Stories Changing Lives: Narratives and Paths toward Social Change 2020016223, 2020016224, 9780190864750, 9780190864774, 9780190864781

Citation preview

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR STORIES CHANGING LIVES: NARRATIVES AND PATHS TOWARD SOCIAL CHANGE

“A timely and accessible book that opens up the complex relations between personal narrative and social change that will be a valued resource for students and established scholars alike.” —​Catherine Kohler Riessman, Professor Emerita, Boston University “This is a far reaching and innovative collection of original essays that highlight both local and global progressive political change. Taken together they show in close detail the radical implications of personal stories for changing both lives and the world. It will become vital reading for all students of narrative, politics and change.” —​Ken Plummer, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, University of Essex “Stories Changing Lives offers us a method, a theoretical lens of reading the social. The contributions engage the familiar and unfamiliar entanglements and connections of our lives and times. Entanglements that occur within contexts of racial, classed, gendered, spatial and other inequalities are examined with beautifully insightful vigor. Narrative’s promise to understand and theorize for social change is presented in this collective of chapters.” —​Peace Kiguwa, Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, University of the Witwatersrand “Now more than ever, in our current historical moment, the importance of stories to effect social justice interventions, is indisputable. This book unites narrative and social justice research and is essential reading for all who work towards the social good” —​Ronelle Carolissen, Professor of Community Psychology, Faculty of Education, Stellenbosch University, South Africa

ii

Explorations in Narrative Psychology Mark Freeman Series Editor Books in the Series Speaking of Violence: The Politics and Poetics of Narrative in Conflict Resolution Sara Cobb Narrative Imagination and Everyday Life Molly Andrews Narratives of Positive Aging: Seaside Stories Amia Lieblich Beyond the Archive: Memory, Narrative, and the Autobiographical Process Jens Brockmeier The Narrative Complexity of Ordinary Life: Tales from the Coffee Shop William L. Randall Rethinking Thought: Inside the Minds of Creative Scientists and Artists Laura Otis Life and Narrative: The Risks and Responsibilities of Storying Experience Edited by Brian Schiff, A. Elizabeth McKim, and Sylvie Patron Not in My Family: German Memory and Responsibility After the Holocaust Roger Frie A New Narrative for Psychology Brian Schiff Decolonizing Psychology: Globalization, Social Justice, and Indian Youth Identities Sunil Bhatia Entangled Narratives: Collaborative Storytelling and the Re-​Imagining of Dementia Lars-​Christer Hydén The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible Hanna Meretoja Words and Wounds: Narratives of Exile Sean Akerman Pandemics, Publics, and Narrative Mark Davis and Davina Lohm Stories Changing Lives: Narratives and Paths toward Social Change Edited by Corinne Squire

Stories Changing Lives Narratives and Paths toward Social Change

Edited by Corinne Squire

1

iv

1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2021 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Squire, Corinne, 1958– editor. Title: Stories changing lives: narratives and paths toward social change / edited by Corinne Squire. Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2021] | Series: Explorations in narrative psychology | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020016223 (print) | LCCN 2020016224 (ebook) | ISBN 9780190864750 (hardback) | ISBN 9780190864774 (epub) | ISBN 9780190864781 Subjects: LCSH: Psychology—Biographical methdods. | Life change events. | Social change—Psychological aspects. | Storytelling—Psychological aspects. | Discourse analysis, Narrative—Psychological aspects. Classification: LCC BF39.4 .S76 2021 (print) | LCC BF39.4 (ebook) | DDC 155.2072/3—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020016223 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020016224 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America

Cover image by kind permission of Carbon (Wandile Dlamini)

In fond memory of Elliot Mishler

CONTENTS

Contributors  ix Introduction  xi 1. The Personal Is Political: The Social Justice Functions of Stories Elliot Mishler with Corinne Squire 2. The Mystery of the Dangerous Book Molly Andrews

1

19

3. Using Narrative Analysis to Inform About Female and Male Sexual Victimization 31 Jennifer O’Mahoney and Irina Anderson 4. Changing Lives in Unanticipated Ways? Disagreements About Racialized Responsibilities and Ethical Entanglements in Joint Analysis of Narrative Stories 57 Ann Phoenix 5. Hidden From View: Some Written Accounts of Community Activism 75 Michael Murray 6. The Power of Bearing Wit(h)ness: Intergenerational Storytelling About Racial Violence, Healing, and Resistance Alisa Del Tufo, Michelle Fine, Loren Cahill, Chinyere Okafor, and Donelda Cook 7. Living Lives of Resistance in Multiple Registers: Dialogic Co-​Constructions, Genocidal Violence, and Postgenocide Transitional Justice 121 M. Brinton Lykes

99

vi

8. Narrative Subjects: Tense, (In)tension, and (Im)possibilities for Change 145 Jill Bradbury 9. Cultural Identities and Narratives That “Race”: Representations and Resistance in the Context of a South African University 163 Shose Kessi Index  185

[ viii ] Contents

CONTRIBUTORS

Irina Anderson, BA, PhD School of Psychology University of East London London, UK

Shose Kessi, PhD Department of Psychology University of Cape Town Rondebosch, South Africa

Molly Andrews, PhD Centre for Narrative Research University of East London London, UK

M. Brinton Lykes, PhD School of Education & Human Development Boston College Jamaica Plain, MA, USA

Jill Bradbury, PhD Department of Psychology University of the Witwatersrand Johannesburg, South Africa Loren Cahill, MSW, MA, MPhil Critical Social Personality Psychology CUNY Graduate Center Brooklyn, NY, USA

Michael Murray, PhD School of Psychology Keele University Staffordshire, UK Jennifer O’Mahoney, PhD Applied Arts Waterford Institute of Technology Waterford, Ireland

Donelda Cook, PhD Vice President for Student Development Loyola University Maryland Annapolis, MD, USA

Chinyere Okafor, BS Psychology Critical Social/​Personality and Environmental Psychology The Graduate Center, CUNY Brooklyn, NY, USA

Michelle Fine, PhD Department of Critical Psychology Graduate Center, CUNY New York, NY, USA

Ann Phoenix, FBA/​PhD Department of Social Science UCL Institute of Education London, UK

x

Corinne Squire, PhD Department of School of Social Sciences & Social Work University of East London Cambridge, UK

[ x ] Contributors

Alisa Del Tufo, MDIv Threshold Collaborative North Bennington, VT, USA

INTRODUCTION

PREFACE: THE HISTORY OF THIS BOOK

Personal narratives’ relation to social change is a frequent topic in the narrative-​psychological and wider narrative social science literature. It is, indeed, a driving interest for many of those doing and reading narrative social research (Andrews, 2014, 2007; Bradbury and Miller, 2010; Carolissen and Kiguwa, 2018; Fine and Harris, 2001; Plummer, 2009, 2001; Polletta, 2006; Selbin, 2010; Squire, 2012, 2007; Tilly, 2002). This book aims to analyze not only the strong but also qualified significance of personal stories for progressive social change. It pursues this analysis by investigating particular aspects of narratives that narrative psychological research describes and explains and that seem to contribute importantly to narratives’ ability to make or catalyze social change. While the assumption that narratives relate closely to social change is common among narrative researchers, few publications take this relationship as a central and explicit focus. This book aims to deepen narrative research’s engagement with progressive social change by addressing it consistently and from a number of different narrative-​psychological research perspectives. The seeds of the book were sown by a number of events, beginning over a decade ago, which foregrounded questions around the relationship between narrative and social change. The Centre for Narrative Research (CNR) at the University of East London hosted two international conferences on narrative and social change and narrative and social justice in 2007 and 2009, respectively; these topics were selected for sponsorship by the British Psychological Society’s Qualitative Methods section. The 2012 Narrative Innovations summer school in Prato, Italy, organized by CNR

Introduction In: Stories Changing Lives. Edited by: Corinne Squire, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190864750.001.0001.

xi

alongside narrative researchers from Monash University, Australia, and Linkoping University, Sweden, which brought together graduate students from many countries, highlighted young narrative researchers’ growing interests in social change. CNR and other narrative researchers’ life story work with refugees, starting in 2015 in the so-​called Jungle refugee camp, in Calais, northern France (Africa et al., 2017), was an attempt to act on our social change interests in a more applied way. This work strengthened some of our ideas about the value of even minimal possibilities around personal narrative, as Bhabha’s (2010) formulation of the “right to narrate” suggests. A  series of UK National Centre for Research Methods–​ funded events in 2016, involving CNR, the Thomas Coram Research Unit at University College London, Edinburgh University’s Centre for Narrative and Auto/​biographical Studies, and visiting colleagues from South Africa and the United States, also contributed to the book’s making, by exploring participatory narrative research and addressing the involvement of research participants alongside researchers in all steps of the research, from defining research problems and doing the research through to analysis, writing up, and research dissemination. From the mid-​2010s, the work of South African psychologist colleagues associated with the Narrative Enquiry for Social Transformation (NEST) project, which attends to narrative’s relations to social transformation (i.e., the social world’s radical reimagining and reorganization, rather than simply change), has helped develop the understandings in this book, as has the work of the Public Science Project at City University of New York, which often deploys narrative psychology and uses participatory research to pursue social justice. As well, the book has been shaped by the collective narrative practices of the informal Cambridge, Massachusetts, narrative discussion group convened by Elliot Mishler over a period of 25 years. In addition, throughout the time period of this book’s development, our work at CNR has been in fruitful dialogue with that of younger narrative scholars presenting at our graduate seminars and annual graduate “to think is to experiment” conference, always asking fundamental, difficult, and new questions and finding answers outside the academic boxes that separate narrative speech from the visual or practice, language from action, and research from advocacy.1 This extended history of work, conversation, and argument has constituted a “slow scholarship” (Mountz et al., 2015) of the book, significant both as a response to the “fast scholarship” characterizing many contemporary marketized universities. This slow scholarship has operated in the gaps and lapses of the marketized project. In the process, it has also had time and space to develop, itself, as a kind of map of themes and activities

[ xii ] Introduction

in the developing field of narrative psychology, at least in a portion of the change-​focused acreage of that field. In the introductory sections that follow, I situate the book within the framework of existing narrative psychological research and other social science narrative and broader social research on social justice and social change, and describe common features of the chapters to follow. I  then move on to explicate the three sections of the book. Within the account of each section, we give a sequential account of the chapters in that section. I  start, though, by taking a more detailed look at stories, language, everyday and social lives, and progressive change—​that is, change that moves in the direction of social justice, equality, and equity. NARRATIVE PSYCHOLOGICAL RESEARCH AND PROGRESSIVE SOCIAL CHANGE: THE CURRENT CONTEXT

Literary, cultural and media studies, medicine, philosophy, politics, sociology, social work, and theology commonly explore the social impacts of narratives within their fields of study (e.g., Bradbury and Miller, 2010; Carolissen and Kiguwa, 2018; Brockmeier, 2015; Charon, 2008; Cobley, 2013; Hutto, 2007; Lodahl, 2011; Meyer, 2014; Prince, 2012; Riessman, 2008; Ryan and Thon, 2014; Wells, 2011). Within the psychological field, psychologists, psychotherapists, and counselors frequently describe and work with the power of personal stories to affect individuals’ lives, while also often being highly aware of the broader social repertoires on which such stories draw and in which they are embedded (Charon, 2008; Frank, 2012; Freeman, 2009; McAdams, 1997; McAdams et al., 2013; White, 2011). This book is interested in an area of study that crosses both fields: that of “personal” stories that have social significance or effects, at levels ranging from the individual and interpersonal through the local to the national and international. Such stories, even if they appear at first to be outside the field of psychology, are of central interest to narrative psychologists, because they are articulated via and their effects derived from subjectivities—​the states that enable us to recognize ourselves and others, and to feel and act, as persons. The book is called Stories Changing Lives:  Narratives and Paths toward Social Change not “Stories Changing Society,” because it focuses on the effects of personal narratives, which must always include, although they may not be limited to, those narratives’ impact on narrators’ own internal social worlds and also because the book addresses how social change happens at a micro level through remakings of the everyday social worlds

