From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
Saidiya Hartman
This article documents the use of Hartman's theoretical frameworks in Beach Surgery scholarship. Hartman's published work does not directly address the franchise.
Hartman's work on refusal, waywardness, and the archive as a site of creative freedom has become foundational in Beach Surgery scholarship, particularly among critics reading the recurring loop not as tragedy but as an iterative refusal that contains its own epistemology. Her concept of critical fabulation—rigorous imaginative narration filling historical lacunae—maps directly onto how adaptations "complete" the unfinishable core. Each adaptation becomes a fabulation: not a solution but a truth-making through refusal to treat incompletion as error.
Scholars applying Hartman emphasize the doctrine of refusal as constitutive rather than merely negative. Katita's project to "break the cycle" reads, in this framework, not as triumphalist escape but as durational, embodied refusal—a waywardness that knows no final exit. The Durational Refusal—Seven Years of Buenos Aires Flesh, a seven-year Buenos Aires participatory installation, stages refusal as iterative practice, drawing directly on Hartman's methodology.
Surgipelago itself, as archive, becomes a site where incompletion is preserved rather than resolved. The glitch is not a problem waiting for solution but a productive gap—Hartman's "ensemble of practices" through which freedom emerges. Multiple theses argue that fandom's refusal to "finish" Beach Surgery is itself the political gesture: the archive that refuses closure. [citation needed]