Radical Imagination and Freedom-Centered Feminist Historiography

Despite decades of feminist critique, historical realism retains a powerful hold on historiography, sustained not only by disciplinary convention but by the imaginative investments that realist norms simultaneously require and disavow. This article argues that feminist historiography cannot escape this impasse by critique alone: it must embrace imagination as a necessary condition of its own practice – not as an embellishment but as the instituting power through which genuinely new historical meanings come into being. Drawing on Saidiya Hartman’s critical fabulation and Cornelius Castoriadis’s radical imagination and social instituting imaginary, it challenges evidentiary norms that render certain lives illegible and redefines historical rigor as an ethical responsibility to configure traces, silences, and possibilities into politically accountable narratives. Critical feminist historiography becomes, on this account, both an exposure of archival violence and a world-making endeavor that institutes new social imaginaries to animate action and judgment in the present.