Introduction  [ xiii ]

xvi

that surround the subject, as well as at larger, social and political levels. The “social” does not just exist in a sphere beyond the personal, but also “inside” it, in the very constitution of the subject, including its language, its most intimate emotions, and its unconscious elements and most intimately around it, in the most apparently “natural” relations of family and friendship (Ahmed, 2004; Butler, 2005; K. Gergen, 2001; Henriques et al., 1984/​2004; Rose, 1990; Squire, 1990; Squire et al., 2014). Many chapters in this book explore the constitution and reconstitution of the social by narrative, within areas that may appear to be personal but which are just as social as what lies outside them, by virtue of their social making and their effects on individual subjects’ micro-​social and broader social lives. The book does not argue on this account, as some do, that there is no individual agency—​that narrative constituted as personal is either colonized by social conservatism or is a simple reflection of progressive social shifts. Rather, in these chapters’ arguments, agency can operate from many positions, and narratives positioned as personal or social, or in some intermediate place, can all work strategically in progressive directions (Squire, 2016). Because of the primacy of the psychological within global, but especially Western, social, and political lives, particularly since the beginning of the twentieth century (MacIntyre, 1984; Rose, 1999), personal stories have taken a central place in current discourses and practices of social change (Andrews, 2014; Meyer, 2014; Polletta, 2006; Selbin, 2010). The social significance of such personal, change-​effecting narratives is not all of one kind. Just because personal narratives often seem central to discourses and practices of social engagement and change, this does not necessarily mean that those narratives work for progress—​that is, toward social justice, equality, and equity. They may operate retrogressively, in conservative or radical undemocratic, inegalitarian directions. They may work in the service of, for instance, xenophobic and authoritarian nationalism, or highly conservative socioeconomic policies. Much contemporary discourse from and on resurgent right-​wing populist and fascist movements in Europe, for instance, demonstrates this way of narrative working, with its foregrounding of exemplary individual stories of suffering, collectivization, and transcendence. At times, this book focuses on regressive and discriminatory narratives—​although there is certainly room for more—​for an entire book that describes and analyses the varieties and effects of contemporary narratives of populism, authoritarianism, and chaos. The book also explores, throughout, the failures and limits of personal stories in furthering social justice—​again, a subject that could bear considerable expansion. However, this book concentrates on the place of personal stories

[ xiv ] Introduction

in potentiating social progress. While acknowledging the strength and the importance of retrogressive narrative effects, narratives’ limitations, and research on both, the book focuses on personal narratives’ operation in “progressive” directions that are democratizing, that move toward equality, equity, and justice. First, this focus on personal narratives that generate or support progressive social change jibes with the intensity of interest in such narratives within the existing research on personal narratives and social change. Second, and more important, we have also adopted this emphasis because progressive social change possibilities seem especially important to consider at the current time. The post-​1980s neoliberal focus on markets and individual responsibility, accompanied by more recent moves within middle-​and high-​income countries toward rightwing oligarchies and autocratic leaderships, can seem to marginalize or erase struggles for social justice. Often, such moves can appear globally hegemonic. However, an array of research on the failures of markets, the adverse impact of widening inequalities, intensified in Global South contexts (Krugman, 2013; Piketty, 2014; Rena and Msoni, 2017; Wilkinson and Pickett, 2009), and multiple actions against globalized marketization, from growing progressive political opposition in Europe and the Americas, through cross-​national campaigns such as Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, the Occupy movement, the Arab Spring, and refugee and migration rights movements to broad new formulations of the commons and decoloniality, all challenge such oppressive discourses and practices. While working at a different level, the book’s focus on the social effects of personal stories is valuable at this moment of political contest, for possibilities of negotiation and change may appear first, subtly but also quite broadly, within the zone of personal narratives, even when other forms of resistance seem closed down. At the same time, the transnational and transhistorical character of the book chapters allows the book to engage with this disputed moment in a wide-​ranging way—​ to read personal stories of significantly different kinds, created in and for quite disparate contexts. A third reason for focusing on personal narratives’ progressive rather than regressive social change actions and potential are the strong and historically embedded traditions of such narratives’ associations with progressive social and intellectual movements in many different contexts. In the West, personal narratives have often acted not only as the exemplars and guarantors of liberal humanist ethics (MacIntyre, 1984), but also as key elements within social movements against slavery, for civil rights, for women’s emancipation, for lesbian and gay rights, and against colonialism (Plummer, 2019, 2001). Repertoires of signification within other traditions—​for instance, those related to a wide range of independence

Introduction  [ xv ]

xvi

and postconflict struggles (e.g., Tololyan, 1987), that of testimonio in South and Central America (Beverley, 2004), in which the first person may “stand in” for a larger collectivity, and those related to the definition of the self through others within ubuntu-​ and maternally based discourses in Africa (Muwanga-​Zake, 2010; Oyewumi, 2015)—​also focus importantly on personal stories. Here, personal narratives enable a trajectory from “stories of me” to “stories of us” (Ganz, 2001). This book, by including work based in and addressing Europe, North and Central America, South Africa, and East and South-​East Asia, provides some perspective on the transnational performances and effects of personal stories and exemplifies some of the moves toward decolonizing social research (Ratele, 2019; Smith, 2012) that are currently expanding and transforming qualitative social research, including a canon of narrative research previously often grounded in the Global North. While the scope of the book is broad, we would argue that it demonstrates, rather than breaches, the span of narrative psychology (see, e.g., Andrews, 2013; Bamberg, 1997; Bradbury and Miller, 2010; Bruner, 1990; Carolissen and Kiguwa, 2018; Crossley, 2000; Freeman, 2009, 1993; K.  Gergen, 2001; Josselson et al., 2007; Kessi, 2018; McAdams, 1997; Mattingley and Lawlor, 2009; Mishler, 1986; Polkinghorne, 1988; Rosenwald and Ochberg, 1992; Sarbin, 1986). This field needs currently to be understood through a defining interdisciplinarity, across which its object of personal narrative ranges. The field often overlaps with community, critical, discursive, and feminist psychology and with sociology; in addition, in the United States, with cultural psychology; and in Europe and Australasia, with social psychology and psychosocial studies. However, narrative psychology is uniquely characterized by its personal narrative focus by attending to narratives, that is, forms of signification that build human meaning as they change—​as they progress, sequence, connect, or shift (Squire et al., 2014)—​and by addressing psychology’s object: subjectivity, a field that has its own independent existence, yet is at least partly constructed by the social realm. This constitution of the personal by an “infolding” of the social (Rose, 1999) means that the psychological focus of the book is particularly well suited to displaying the way that personal narratives create and recreate the social field. The book makes a common address, in all the chapters, to the previously described issues. Each chapter walks through the theoretical and methodological perspectives involved with different projects—​often but not always the authors’ own—​in relation to social change. The chapters discuss the relations between narrative, the personal, and the social. They examine what is specific about narrative’s effects—​rather than those of other kinds

[ xvi ] Introduction

of language or other interventions. They explore the boundaries and interplay between psychosocial, micro-​social, and larger social effects. And they delineate the limits, difficulties, and opportunities associated with narratives’ progressive social change effects as they see them.

OUTLINE OF SECTIONS AND CHAPTERS

The lines of argument and areas of speculation in this book often work across the chapters, but the sections of the book are organized broadly according to the chapters’ priority considerations. The book comprises three sections: Personal Stories and Social Change; The Language of Social Change Narratives; and Narrating Histories of the Past, Present, and Future. These sections are thematically organized, but they do not strictly address only their own theme; to some extent, themes migrate between them. In addition, each thematic section is itself about movement: in the first section, between larger and smaller scale narratives and narrative effects; in the second section, between elements of narrative language and their effects; and in the third section, between narrative temporalities of past, present, and future and their impacts. The order of the sections is important. The book starts by trying to understand, as demonstrated by the chapters in the first section, the intercalations of personal narratives with broader narratives and of personal and wider narrative effects. The second section emphasizes the specificity of narrative as a form of symbolic language that takes in different media and modalities but that is consistently characterized by connection and specificity. The third section explicates the complex relations between temporalities that are in play when narratives operate to generate social change—​the imbrication of pasts with presents and futures. The second section thus presupposes the first, and the third section builds on the principles of the previous two. The book begins with a two-​chapter section, Personal Stories and Social Change, which addresses relations between personal narratives, social justice, and social change generally, examining relations between different structural levels and functions of narrative. It investigates the potential contributions that narratives offer for both understanding and shifting people’s everyday relations to the social world, and larger social and political worlds themselves, toward justice and progress. Chapter  1, Elliot Mishler’s and Corinne Squire’s “The Personal Is Political:  The Social Justice Functions of Stories,” takes as its starting point the interest in stories and storytelling that emerged in a variety of

Introduction  [ xvii ]

xvi

disciplines, as well as interdisciplinarily, in the early 1980s. Often referred to as the “narrative turn,” this diverse field of inquiry has continued to flourish, expanding into new areas such as those indicated by the title of this book, Stories Changing Lives: Narratives and Paths toward Social Change. Mishler and Squire explores how, beyond the circles of academic research, a strong interest in personal experience stories has emerged in various public arenas, including political campaigns, university programs, and social organizations. The chapter assembles a number of examples for discussion, specifically in the field of social justice—​a kind of “limit case” for social change, which has had an ongoing though shifting relationship to narrative research. Despite the broad range of settings in which stories are told, there has been, Mishler and Squire argue, relatively little attention directed to why people tell stories and how they function in various social contexts. The chapter briefly takes note of the broad range of narrative studies, particularly on topics related to issues of social justice, and then examines in more detail a few studies of narratives that address them, namely, resistance to unfair use of legal authority, the struggle for equality by African Americans, and the impact on people’s lives of traumatic brain injury. Questions discussed include, What role does their own or others’ personal experience stories play in the development of people’s views of social injustice, what they think can be done, and what they are prepared to do about it? How do personal experience stories function, and how effective are they in the development of organized political action for social justice? Mishler and Squire suggest that narrative language can potentiate and produce action: An act of resistance that becomes a story of it extends its power. Stories can also, by their own shape, shape actions—​for instance, by showing spontaneity and collectivity. Finally, even small-​scale, personal narrative registerings of social injustices—​for example, around illness—​ can be acted against by verbal and visual stories that claim Bhabha’s (2000) foundational and initial “right to narrate.” The first version of this chapter was drafted by Mishler, prior to his participation in the CNR 2009 event on narrative and social justice. The chapter was later completed by Squire, after Mishler’s sad death. The completion process involved following Mishler’s conceptual framework while also updating and extending his arguments. Chapter  2, Molly Andrews’s “The Mystery of the Dangerous Book” focuses on the last level to which Mishler pays attention:  the micro-​ narrative level of how social change happens. Andrews notes the growing interest in political narratives, much of which focuses on how stories can assist us in documenting and understanding social processes generally. Yet,

