Fabulation has been conceptualised and applied under various names depending on the social, epistemic and artistic context. Abram (2005) speaks of fabulation in terms of “experiments with subject matter, form, style, temporal sequence, and fusions of the everyday, the fantastic, the mythical, and the nightmarish, in renderings that blur traditional distinctions between what is serious or trivial, horrible or ludicrous, tragic or comic.” For Piérola (2022) fabulation straddles “history and fiction, fact and imagination to tell stories.”

In the last two to three decades, the term fabulation has gained pertinence in both scholarly and artistic arenas and its meaning, usage and critical potentialities have undergone a major shift to include speculative fabulation (Haraway, 2016), critical fabulation (Hartman, 2008), afro-fabulation (Nyong’o, 2019), afro-futurism (Dery, 1994; Nelson, 2002), and feminist fabulation (Barr, 1992). All of these interpretations have invited artists and scholars to address imaginative capacities that foreground what is otherwise conceived of as irrecoverable and unrepresentable. Fabulation as a theoretical and artistic practice does not merely attend to the gaps in history but provides possibilities to imagine alternative futures.

This issue of PARSE aims to explore and interrogate the affordances of mobilising fabulation in artistic practices.