‘Places research can’t go’

This article explores the historiographical dimension of the work of singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Rhiannon Giddens. Beginning with her revivalist endeavors with the Carolina Chocolate Drops, Giddens’s musical practice has evolved from popularizing significance- and value-driven revisions of the historical narrative to crafting a musical equivalent of Saidiya Hartman’s critical fabulation in an effort to recover the voices of enslaved women from lacunary archives. Her reclamation of minstrel music and her use of historical artefacts to imagine non-existent musical records of the past—as a solo artist and in Our Native Daughters—can be understood as Afrofuturist and chronopolitical as they evidence the temporal entanglement which best characterizes the afterlife of slavery. From this point of view, there is ground for considering Giddens’s historical practice as pertaining to the philosophy of history, as her Sankofic look backwards complements historians’ work with a practical past which circumvents the epistemological and emotional limitations of the archive. Being firmly rooted in an understanding of US music and history as always already creolized, Giddens’s revisionist approach and the emancipated futures it conjures up can ultimately be construed as reparational.