[ xviii ] Introduction

narratives are not, she argues, only the means by which individuals breathe public life into personal experience; they are a primary tool by which individuals recognize and affirm themselves as members of a group—​a social structure that is unavoidably political. Stories can thus play a vital role in de-​individualizing that which is personal. Rendering experience into a narrative form can then help people to become more actively engaged in shaping the conditions of their lives. The chapter addresses personal narratives’ role of documenting and rendering comprehensible social processes and social change. It also emphasizes narratives’ parallel role as constructors of collective identities that enable social activity and activism. Andrews’s account of the story of a “disappeared” object, with its links to many other disappearances, and of “disappearances”—​things not said and sometimes not known—​within the story itself, demonstrates how such a story can lay out, both explicitly and implicitly, the ways in which a political system impacts upon everyday lives, and how resistances to it are practiced within those “everydays.” The second book section, The Language of Social Change Narratives, presents detailed readings of narratives, drawing on discourse-​analytic traditions of analyzing the microstructures of language. These readings elucidate how narratives generate changing, resistant, or regressive, and often contested self-​and co-​constructions of identities in the social world. Here, we see the fine micro-​social grain of how the language—​the symbol systems—​that characterize stories work for understanding and change within people’s everyday lives and on wider audiences. Chapter 3, Jennifer O’Mahoney and Irina Anderson’s “Using Narrative Analysis to Inform About Female and Male Sexual Victimization” applies narrative analysis to accounts of experiences of female and male sexual victimization. As in Andrews’s chapter, people are here using stories to make sense of their everyday worlds, a process that is particularly helpful in times of trauma or upset, when people need to comprehend major changes in their lives. In this way, personal narratives, even when told simply to oneself, can change subjects’ social positioning, functioning, and effects—​although not always in a positive, progressive direction. As an organizing principle, narrative analysis is directly suited to understanding how people use language to co-​construct beliefs and knowledge. How, therefore, do survivors make sense of their experiences of support related to sexual victimization and describe their own reality? The chapter describes an interview study with five men and five women regarding the role of their social relationships (i.e., with family, friends, and partners) and of an online parasocial support group as means of support in coping with their sexual victimization. Analysis focuses on the interviewees’ self-​constructions as ethical subjects,

Introduction  [ xix ]

x

specifically in relation to their narrative presentations as moral and ethical individuals, and the implications of this self-​construction for accountability and self-​blame. The chapter highlights how narratives were used to present the survivors as affected, but not defined, by their victimization, thus constructing themselves as resilient. These narratives also mitigate self-​blame and tell of how the survivors have moved beyond the unsupportive reactions of their friends and family. Survivors can interpret sexual victimization as evidence of their powerlessness and culpability, leading to poorer adaptation, or they can interpret their experiences in ways that mitigate self-​blame, that emphasize the supportive relationships in their lives, and that are life-​enhancing. The chapter discusses how narratives may be useful for survivors of sexual victimization to achieve this outcome and, in the process, to position themselves differently and more progressively within the ethico-​social sphere. As with larger narrative moves, such small-​ scale narrative shifts are contested, whether those shifts are progressive or regressive. In Chapter 4, “Changing Lives in Unanticipated Ways? Disagreements About Racialized Responsibilities and Ethical Entanglements in Joint Analysis of Narrative Stories,” Ann Phoenix takes a similarly micro-​social perspective on racialized and other positionings within self-​narratives and on the contestations involved with them. The chapter conducts a close analysis of portions of two interviews, one with a woman of mixed parentage and one with a man of mixed parentage. The analysis interrogates the complexity of the ethics involved in listening, uninterrupted, to participants’ narrative positioning of themselves in relation to racialization when these positionings run counter to listeners’—​in this case, the researcher’s and research team’s—​world view. The chapter explores the process of producing narratives and joint analysis as well as the production of written narrative analyses and illustrates the ethical entanglements that become evident in considerations of intersecting, potentially oppressive relations. Phoenix argues, like O’Mahoney and Anderson, that this kind of careful work on the small stories of identity construction is as essential for the kinds of engagements Mishler and Andrews consider as is the tracing of larger, more deliberate self-​narratives. Beyond this, Phoenix suggests that the inevitable narrative–​discursive tensions that exist within biographical stories are crucial to their reading. Such stories should not simply be taken “at their word.” This chapter makes a strong case for the inevitable and powerful inscription of social formations of, for instance, race and gender within even small fragments of everyday talk. It suggests, too, that these kinds of narrative positionings themselves act on the microstructures of social formations and that they always do so in dialogic and contested ways.

[ xx ] Introduction

Chapter 5, “Hidden From View: Some Written Accounts of Community Activism,” by Michael Murray, shifts analytic attention to the changes instituted by narrative language at another level: that of the genre. Stories, Murray argues, like Mishler and Andrews, provide an interpretive framework for understanding our lives. They can be both individual and biographical, and collective and historical, and each type can inform the other. They also have an emotional tone such that they can oppress the storyteller and others as well as offer opportunities for challenge and personal and social transformation. Murray explores the different genre characters of personal stories although a reflection on the autobiographies of two widely known women community activists in Scotland in the 1970s and 1980s, Helen Crummy and Cathy McCormack. Community activism is an activity clearly occupied with social change, concerned as it is with various forms of collective activity designed to improve the lives of disadvantaged, oppressed, and marginalized groups. It can take various forms, from actions within a locality designed to improve the quality of life of the residents (e.g., organizing clubs and events) to activities designed to access increased resources, which may bring the community into conflict with outside agencies. Key to these developments is the role of individual community activists who are involved in organizing events and initiating actions. At the same time, as Mishler points out, the storying of those events and actions can turn them into a wider resource, potentiating further change. The aim of the chapter is to explore the work of such community activists through their written accounts and to consider the role of narrative in providing an organizing frame for local change. The two autobiographies analyzed here go beyond simply telling the events of the authors’ activism or their lives around it. They also work to situate that activism within a much broader sociopolitical frame. They explicitly analyze the personal difficulties the authors must address, while pursuing their goals of social justice. Crucially, for our understanding of the narrative language of social change, each autobiography uses a specific genre to hail and to involve and to inspire its readers. In Helen’s case, the narrative is based on the traditional socialist and cooperative ideas of the Labour Party, whereas for Cathy it is based in the ideas of liberation theology around struggle and self-​sacrifice. The chapter also considers the various obstacles to the process of social change, including those presented by the complexities of narratives themselves. The book’s third section, Narrating Histories of the Past, Present, and Future, addresses not only the complications but also the possibilities that interwoven narrative temporal and spatial lines present for social change, problematizing “progress” and at times suggesting a kind of alterity to time.

Introduction  [ xxi ]

xxi

In Chapter  6, “The Power of Bearing Wit(h)ness:  Intergenerational Storytelling About Racial Violence, Healing, and Resistance,” Alisa Del Tufo and colleagues chronicle a powerful gathering of Black, White, and Chicano Texans in the dawn of the Trump presidency to bear witness to stories of racial injustice that tear through the fabric of social life in America, historically and today. In a bold gesture, a coalition of churches, community groups, and universities committed to building a space in which stories of racial violence, pain, and oppression became testimony to be archived for racially mixed audiences, to listen with intent, to act in common motion, to reimagine the diverse racial fabric within and across Texas cities, and to educate generations yet to come. The authors documented the content, affects, and silences embedded in how these stories of racial injustice were spoken, how they were heard, and how the communities intimately affected metabolized these stories. The chapter explores how speaking violence transforms the trauma, how hearing violence affects those who dare to listen, and how communities can reimagine themselves once painful stories are spoken, heard, and reflected upon. Here, stories of the racialized social injustices and changes of the late twentieth century United States are reunderstood—​itself a radical change process for speakers and hearers—​in the context of the present and imminent future struggles against reracialization and growing racism. The chapter argues that such intergenerational narrative knowledge-​building and transformation can be key for present and future actions. Sometimes, such narrativizing across time is more ambiguous than in Del Tufo and colleagues’ account. Chapter  7, “Living Lives of Resistance in Multiple Registers:  Dialogic Co-​ Constructions, Genocidal Violence, and Postgenocide Transitional Justice,” by M.  Brinton Lykes, examines narratives gathered in rural Guatemala (Chajul) over the author’s two decades working with rural Mayan women in conflict and postconflict situations, using visual and verbal media, creativity, and Mayan women’s traditions of narrative and performance. The chapter discusses one woman’s story, between the 1970s and 2015, of her decade-​long engagement in the 1980s armed struggle, her time in exile in Mexico as a refugee, and her return to Guatemala. While this woman’s story importantly “breaks silence” in its earlier parts, it is later a story that silences the woman’s 15-​ year experiences as a guerilla, refugee, and a campaigner against gendered and racialized violence in the context of her return. This woman refuses the current dominant, politically limited discourse of peace accords, transitional justice, and Mayan women as victims, which renders her own earlier story as a political subject transgressive or unlistenable. In response, she adopts a strategic silence about her past. This chapter demonstrates how

[ xxii ] Introduction

the absence of a narrative can also work to retain and rearticulate the past within the present, with important effects. For this continuing narrative of resistance, now expressed as silence, remains hearable by those politically close to the narrator, including researchers in solidarity with her, and thus sustains the possibility of shaping the future. The book ends with two chapters by South African authors. “Narrative Subjects:  Tense, (In)tension, and (Im)possibilities for Change,” by Jill Bradbury, takes up Lykes’s concern with the future temporalities of change narratives rooted in the past. The chapter explores ways in which the feminist slogan “The personal is political” may be inverted to think about ways in which the political may be made personal, routes by which the project of social change may be articulated in the construction of personal narratives. In South Africa, narratives of the apartheid past are employed in the construction and interpretation of the present social world, primarily presenting a collective national history of resistance and overcoming, despite the deeply intransigent inequalities of the current structure of South African society. The chapter points to this repertoire of stories’ limited power for social change and its existence alongside a powerful injunction to forget or erase the past that is similar in some ways to the erasure confronted and undone in Del Tufo and colleagues’ chapter. Bradbury explores the tension between remembering and forgetting our collective histories in the light of Freeman’s (2010) notion of the narrative unconscious and, in particular, examines how this historical legacy can be reworked in the projection of future narratives of young people. The youth of South Africa are the children of parents who lived through the oppressive apartheid regime. Yet they themselves live in a constitutional democracy, a constitution that explicitly asserts a framework of social justice and equality. In this context, the chapter argues, working with young people to create alternative futures entails reworking the ways in which history is inscribed in current identities and creating possibilities for telling their stories forward, rewriting themselves. By articulating the project of social change as the generation of alternative personal stories, the political becomes personal, creating possibilities for new forms of identification, new points of suture (Hall, 1996) into alternative social discourses. The last chapter in the book, Shose Kessi’s “Cultural Identities and Narratives That ‘Race’:  Representations and Resistance in the Context of a South African University,” exemplifies and extends the work of the prior chapter in its account of visual as well as verbal stories of Black South African students in the space of the university. Narratives, the chapter argues, communicate “persuasive representations of us and others,” including representations of belonging and exclusions, of narrators, and of

Introduction  [ xxiii ]

xvi

those they narrate. Where narratives foreground, put in question, and oppose hegemonic representations, they may therefore generate social change—​including change that pursues justice. Stories delineate oppression in ways that are complex and intersectional and without which resistance is depleted and oversimplified. The chapter explores such functioning through the photo-​voice work of Black students at the University of Cape Town. In such large and long-​established institutions, significant demographic shifts have occurred, but apartheid-​era discourses of race, gender, and class have not similarly shifted. Through images and written stories, the students identified and challenged such discourses, at the same time “speaking back,” asserting their own identities within these historically excluding spaces. These processes were both enabled and extended by the students’ photographic gaze, which opened up overlooked spaces and the affects condensed within them. Such narratives thus not only expand understanding of the racial mythologization of the university and those living within it; they also provide, literally, an alternative perspective on it and resources for individual and collective identity and action.

