relationality and futurity.