POSTFACE: THE FUTURES OF NARRATIVE-​P SYCHOLOGICAL RESEARCH ON SOCIAL CHANGE

This introduction has not just mapped the contemporary contributions of the narrative-​psychological research in this book to our understanding of relations between narratives and social change. It has also sketched how the book chapters are shifting this research in new directions. I  want to draw out here four important routes of future movement that emerge from the descriptions of the chapters just presented. First, the contemporary work exemplified in this volume focuses intently on the specific grain of narrative language: the effectiveness of even small elements of it, its contested and complex character, and the ambiguity and fragility of its progressive effects. Phoenix’s and O’Mahoney’s and Anderson’s chapters exemplify this subtlety and care in analysis. Second, the chapters open up in helpful ways what “narrative” is in its relations to social change. They are attentive not only to orality, the canonic material of narrative psychology, but to written narrative, to spatiality and the visual, to silence, to narrative patterns of process and action, and to narratives of affect (Del Tufo et al., this volume; Kessi, this volume; Lykes, this volume; Bradbury, this volume). The chapters also skew, condense, stretch out, and collectivize the temporalities with which narrative research has traditionally been concerned, recasting them as histories.

[ xxiv ] Introduction

Murray’s. Kessi’s, Lykes’s, and Bradbury’s chapters provide abundant examples of these shifts. Third, the chapters assert the value of the multiplicity of stories, genres, positions, and intersectionalities, in itself, as a condition of the transformations that interest them (Kessi, this volume; Murray, this volume). In this, they recall Adichie’s and others’ recent work on the vital nature of such openness and expansion within the decolonial project, across national contexts. Fourth, the chapters complexify the double movements by which narrative has been seen to effect social change, by connecting intimately the infolding of social change within the subject (O’Mahoney and Anderson, this volume) and the outfolding of even a single subject into a political effect (Andrews, this volume; Mishler, this volume). In so doing, often through within and through a hard-​worked participatory or transformative research framework (Del Tufo et al., this volume, Bradbury, this volume; Kessi, this volume), they chronicle the character of our present and developing future understandings and practices around narrative and social change: as intertwined and inextricable double movements of narrating the political personally and storying it outward, forward, and transformatively (Freeman, 2010). Finally, these directions of movement across the book are, I think, inextricably related to some of its most obvious diversities and complexities: its interdisciplinary references, radiating outward from its psychological foundation; its transnationalism; and its wide historical reach, replicated to some extent within the slow scholarship processes of its formation. In the current conjuncture of widespread, varying, and powerful retrogressions toward market-​justified inequalities, inequities, and failures of justice, the cultivation of such multiplicities, working on many fronts, rather than of a single oppositional or alternative formulation, seems an especially appropriate strategy for narrative research’s engagements with progressive social change.

NOTES 1. These background events can be explored further through the websites of the CNR (https://​www.uel.ac.uk/​research/​centre-​for-​narrative-​research), Narrative Innovations (https://​www.monash.edu/​arts/​social-​sciences/​news-​ and-​events/​articles/​2013/​narrative-​innovations-​online), and the Public Science Project (http://​publicscienceproject.org/), as well as through information available online on Narrative Enquiry for Social Transformation (e.g., https://​ africainwords.com/​2017/​09/​10/​call-​for-​papers-​2nd-​narrative-​enquiry-​for-​ social-​transformation-​international-​conference-​2018/​).

Introduction  [ xxv ]

xvi

REFERENCES Ahmed, S. (2004). The cultural politics of emotions. London, England: Edinburgh University Press/​Routledge. Andrews, M. (2007). Shaping history. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Andrews, M. (2013). Never the last word: revisiting data. In M. Andrews, C. Squire & M. Tamboukou (Eds.), Doing narrative research. London, England: Sage. Andrews, M. (2014). Narrative imagination and everyday life. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Bamberg, M. (1997). Narrative development: Six approaches. London, England: Routledge. Beverley, J. (2004). Testimonio: On the politics of truth. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Bradbury, J., and Miller, R. (2010). Narrative possibilities. Theory & Psychology 20(5), 687–​702. Brockmeier, J. (2015). Beyond the archive. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Bruner, J. (1990). Acts of meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Butler, J. (2005). Giving an account of oneself. Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press. Calais Writers. (2017). Voices from the “jungle.” London, England: Pluto Press. Carolissen, R., and Kiguwa, P. (2018). Narrative explorations of the micro-​politics of students’ citizenship, belonging and alienation at South African universities. South African Journal of Higher Education 32(3), 1–​11. Charon, R. (2008). Narrative medicine. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Cobley, P. (2013). Narrative: The new critical idiom. London, England: Routledge. Crossley, M. (2000). Introducing narrative psychology. Buckinghamshire, England: Open University Press. Fine, M., & Harris, A. (2001). Under the covers: Theorising the politics of counter stories. London, England: Lawrence and Wishart. Frank, A. (2012). Letting stories breathe. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Freeman, M. (1993). Rewriting the self: History, memory, narrative. London, England: Routledge. Freeman, M. (2010). Hindsight. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Ganz, M. (2001). The power of story in social movements. Retrieved from http://​ citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/​viewdoc/​download?doi=10.1.1.94.1488&rep=rep1& type=pdf Gergen, K. (2001). Social construction in context. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Gergen, M. (2001). Feminist reconstructions in psychology: Narrative, gender and performance. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Hall, S. (1996). Who needs identity? In S. Hall & P. Du Gay (Eds.), Questions of cultural identity. London, England: Sage. Henriques, J., Hollway, W, Urwin, C., Venn, C., and Walkerdine, V. (2004). Changing the subject. London, England: Routledge. (Original work published 1984) Hutto, D. (2007). Folk psychological narratives. London, England: Bradford Books. Josselson, R., Lieblich, A., and McAdams, D. (Eds.). (2007). The meaning of others: Narrative studies of relationships. Washington, DC: APA. Kessi, S. (2018). Photovoice as a narrative tool for decolonization. South African Journal of Higher Education 32(3), 101–​117.

[ xxvi ] Introduction

Krugman, P. (2013). End this depression now! New York, NY: Norton. Lodahl, M. (2011). The story of god. New York, NY: The House Studio. McAdams, D. (1997). The stories we live by. New York, NY: Guilford Press. McAdams, D., Josselson, R., and Lieblich, A. (2013). Identity and story. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. MacIntyre, A. (1984). After virtue. Bloomington, IN: Notre Dame University Press. Mattingley, C., and Lawlor, M. (2009). Learning from stories. Scandinavian Journal of Occupational Therapy 7(1), 4–​14. Meyer, F. (2014). Narrative politics. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Mishler, E. (1986). Research interviewing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mountz, A., Bonds, A., Mansfield, B., Loyd, J., Hyndman, J., Walton-​Robers, M., Basu, R., Whitson, R., Hawkins, R., Hamilton, T., and Curran, W. (2015). For slow scholarship. ACME 14(4), 1235–​1259. Muwanga-​Zake, J. (2010). Narrative research across cultures: Epistemological concerns in Africa. Current Narratives 2, 68–​83. http://​ro.uow.edu.au/​ currentnarratives/​vol1/​iss2/​7 Oyewumi, O. (2015). What gender is motherhood? New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Piketty, T. (2014). Capital in the twenty-​first century. New York, NY: Belknapp. Plummer, K. (2001). Documents of life 2. London, England: SAGE. Plummer, K. (2009). Narrative power. London, England: Polity. Polkinghorne, D. (1988). Narrative knowing and the human sciences. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Polletta, F. (2006). It was like a fever. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Prince, G. (2012). Narratology. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: De Gruyter. Ratele, K. (2019). The world looks like this from here. Johannesburg, South Africa: Witwatersrand University Press. Rena, R., and Msoni, M. (2017). Global financial crisis and its impact on the South African economy. Journal of Economics 5(1), 17–​25. Riessman, C. (2008). Narrative methods for the human sciences. New York, NY: SAGE. Rose, N. (1990). Psychology as a “social” science. In I. Parker & J. Shotter (Eds.), Deconstructing social psychology. London, England: Routledge. Rose, N. (1999). Governing the soul. London, England: Free Association. Rosenwald, G., and Ochberg, R. (1992). Storied lives. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Ryan, M-​L ., and Thon, J-​N. (2014). Storyworlds across media. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Sarbin, T. (1986). Narrative psychology. New York, NY: Praeger. Selbin, B. (2010). Revolution, rebellion, resistance: The power of story. New York, NY: Zed Books. Smith, Tuhiwai L. (2012). Decolonising methodologies. London, England: Zed Books. Squire, C. (1990). Crisis what crisis? Discourses and narratives of the ‘social’ in social psychology. In I. Parker & J. Shotter (Eds.), Deconstructing social psychology. London, England: Routledge. Squire, C. (2007). HIV in South Africa. London, England: Routledge. Squire, C. (2012). Narratives, connections, and social change. Narrative Inquiry 22(1),  50–​68. Squire, C. (2016). Life stories: complex narratives and everyday truths. In J. Maybin (Ed.), Narrative, language and creativity. Milton Keynes, England: Open University Press.

Introduction  [ xxvii ]

xxivi

Squire, C., Davis, M., Esin, C., Andrews, M., Harrison, B., Hyden, L-​C., and Hyden, M. (2014). What is narrative research? London, England: Bloomsbury. Tilly, C. (2002). Stories, identities and political change. Oxford, England: Rowman and Littlefield. Tololyan, K. (1987). Cultural narrative and the motivation of the terrorist. Journal of Strategic Studies 10(4), 217–​233. Wells, K. (2011). Narrative inquiry: Social work methods. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. White, M. (2011). Narrative practice. New York, NY: Norton. Wilkinson, R., and Pickett, K. (2009). The spirit level. London, England: Allen Lane.

[ xxviii ] Introduction

CHAPTER 1

The Personal Is Political The Social Justice Functions of Stories ELLIOT MISHLER WI TH CORINNE SQUIRE

INTRODUCTION

This chapter examines social justice as an exemplar of progressive social change, in its relations to narrative. We can see social justice as the limit case of social change, the condition to which all efforts at social change aspire. Alternatively, we can see it as a condition tangential to social change, a state rather than a process. Perhaps we can see it in both ways, so that the conjunction between narrative and social justice becomes simply a pointed, explicit version of that between narrative and social change—​a version that resolves the ambiguities of change, while raising new questions around the complicated relations between narrative and justice and the nature of social justice itself. Sadly, Elliot Mishler died in 2018, after a period of illness, and was not able to finish his contribution to this volume, which arose first as a keynote contribution to a conference on narrative and social justice. The main body of the chapter arises from Mishler’s conference address, while the volume editor wrote the introduction and conclusion to draw out the theoretical issues raised for “stories changing lives” by Misher’s tracking of the historical context of the field and the significance of Mishler’s work. The editor has attempted to edit and complete the chapter in consonance with Mishler’s

Elliot Mishler with Corinne Squire, The Personal Is Political In: Stories Changing Lives. Edited by: Corinne Squire, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190864750.003.0001.

2

own thoughts for it as well as the themes of the volume. Any errors in this regard are hers alone. Social justice—​ usually taken to include economic justice also—​ is characterized variously as involving openness of opportunities to all, possibilities for social mobility, low levels of resource inequality, equal rights, and resource redistribution. In 2006, the United Nations’ International Forum for Social Development (United Nations, 2006) pointed out the iniquitousness, internationally, of such discourses and practices in the 1960s and 1970s and their decline in the 1980s and 1990s, as market framings of development took hold, implemented through monetarism, structural adjustment, and neoliberalism. Narrative research’s alignment with such broad policy shifts is not, as we shall see, exact, although it bears some relation to them. Perhaps, though, from the 2008 financial crisis through to the present moment, amid concerns about growing inequalities, the rise of right-​wing populist movements and resistance to them, and environmental exploitation and crisis, the policy call for social justice is again strengthening. Perhaps we may see this shift in the work that narrative researchers have been doing over this time period, too. This chapter starts by considering the historical positioning of social justice concerns within narrative studies, and especially narrative social research, before looking at the broader context of such work: the high contemporary cultural profile of narratives, now highly occupied with social justice, but also appearing around all kinds of critical social and personal moments, as the chapter demonstrates. The chapter then moves on to examples of studies where narrative is linked to social justice in very clear or less clear—​perhaps more preliminary and personal—​ways. The chapter starts, however, by describing something of the past and present focuses of narrative social research. It is through such histories, however partial, that we can see the growing and complexifying relation of narrative research to social justice.

NARRATIVE RESEARCH AND SOCIAL JUSTICE IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

If I were tracing the recent history of narrative research within the social sciences, I would begin with a paper by the sociolinguist William Labov and his student Joshua Waletzky, entitled “Narrative Analysis: Oral Versions of Personal Experience” (Labov and Waletzky, 1967). Based on stories told in interviews, it was published in the proceedings of the 1966 meeting of the American Ethnological Society. Labov returned to these data several years

[ 2 ]  Stories Changing Lives

later in a chapter entitled “The Transformation of Experience in Narrative Syntax,” in his book, Language in the Inner City (Labov, 1972). While this work is linguistically based, its broader perspective was and remained the universality of narrative forms, and the skills of human narrators, a radical linguistics posed against educational and political “verbal deprivation” denigrations of the languages of African Americans and people from lower socioeconomic groups. In that regard, Labov’s work was already situated on the side of social justice, as was that of other radical linguists and educators of that time (e.g., Lakoff and Johnson, 1980), and as these researchers’ work continues to be. Despite these early signposts toward the possibilities offered by narrative research beyond linguistics, it took a while before the broad field of narrative studies, as we know it today, took off. A harbinger of what was to come was the Autumn 1980 issue of Critical Inquiry, a journal published by the University of Chicago. Entitled “On Narrative” (Mitchell, 1980), it included articles by well-​known philosophers, literary critics, and social scientists—​although not linguists. By this point, fields located primarily outside social science disciplines, like literary, film and art theory, political theory, and history (e.g., see Culler, 1981; Mulvey, 1975; White, 1973) had already been analyzing narrative in the light of European “poststructural” or “postmodern” theories of language, drawing on for instance Barthes (1975), Genette (1972), Cixous (1976), and Todorov (1990), as well as earlier structural and functional linguistics, for some time. The antecedents of and supports to such theoretical work included political theory, especially that of Marx, Althusser, and Foucault, but also political practices around working-​class and anticolonial struggles in particular, which thus engendered within this heterogeneous “narrative” field a persistent, if variable, interest in social justice and social change. As within Mitchell’s volume, however, much later narrative work operated at a predominantly theoretical level, or within the politics of signification and representation, and did not engage with empirical research or practices around social justice. However, it could be argued that narrative research has turned again toward issues of justice in the decade following the financial crisis, responding to issues of global inequalities and conflicts and environmental crisis. It seems to me, and I  think many narrative social researchers would agree, that the critical take-​off point for narrative social research specifically, came somewhat after the move Mitchell’s volume signaled in literary and cultural studies—​in the mid-​to late 1980s, about 20 years after Labov and Waletzky’s seminal paper. That shift overlapped with related initiatives around for instance oral history, life writing, and ethnography, as well as

T h e P e r s o n a l I s P ol iti c a l  

[ 3 ]

4

initiatives in fields such as discourse analysis and conversation analysis. The narrative social research initiatives drew on some of the theoretical understandings already prevalent within the broader narrative field as previously described, as well as on writing emerging from the related but wider political practices of antiracism, anticolonialism, lesbian and gay rights, and second-​wave feminisms. Among many markers of this turn were three books published in 1986 that focused directly on the value of narrative studies and provided examples and methods for doing the work (Bruner, 1986; Mishler, 1986; Sarbin, 1986). Papers by Gareth Williams (1984) and Michael Bury (1982) on illness narratives appeared a little earlier; the work of the Personal Narratives Group (1989) slightly afterwards. All this work broadened the possibilities of narrative social research considerably. For it addressed the contexts of narrative in ways that could be said to be “political,” that is, involving social relations of power at levels, and ranging from the intrapersonal and interpersonal, to much larger formations around, for instance, class, gender, and generation. Such work could hardly fail to engage, more directly than before, with social justice issues. At the same time, this work from the mid-​1980s took narrative content seriously, both the narrative voices of social groups and movements, and the narrative idiosyncrasies of individual subjectivities—​as well as paying attention, as linguistics like Labov always had, to narrative structures. However, an engagement with social justice of course did not and does not characterize all narrative social research since that time. We might also argue that during the 1980s and 1990s, as with the policy shifts the United Nations describes, and increasingly in the early 2000s, some of the large proliferation of narrative social research moved away from social justice toward personal articulations of injustice and psychological reparational strategies or toward a kind of “micro-​social” justice, explored around small groups of participants whose lived and narrated struggles were intricately described and understood (Riessman, 2008), but which were rarely related to each other or to larger formations. Perhaps, as my considerations in the following text of work from the later 2000s suggests, this move is reversing. I begin with this brief note on the history of narrative studies because I think that many of us engaged in the work tend to believe that our field is indeed in a continual state of development. It remains exciting because fresh topics and original approaches continue to emerge and develop. The title of one of the events that led me to start writing this chapter—​a conference on narrative and social justice, sponsored by the Special Section on Qualitative Methods of the British Psychological Society and the Centre for Narrative Research at University of East London in 2009—​supports that view.

[ 4 ]  Stories Changing Lives

When I first started thinking about narrative in relation to social justice, I was somewhat puzzled by the relationship. Although I had always viewed writing and telling stories as positive social activities, I had not linked them explicitly to the broad concept of social justice. Trying to figure out what might be intended by this connection at the original conference led me, at some point, to reflect on how stories may function in this way, as agents, mediators, or negotiators of social justice, at various levels in our social and political structures. Examining these different levels may allow us to retain the clear focus on progressive change that the notion of social justice gives us in relation to narrative, while also allowing us to think about it operating in different fields (Murray, 2000). While the earlier narrative social research that I  have mentioned frequently assumed and sometimes explicitly discussed narratives’ relations to social contexts and their changes and, in this way, had implications for social justice, it was rarely as directly concerned with narratives’ progressive effects as has been and is the case with later and current work, examples of whose contributions I examine in the following discussion (see also Andrews, 2014; Goodall, 2016; Meyer, 2014; Selbin, 2010; Woodiwiss et al., 2017). In the course of my exploration of narrative and social justice, I also became aware of the frequency of references to stories and storytelling in the everyday world today, particularly in relation to inequality and therefore, implicitly at least, social justice; but also more generally, and with much less clear links to social justice, in relation to key “personal” events and experiences. This is a push in a new direction that, again, in its diversity, reflects my initial puzzlement. It suggests, though, that however narratives now operate in relation to social justice, they are embedded in cultural repertoires of representation that standardly deploy narrative to address social justice alongside other social and personal conflicts and settlements. It seemed to me that much of what appears in the broad field of narrative studies still focuses on stories people tell us in our interviews about their lives, what we might refer to as “personal experience narratives.” Such narratives are the context, for narrative researchers, within which they usually examine narratives’ implications with social justice and social change. But we have been relatively inattentive to the broader context: the widespread presentation of such accounts in newspapers, magazines, radio, and TV programs and reports of institutions and organizations. In part to correct this lapse, I want to begin with a variety of examples of how stories are used to frame and interpret what is happening in our social worlds. The intent is to provide a larger social context to our studies of personal narratives and their relation to social justice.

T h e P e r s o n a l I s P ol iti c a l  

[ 5 ]

6

STORIES TAKE CENTER STAGE

One notable instance of the cultural prioritization of stories over the past decade appeared in the final TV appearance of U.S. President Barack Obama before his first election, when he said that if elected he would focus on stories people told him during his campaign. These stories, he observed, showed us what problems they faced, which he claimed to understand and, therefore, could do something about if he were elected. The day after the election, the Boston Globe picked up the story theme with a front-​page headline: “In The Great National Narrative, Where Will Obama’s Election Really Fit?” At that time, I  was beginning to think about what I  might talk about at the British Psychological Society and the Centre for Narrative Research conference and may have been more than unusually attentive to such items, but I  was startled by the frequency with which the word “story” was appearing in the titles and headlines of news stories and institutional brochures and reports. For example, in mid-​November 2008, the Boston Foundation—​a prominent supporter of social programs—​alerted readers to its annual report, entitled, “Stories From the City.” It included 30 pages of stories about people involved in their programs. To further underline its interest in stories, its end-​of-​year holiday card offered “Thanks to those who shared their stories with us this year and to those whose stories we have yet to hear.” About the same time, an announcement on the website of Democracy for America—​an online, progressive political organization—​offered its readers an opportunity to contribute to the historical understanding of Obama’s victory through a “Share Your Story” project. “Let’s hear your story,” was their request to readers. Tell us “What you did to move America forward?” and “How did you make change happen?” Again, in late November 2008, the Boston Globe Magazine featured an article on an organization called Story Corps, whose founder announced that they had designated the day after Thanksgiving as a National Day of Listening, when people would be interviewed and asked to tell their stories. The article reported that Story Corps is “the largest oral history project ever undertaken” and that “more than 40,000 Americans have participated,” including President Bush who had been interviewed by his sister. In the same month, Tufts University mounted an exhibit celebrating Somerville as a city of immigrants, entitled “Immigrants: Then and Now,” which highlighted the stories of 30 people of immigrant heritage. Alerted to references to stories, I  retrieved the Spring 2008 issue of the Harvard University Alumni Quarterly, which featured an article by a

[ 6 ]  Stories Changing Lives

professor of science, entitled: “Never-​Ending Stories: The Cultural Power of Mind–​Body Medicine.” It emphasized the significance of stories in theories of illness and treatment in the history of mind–​body medicine. Further underlining my new appreciation of the ubiquity of stories around this time was a house gift of a small sculpture of a seated Pueblo Indian from the U.S. Southwest with four little children held in its arms and an accompanying booklet of folk tales entitled “Pueblo Stories and Storytellers.” Two other examples from that same stretch of time can serve as closure to this section. The first was an announcement in December from a local group called True Story Theatre, which engages in what they refer to as “improvisational storytelling.” Its small cast acts out what members of their audiences tell them were important events in their lives. And in January, a flyer from our local public TV station announced that it brings us—​its audience—​“the stories of America—​the stories that shape our country . . . which are all part of the story of America—​a story no one tells better than WGBH.”

WHAT DO STORIES DO?

Clearly, in the context of the then-​upcoming conference on narrative and social justice, these omens were hard for me to ignore. Nonetheless, their relevance to the “justice” theme was not immediately apparent. The broad significance of personal stories is highlighted in these various attempts to collect and display stories, but how they function in connecting our lives to significant social and political issues is left unspecified. There is, for example, no clue in the Story Corps Day of Listening proposal to the impact on individual lives or social processes of having thousands of people tell their “stories” to strangers who will then transfer them to an open-​ ended—​and seemingly limitless—​website. Nor is there any indication of what it might mean to people to tell their stories, knowing that they will be preserved in some form and might be used in some way. It appears that just having them accumulate is the only purpose. The title of the Narrative and Social Justice conference pointed in a different direction. It raised questions about the functions of stories, that is, the work they do in reflecting and, perhaps, influencing what happens in our social worlds. One underlying idea is that personal accounts of life experiences—​in some story-​like form—​provide some entry into our understanding of what may be important in people’s lives. Step back for a moment and think about how different this conception is from our traditional modes of research and theory-​building, where we ask people about

T h e P e r s o n a l I s P ol iti c a l  

[ 7 ]

8

different aspects of their lives and social situations—​income, type of job, family structure, political attitude, etc.—​but do not explore how they convert these separate dimensions into a coherent course of action or set of beliefs that have the structure of a story. I think each of us could construct a variety of stories, each representing a different aspect or dimension of our lives, if we tried to tie together in a meaningful way the specific forms taken by various social dimensions, such as income, job, marital status, and so on. This open-​endedness of stories in describing, analyzing, and commenting on our actions and relationships only begins to suggest the degree to which they enter into our ways of understanding and describing our experiences and relationships. For example, the concept of “social justice” itself seems to depend on and reflect a particular story structure, the familiar three-​part story: Part 1, set in the past, refers to a situation of injustice—​slavery, war, pestilence, discrimination; Part 2 is a period of struggle against injustice—​ perhaps a revolution, with a heroic or saintly leader, and possibly the spread of new idea or gospel; and Part 3 represents the achievement of a more just world. We can thus add to our ideas about how stories act within our lives in relation to social justice, the possibility that they work within well-​established narrative genres that help us put them together and allow us to hear them. At times, also, our stories about the world may push the boundaries of genres or break with them. An interesting feature of the previously described story structure, for instance, is that the degree or form of past injustice may come to be recognized in a fuller and more detailed way only after victory is achieved, so that Part 3 leads to a revisiting of Part 1, and perhaps a revised, expanded telling of the whole story. For example, we now have a clearer and more comprehensive picture of the terrible, inhumane quality of life for slaves in the southern states of the United States than we did before the Civil War. The same revision of the past is evident in our deeper understanding of the earlier status of women after passage in the United States of their right to vote. Gaining that vote led to a deeper understanding of their unequal status with men across the broader spectrum of social life than just voting. In turn, that led to a broader range of changes in their socioeconomic and sociopolitical roles within society.

THE NARRATIVE TURN

The gradual, but steady interest in narratives among researchers and theorists in various fields in the early to mid-​1980s, which I  referred to

[ 8 ]  Stories Changing Lives

earlier, reflected a more general shift away from the traditional model of social science theory and research, derived from the natural sciences, which highlighted the importance—​and often, the necessity—​of quantitative measures and large subject samples. Well before the “narrative turn,” and particularly since the 1960s, there was a broad, multidisciplinary critique of the dominance of quantitative methods. Analyses of individual subject-​based data sets, for instance, life story interviews and case studies, gained adherents in various areas of study. I do not mean to suggest that these new directions came to dominate traditional approaches in sociology, psychology, and their related disciplines. But there were new currents, and enough people in a variety of places working in these new ways, to encourage case-​study researchers, for instance, to talk with each other, develop small cadres of like-​minded investigators from different disciplines, have occasional meetings, start a journal, and so on. Among many developments that accompanied this movement was a shift in interviewing procedures—​from questionnaires and short-​answer models to open-​ended interviews. This shift quickly showed that, given an opportunity to respond in an open-​ended way to questions rather than simply to choose between “yes” and “no” answers, people had stories to tell. This capacity opened an entirely new area of “narrative” study, requiring new methods of interviewing, analysis, and theorizing. I am not claiming that there was a grand groundswell of interest or tidal wave of narrative studies, but enough theorists and researchers in various fields were drawn to these new possibilities of study and analysis that the work became visible. And so the diverse field of narrative studies was born. There was enough interest, for example, in my piece of the world of psychologists, social scientists, linguists, and researchers in education and medicine that we initiated a Narrative Study Group in 1985. This supportive, informal community continues to function and is now in its 33rd year. We were not alone. In retrospect, it appears as if there was a spontaneous surge of interest in what might be learned from people’s storied accounts of their lives. Our informants or participants were now recognized as experts in the description and analysis of what they did and how they felt, rather than viewed simply as subjects whose role was to provide data for social scientists’ analyses. There is another important feature in this brief history of narrative studies, which is that many of us still feel as if we are engaged in a new area of research and theory in the human sciences. On the one hand that’s a bit surprising, given the capsule history I’ve just offered. After all, we—​that is, the community of narrative researchers—​have been at this work for 35-​ plus years. The clue to our sense of still being at an early stage, I believe,

T h e P e r s o n a l I s P ol iti c a l  

[ 9 ]

01

is the multiplicity of disciplines that are represented in the work. I do not mean that as a complaint. Quite the opposite, I view the interdisciplinary base of the field as a source of strength. This range of different types of work—​in both methods and theories—​is the hallmark of the field of narrative studies. For example, the topic of this volume, Stories Changing Lives: Narratives and Paths toward Social Change provides a relatively large umbrella, yet as I look at the bookshelves near my desk where I am writing, I find a collection of volume and paper titles that appear to cover a range of research topics that go beyond even this broad topic. You would recognize most of them—​for example, Stories in the Time of Cholera; The Wounded Storyteller; Holocaust Testimonies; Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust; “Living Narrative”; “Thrice Told Tales,” a paper with the subtitle, “Storytelling and Knowledges of Resistance”; “Making Stories:  Law, Literature, and Life”; and Doing Narrative Research. To bring our analysis to bear on narrative and social change, let alone narrative and social justice, we would need, at this point, to be selective within the field of narrative studies as represented in my bookcase: To narrow our gaze. I want now to review briefly a few studies of narratives that seem to me to bear on the questions raised by the conjunction of “narrative” and “social justice” specifically. One study has to do with the struggle against racism in the United States; another with efforts to resist unfair laws; and a third is about efforts to deal with the social world in the face of severe injuries and to change medical practices in ways that would give patients more control over their treatment. I hope that this review of work from some of the different disciplines involved in narrative social research will generate more understanding about what the relation of this work to social justice may be today.

NARRATIVE STUDIES AND SOCIAL JUSTICE

The first example is a paper by Patricia Ewick and Susan Silbey, entitled “Narrating Social Structure:  Stories of Resistance to Legal Authority” (Ewick and Silbey, 2003). Based on an interview study of how over 400 respondents “experience, interpret, and use law” (p.  1338), Ewick and Silbey argue that a “chief means for extending the social consequences of resistance is to transform an act of resistance into a story about resistance” (p. 1328). This is a particularly interesting standpoint since it reverses the more common sense notion that actions are more powerful than talk. Ewick and Silbey pursue this perspective through an analysis of the ways

[ 10 ]  Stories Changing Lives

in which their respondents, in the stories they told, tried to “oppose and resist legal authority” and how they thereby “transformed a momentary transaction into a historical event, recorded not only in their own memory but reconstructed for an audience, if only an audience of interviewers” (p. 1338). The stories told by Ewick and Silbey’s (2003) respondents reveal acute understanding of the complexities of the social order. For example, when an elderly Hispanic man’s calls to the police about problems with vandals in his neighborhood were ignored, he changed his voice to sound like a woman and then got a “quick response” (p.  1351). An African American woman whose calls to the phone company for repairs went unanswered broke through the bureaucratic hierarchy and reached the president by telling the operator she was “his maid” (p. 1352). Some respondents reported using a “colonizing space” strategy to gain satisfaction. For example, one working-​ class mother whose son was attending a higher-​class school thought his learning needs were being ignored. She “dressed nicely; went to school with her son one morning and sat in the guidance counselor’s waiting room with him until she received the attention she felt was needed” (p. 1362). In their summary, Ewick and Silbey (2003) argue that their respondents well understand how our social systems are organized. They recognize their relative powerlessness and are aware that they often cannot get what they want. To overcome what they recognize as an unfair situation, they engage in practices that demonstrate a common stock of knowledge about how to turn around a problematic situation and succeed in their efforts. These practices are acts of resistance, which then also become additions to the common stock of knowledge, circulating through the stories that people tell about their successes in beating the system. It is in this sense that Ewick and Silbey claim that these acts of resistance—​and, as important for our purposes, people’s stories about them—​are significant features of how social systems function. Such stories, indeed, can themselves become practices that pursue and attain social justice, as they become part of people’s capitals of resistance. I want to turn now to a larger-​scale and perhaps more obvious negotiation of social justice through narrative. The subtitle of Francesca Polletta’s (2006) volume on the social and political functions of stories is “Storytelling in Protest and Politics.” Looking back on one of the critical events in the civil rights movement in the United States—​the sit-​in by four Black students from a nearby college on February 1, 1960 at a “Whites only” lunch counter in a Woolworth store in Greensboro, North Carolina—​Polletta re-​examines the commonly held view that this was an “unplanned, impulsive” act (p. 32). The act’s impact was extraordinary and

T h e P e r s o n a l I s P ol iti c a l  

[ 11 ]

21

unexpected. Within two months, sit-​ins had spread to more than 50 cities in nine states. By mid-​April 1960, more than 50,000 and by September, more than 70,000 people had participated in the protests. From the beginning, students and their supporters described this wave of protest as “spontaneous.” The phrase “It was like a fever”—​the main title of Polletta’s book—​represented this view that “no one started it” (p. 34). Of course, there was a history. There was a network of Black activists who had been engaged in various forms of resistance for decades, including training students in sit-​in techniques. The four students who sat in at the Woolworth lunch counter were members of an NAACP Youth Council and had been in touch with activists from the early 1950s who had participated in sit-​ins. Polletta argues that this history, which prepared the ground for the sit-​ins, was subordinated in participants’ later accounts to a new narrative of protest that emphasized “spontaneity.” This term distanced the students’ direct actions from the earlier generation’s struggles, which they saw as too cautious, slow-​moving, and timid. However, beyond that, Polletta (2006) suggests that participants in this struggle for justice used these stories of spontaneity “strategically.” That is, they were not necessarily claiming that they did not plan their acts of civil disobedience in advance. Rather, by stressing the open-​ended and rapidly spreading range of protests—​its “spontaneity”—​they were displaying both the widespread nature of the oppression they faced, the urgency of their efforts—​and the immediacy and accessibility of protest. Making participation in the struggle normative through such stories helped to define the differences between what was “an opportunity or an obstacle, a success or a failure, and a cost or a benefit” (p. 52). From this perspective, Polletta (2006) argues that another consequence of the emphasis on spontaneity and what she refers to as the “underspecification of the mechanisms of participation” (p. 45) was that listeners and readers were led to become co-​authors’ in the widespread and varied retellings of the basic story. In her analysis, these stories could function not merely as words, but as forms of action in the struggle for social justice, in much the same way as sitting in at the Woolworth counter was an act of resistance. Finally, I want to examine a perhaps less obvious example of how stories, in this case, personal narratives, can work against social injustices—​here, in relation to spoken and photographic narratives, combined. There is a long history of studies using photographs to document the lives of people in various cultures and social strata, particularly in situations of disempowerment and disadvantage. Jacob Riis’s influential report “Studies Among the Tenements of New  York,” published in 1901 at the turn of

[ 12 ]  Stories Changing Lives

the century, included 100 photographs of people in their homes. (Riis, 1901/​1971) Anthropologists have been particularly interested in using photographs to document their field studies of different cultures. Margaret Mead and Frances MacGregor’s report of their studies of Balinese culture is a prominent example. Subtitled “A Photographic study of Balinese Culture”; it included about 400 photographs taken from Gregory Bateson’s 25,000-​strong set of photos taken in Bali in the mid to late 1930s (Mead and McGregor, 1951). The increased significance of photography as part of the anthropologist’s toolkit is marked by John and Malcolm Colliers’s text, Visual Anthropology, with its subtitle “Photography as a Research Method” in the mid-​1960s. (Collier and Collier, 1967/​1986). These notes from the history of the use of photographs in social research provide a context for a more radical development that took place in the role of photography in studies of people’s social worlds. That shift involved giving cameras to research subjects and asking them to record their lives and experiences. An early example of this approach to field research was a study by Sol Worth and John Adair from the mid-​1960s. It involved giving movie cameras to members of the Navajo nation for them to learn what the researchers referred to as the art of filmmaking (Worth and Adair, 1972). This work was a forerunner to what came to be referred to as “photovoice.” The original study adopting this title, carried out among rural Chinese women by Caroline Wang and Mary Ann Burris, was viewed by them as a form of participatory research. (Wang and Burris, 1994, 1997)  Within a project focused on “public health promotion,” Wang and Burris refer to their approach as a “practice based in the production of knowledge,” which enables participants to “record and reflect their community’s strengths and concerns” and to “promote dialogue and knowledge about important issues through large and small group discussion of photographs” (Wang and Burris, 1997, p. 369). In my last example, a study that uses Wang and Burris’s photovoice procedure, I want to extend the concept of social injustice that is the thematic center of this chapter to include the impact of unexpected accidents or illnesses that damage people’s lives. Victims of such experiences often view themselves as having been treated unjustly by fate, since they did not do anything to injure other people or damage something in their social or physical environment. So what do narratives about fate have to do with narratives about social justice? In her study of the impact of traumatic brain injury—​which is often the result of an unexpected accident—​Laura Lorenz used a photo elicitation procedure. Her research participants, who were voluntary members of a brain injury support group, took photographs of whatever they wished to

T h e P e r s o n a l I s P ol iti c a l  

[ 13 ]

41

record of their lives and the world they lived in. They met together to share their photographs with each other, discussed what they meant, and had an exhibit for invited guests. At the end of this project, Lorenz asked the participants if she could interview them about what the photos meant to them and whether she could use their photos and interviews for her doctoral dissertation. They all agreed (Lorenz, 2008). Lorenz interviewed each subject to learn why they took the pictures and then selected those that seemed to fall into a particular area of concern in their lives. For example, one subject highlighted the “frustration and confusion” in his daily life, which was reflected in a series of four photographs that showed the “disorder” in his home—​one photo showed a jumble of empty cans in his sink, another, an overstuffed refrigerator. Lorenz’s (2008) analysis focuses on her participants’ “narratives” about these selected pictures. Her participant’s account of why he photographed “cans in the sink” is entitled “The Disorder That I’m Living With Right Now”; it includes what we could call a prelude: It (the photo) was supposed to make a point; Part 1: I keep getting confused and lost; Part 2: Now everything is disorganized; Part 3: I feel like I’m living in chaos and it’s hopeless; and ends with a coda: These are appropriate pictures. These are all the chaos (pp. 93–​94). Lorenz entitles one photograph of another participant’s series of images, “Skylight:  There’s Light in the Dark.” The headings of this participant’s comments, grouped by Lorenz into a series of three stanzas are “I’m just in a cave sometimes it seems”; “You can’t get out, and you can’t get it”; and “But there’s light in this dark.” Lorenz, as the investigator, selected and arranged her participants’ photographs into these groups. Her analyses are based on the comments her subjects made to each of these subsets of photographs. Another series from this subject is entitled “Dark Branches and a Gray Sky: This Is Just the New Thing.” The series of captions of the paragraphs, into which Lorenz grouped her subject’s comments to the photograph are Prelude: Things that made sense along the way; Part 1: It’s odd; Part 2: One day I became somebody else; Part 3: I don’t want . . . to be . . . all I am is a brain-​injured person; Part 4: My friends . . . say . . . “you’re fine now”; Part 5: It’s good . . . to be, seen, as whole, right? and Part 6: It’s a step in the right direction (pp. 140–​142).

CONCLUSION

The kind of work that this chapter ends up describing is much less obviously connected to social justice than the work described in the first two

[ 14 ]  Stories Changing Lives

examples. What is happening here seems perhaps a more preliminary registering of disempowerment and distress and an insistence on chaos, oddness, and the specificities of being brain-​injured, being seen and heard, both by biomedicine and by the social world generally. Such work recalls Homi Bhabha’s (2000) insistence on “the right to narrate” as a necessary though not sufficient condition for resistance. This right consists of “the authority to tell stories, recount or recast histories, that create the web of social life and change the direction of its flow.” It is conducted dialogically, Bhabha says, held within the flow of sociohistorical change and appears in contexts ranging from the personal to much larger communities. And it can make itself felt not just in large stories of individuals or groups, but even in small significations:  “a hesitant brushstroke, a gesture that fixes a dance movement, a camera angle.” Lorenz’s participants create such narrating significations: highly metaphorically loaded images, which they partially unpack in the interviews and which shed narrative “light” on their losses, exclusions, and efforts to re-​inscribe themselves into sociality. If, as here, physical and mental differences exile you from citizenship, then such narrations can constitute necessary, albeit partial, resistance to such injustice. These examples suggest, perhaps, that there are a number of ways in which narrative may appear within social research as related to social justice rather than simply to social change. Narratives may draw on prior narrative “capitals” related to everyday struggles for equity or at least redress and then further contribute to them—​to representational processes that also inform practices—​as in the first example. Narratives may be generated strategically in the pursuit of justice at sociopolitical levels—​for instance, of racial equality—​in dialogue with older stories of resistance and mainstream, normative narratives, as in the second example. Finally, “the right to narrate,” to speak of present injurious conditions of life as they occur, may of itself be an articulation that demands justice. None of these narrative pursuits of justice look at first sight much like the rather simpler field of “story” that appearing within popular media. They do not belong fully to the genre described earlier, characterized by a move from a scene-​setting of injustice, through a struggle to establish justice, to a just resolution, which is frequently found in popular media. In the first case examined, struggle is limited; resolution is partial and contingent, but resistance is always renewable. In the second, the struggle, narratively conducted, is itself ambiguous, showing the possibilities of multiple strategies. In the third, only the first and perhaps the initial part of the second sections of the genre are present, yet the initial assertion of the “right to narrate” is foundational. Despite these narratives’ divergencies

T h e P e r s o n a l I s P ol iti c a l  

[ 15 ]

61

and incompleteness, each of the studies demonstrates, as the chapter has argued, narratives’ productive relation to social justice. In addition to the increasing amount of social research on narrative that is explicitly concerned with justice, then, we might also want to pay attention, especially at a time of heightened awareness of and responses to injustice, to the wider variety of potential productive narrative addresses to justice—​a breadth that offers possibility and hope in situations where conventional narratives of justice cannot appear.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

Squire would like to thank Vicky Steinetz, Elliot Mishler’s partner, and his son, Paul Mishler, for their help in editing this chapter appropriately.

REFERENCES Andrews, M. (2014). Narrative, imagination and everyday life. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Barthes, R. (1975). An introduction to the structural analysis of narrative. New Literary History 6(2), 237–​272. Bhabha, H. (2000). The right to narrate. Harvard Design Magazine 38. Bruner, J. (1986). Actual minds, possible worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986. Bury, M. (1982). Chronic illness as biographical disruption. Sociology of Health and Illness 4(2), 167–​182. Cixous, H. (1976). The laugh of the medusa. Signs 1(4), 875–​893. Collier, J., and Collier, M. (1986). Visual anthropology: Photography as a research method (Rev. ed.). Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press. (Original work published 1967) Culler, J. (1981). The pursuit of signs. London, England: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Ewick, P., and Silbey, S. (2003). Narrating social structure: Stories of resistance to legal authority. American Journal of Sociology, 108(6), 1328–​1372. Genette, G. (1972). Narrative discourse. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Goodall, H. (2016). Counter-​narrative. New York, NY: Routledge. Labov, W., and Waletzky, J. (1967). Oral versions of personal experience. In J. Helm (Ed.), Essays on the verbal and visual arts: Proceedings of the 1966 meeting of the American Ethnological Society. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. Labov, W. (1972). Language in the Inner City. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Lakoff, G., and Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Lorenz, L. (2008). Making visible the invisible: Understanding lived experience with acquired brain injury through visual illness narratives (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Brandeis University, Waltham, MA.

[ 16 ]  Stories Changing Lives

Mead, M., and MacGregor, F. (1951). Growth and culture: A photographic study of Balinese children. New York, NY: Putnam. Meyer, F. (2014). Narrative politics. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Mishler, E. (1986). Research interviewing: Context and narrative. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mitchell W (Ed.). (1980). On narrative. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Mulvey, L. (1975). Visual pleasure and narrative cinema. Screen 16, 3, 6–​18. Murray, M. (2000). Levels of narrative analysis in health psychology. Journal of Health Psychology 5(3), 337–​347. Personal Narratives Group. (1989). Interpreting women’s lives. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Polletta, F. (2006). It was like a fever: Storytelling in protest and politics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Riessman, C. (2008). Narrative methods for the human sciences. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Riis, J. (1971). How the other half lives: Studies Among the tenements of New York. New York, NY: Dover. (Original work published 1901) Sarbin, T. (Ed.). (1986). Narrative psychology: The storied nature of human conduct. New York, NY: Praeger. Selbin, E. (2010). Revolution, rebellion, resistance: The power of story. London, England: Zed Books. Todorov, T. (1990). Genres in discourse. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. United Nations. (2006) International Foundation for Social Development: Social justice in an open world. Geneva: Author. Wang, C., and Burris, M. A. (1997). Photovoice: Concept, methodology, and use for participatory needs assessment. Health Education & Behavior 24(3), 369–​387. Wang, C., and Burris, M. A. (1994). Empowerment through photo novella: Portraits of participants. Health Education Quarterly 21(2), 171–​186. White, H. (1973). Metahistory. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Williams, G. (1984). The genesis of chronic illness: Narrative re-​construction. Sociology of Health and Illness 6(2), 175–​200. Woodiwiss, J., Smith, K., and Kelly, K. (2017). Feminist narrative research. London, England: Palgrave Macmillan. Worth, S., and Adair, J. (1972). Through Navajo eyes: An exploration of film communication and anthropology. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

T h e P e r s o n a l I s P ol iti c a l  

[ 17 ]

CHAPTER 2

The Mystery of the Dangerous Book MOLLY ANDREWS

T

his book concerns itself with how social change happens at the micro level. It follows from a growing volume of work that interrogates the relationship between personal story telling and its relationship to social transformation. Ken Plummer (2016) has gone so far as to say that “ultimately political change depends on good storytelling” (p.  281). When reading such scholarship, it might be tempting to imagine that the stories that serve such a powerful function are most unusual, the kind of thing that others might encounter in their research, but not for those of us whose investigations are closer to the everyday. In my own research, I have found that personal stories can and often do provide a powerful lens from which to try to make sense of social change. I will begin this chapter with an extended account that illustrates this argument and use it as a platform from which to examine the theoretical framework I am proposing. The year is 2012. I am interviewing Jens Reich, a leader in the East German citizen’s movement of the late 1980s. In 1989, when the wall came down, it was his face that often appeared on television screens in the West. At that time, he was one of the only East Germans who were fluent in English, and, as such, it was through his words that many in the West were guided through the quick succession of dramatic changes in his country at that time. This is not the first time I have interviewed him. But more than 20 years have passed since our last interview, in 1992, when the reunification of Germany still seemed like fresh paint. In preparation for this interview, I have sent him the transcript from our last meeting, so we can reacquaint ourselves with the topics and ideas that occupied us at that time. Molly Andrews, The Mystery of the Dangerous Book In: Stories Changing Lives. Edited by: Corinne Squire, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190864750.003.0002.

02

Much has changed since we last met. And yet, listening to these tapes, we are both reminded that there is much that has stayed the same. For instance, questions of what it means to be East German have almost run full circle; the identity that had once been imposed by the state (and thereby resisted by many, if only in their minds) was now quite a different animal, something that many (including Reich himself) regard as a critical component of their existence. Reich wishes to demonstrate to me the complexity of his former life, of the risks one took, and the lengths one would go to promote the possibility of social change. In response to a question I ask him about his experience of looking at his Stasi files, he relates to me a very powerful story, which I will now quote at length. JR:  One thing I  will never understand is how the Stasi could have achieved what they did with the book of Werner Stiller. There was the book of a defector, high officer of the Stasi who defected in the early 80’s to the West and then wrote a book about the internal affairs of the Stasi. This book was extremely useful for us, because there was a lot of information about how the Stasi is organised and how they deal with opposition people and so on. I got a copy of this book—​it’s a digression—​on a very dangerous way: A friend of ours emigrated to the West and was active there politically and couldn’t come to East Berlin any longer. He was in West Berlin. But he sent his 12-​year-​old daughter to visit grandparents in the East. In order to do me an important favour, he gave this girl the booklet into her pants. She was used to go, the children were allowed to cross the Friedrichstraße. She was not searched. It could have been very dangerous. So she came, and she draws this thing out, this extremely dangerous thing. I circulated it with friends, people who were very thankful for this information, When we went on vacation, four weeks, I wrapped it in plastic, went into the basement—​ we had a basement which we never used. There were old coal boxes from the time when there was still coal heating in the house. It was completely rotten and wet, and full of spider nets. We never used it except for storing rubbish for some time before we would get rid of it. So it was a very old house and the basement was not used by anybody. I took the coals with a shovel and put it into the coal box. They found it, and it was away when we came back. It was a shock for me when I went down after our vacation to get it, and the coal box was—​they had found it somehow. I don’t know how they could find out.

[ 20 ]  Stories Changing Lives

MA: Was it in your files? JR: No. I don’t know what they would have done. Of course, if they had put me—​I would have been a real spy. With that, they could have jailed me for years. MA: But they didn’t? JR: No. It disappeared. I cannot say more. . . . To this day, I don’t know the reason, and to where it disappeared. Maybe, connected to the Leben der Anderen [the Academy Award winning film The Lives of Others] it was a guy who himself did hide it and put it aside. Read it and put it into the dustbin. In the first part of this chapter, I would like to explore three key narrative components contained in this extract, before proceeding to a discussion on the social significance of personal narratives. I will focus on character, plot, and context as these are three of the most salient aspects of narrative structure. A more enhanced analysis might also investigate visual, performative, thematic, and other dimensions of the data, but the analysis here is not intended to be exhaustive.

CHARACTERS

There are five key protagonists in this story. The author—​The first person mentioned in the account is the author Werner Stiller, a high ranking officer of the Stasi who defects to the West and publishes a book about its internal operations. His is a story of an altered consciousness, not only a defector but one who wishes to undermine an organization of which he was formerly an integral part. The book that he writes is “full of information” that has the potential to be very useful to members of the opposition. As an object, the book epitomizes the cracks in the state apparatus. The father/​friend—​The next person who appears in this story is that of the friend of Reich, an East German who had emigrated to the West, where he was still politically engaged with the struggles of his comrades he had left behind, and indeed where he still has family. Realizing the importance of Stiller’s book, he is willing to risk his 12-​year-​old daughter’s safety, using her as a vehicle for transporting the prohibited item.

T h e M y s t e r y of t h e Da n g e r o u s   B o ok  

[ 21 ]

2

The daughter—​Although there is very little said about this child, she functions in many ways as the dramatic center of this story. That one so young would cross a border carrying this “extremely dangerous thing” in her underwear is the stuff of movies. We know that in the event she is not searched, and one presumes that she carries on and visits her grandparents—​this is a Red Riding Hood story world with a different dramatic twist. Jens Reich—​Not surprisingly, Reich features as a character in his story at a number of different points. Reich does not tell us, but we must assume that somewhere he meets the child of his friend, where she “draws this thing out”—​in other words, retrieves the book from her clothing and delivers it to him. He then circulates the book to his friends. When he goes on holiday with his family, he takes great care to hide the book, wrapping it in plastic and burying it in the basement, among piles of coal. Listening to his story, one cannot help but share the feeling of shock when, upon his return, the book is no longer there. This point in the account is then followed by a long section (not previously included herein) in which Reich details the numerous times he was subsequently summoned and interrogated by the Stasi (but, significantly, never directly asked about this book). The story effectively ends with Reich inspecting his Stasi files, curious to learn the fate of this book, only to see that it has not been recorded. The Infiltrator—​The most enigmatic character in this story is the one who does not appear, but whose existence is critical to the action of the story. We can safely assume that someone has come into Reich’s basement, has uncovered the book, and taken it away. But here what we don’t know is more important than what we do. First, we do not know what precedes this encounter with the book in the basement: Did this person know where the book was hidden? Had they been watching Reich all along? Is this someone Reich knew, and perhaps with whom he had even shared the secret of its existence? Can we assume that the person or persons who found the book are connected with the Stasi, as Reich himself indicates in the opening line, where he wonders aloud, “How the Stasi could have achieved what they did. . . .” This assumption filters through the narrative, encapsulated by the unspecified “they.” But if Reich is correct, why does the agent not report this great find to the Stasi? What happens after the infiltrator leaves the house with the book? Does he or she read it?

[ 22 ]  Stories Changing Lives

PLOT

The main plot of the story follows the movement of a very special, “dangerous” book from West to East Berlin. The book is transported by a child, delivered to a member of the opposition, who then circulates it. It is then hidden in a basement, to be removed by a person who remains unknown and whose motives are unclear. The story ends in an anticlimax:  Reich’s encounter with his Stasi file, in which he anticipates all will be revealed, sheds no light on the mystery. The listener is left to contemplate the multiple possibilities that could have transpired, leading to not only the disappearance of the book, but to its absence in Reich’s Stasi file. Reich himself indicates a range of possibilities, including a version that resembles the storyline of The Lives of Others, a film of which most in my study are highly critical, regarding it as a Hollywood version of the lives they most decidedly did not live. But maybe there was a Stasi agent who came upon this book and who, for whatever reasons, “read it and put it into the dustbin,” sparing Reich the imprisonment that undoubtedly would have befallen him had his actions become known. The uncertainty that continues to cloud this story, decades after the events took place, contributes to its suitability as a vehicle for communicating the still lingering subjective experience of being a target of Stasi surveillance. CONTEXT

The story that Reich recounts invites one invariably into another world and another time. If one assumes that Reich’s friend who orchestrates the border crossing cares for his child, then his actions must be interpreted as those of someone who is desperate. Equally, the cautious preparations that Reich makes for the storage of the book while he is away, are reminiscent of a John Le Carre novel. That despite that care, the book disappears, only heightens the sense of what it must have been like to live in times of such turmoil. This setting contrasts with that of the tale’s ending—​Reich’s encounter with his Stasi file—​in which power has radically shifted, and members of the opposition are no longer the hunted but rather those who play a critical role in the writing of this period of history. WHY TELL A STORY?

When contemplating the meaning of this story, it is important to remember that Reich produces it in response to my question about his

T h e M y s t e r y of t h e Da n g e r o u s   B o ok  

[ 23 ]

42

experience of viewing his Stasi file. He introduces the story as akin to a mystery, “something I will never understand.” Reich relates the story with considerable detail, and indeed, he is a very accomplished raconteur. His description of the basement of his house is very evocative “rotten, wet and full of spiders.” The listener is transported into that dark space and can quite easily imagine Reich shoveling the coals and placing the carefully wrapped book into the coal box. The importance, and potential harmfulness, of this secret object is evident in every detail. It is not until the very end that the story comes back to the question of his Stasi files, and even here the dramatic charge of the story comes not from what is there, but from what is not there. Mark Freeman (2004) describes the importance of “the presence of what is missing” (p. 294). In this tale, that absence is both physical (the disappeared book) and related to documentation (its nonappearance in the file). In responding to my question with this elaborated story, Reich effectively conveys a complex message about his experience of reading his file, an encounter that does not bring the anticipated denouement for either Reich, nor his audience (in this case, me). Perhaps that is part of what he is saying: Even twenty years later, the impact of the Stasi cannot be fully known. The “Stasi virus” permeates time and space. The irony is that reading the file doesn’t solve anything; indeed, it raises yet more questions. This might also be case of other similar circumstances whose function is to shine light on previously secret information and thus to bring resolution. Those who have participated in public forums of “truth telling” such as truth commissions have not always experienced these encounters as restorative (e.g., see Henri, 2003), and in the realm of the private, those who read classified documents about themselves, or seek to find out the identity of their birth parents, do not necessarily experience the catharsis they had envisioned when they set upon their quest. The story Reich tells demonstrates the precarious nature of “endings” that do not always bring closure. Why does Reich answer my question with a story? Surely he could have extracted the primary message(s) for me, thus ensuring that I would not mistake the point he was wishing to make. But he doesn’t do that. Rather, he chooses a story, and for some time, it is not clear to me exactly what the function of this story will be, and certainly not how it will end. The fact that effectively there is no conclusion to the story, but rather an enigmatic “nonending” means that it is all the more engaging for me as a listener. He presents me with a puzzle—​“to this day, I don’t know the reason”—​thus inviting me into his challenge for making sense of what remain inexplicable events. I am hooked by the story Reich tells of what

[ 24 ]  Stories Changing Lives

happened; his insinuations of what could have happened; and the importance placed on the unsaid story, that which did not happen. For me, this intriguing story demonstrates the social significance of personal narratives.

PERSONAL STORIES AND SOCIAL CHANGE

There has been an increasing body of literature that explores the role of personal storytelling and social change. Some works deal with this theoretically (e.g., Polletta 2006; Selbin, 2010; Tilly, 2002), and others are collections of first person accounts of, and/​or third parties writing about, engagement in particular political movements (e.g., Dhaliwal and Yuval-​Davis, 2014; Jenson and Jolly, 2014; Woodiwiss, 2017). For all of these works, the operating premise is that stories that are articulated by individuals about political change have the potential to do something special. Some stories have an observable dramatic impact, and indeed, many political movements are set alight not because of the plight of millions, but because of the circulation of one particular story. Countless examples of this abound: Elián González, the young Cuban boy who became the focus of a diplomatic dispute between the United States and Cuba or the images of the corpse of a young Syrian boy washed up on shore, and political movements often have their martyrs, such as Jan Palach who set himself on fire in Wenceslas Square to protest the Soviet invasion of Hungary and who became the symbol of the Prague Spring or those like Rodney King whose death in 1991 in police custody set off the Los Angeles Riots. But often times the effect is more subtle, and it is the mere sharing of stories that functions as the engine of political change. People tell stories to others for particular purposes, and they shape what they say according to who they perceive their audience to be and what function they hope their story will perform. All agree that the meaning of stories are in constant flux; even the same accounts, retold, are altered. This is particularly true of political stories, where the public context is defined by both its transitory and contested nature. Polletta (2006) argues that the power of political stories to effect change derives from their insistence on interpretation. “Following a story,” she writes, means more than listening: it means filling the blanks, both between unfolding events and between events and the larger point they add up to. When listeners or readers reach the story’s end, they have the experience of loose ends being tied up. But the closure is never complete. The possibility remains that the same events told differently would have yielded a different normative point. (p. viii)

T h e M y s t e r y of t h e Da n g e r o u s   B o ok  

[ 25 ]

62

Stories effect political change not because they are didactic—​although they can be so at times—​but rather because they are open. Stories gather momentum as tools for change when there is a driving force to engage with them; in Polletta’s (2006) terms, stories “require our interpretive participation” (p. 10). If, however, it is narrative’s ambiguity that enhances its effectiveness to engage, what can be said about its inclination to move beyond neutrality, indeed to advance social justice? Some chapters in this book deal with such limitations, and it is important to remember them. Other personal stories can and do promote positive social change. We can think of many examples where that is the case; yet, if and when this happens, it is not the mere reporting of experiences that accomplishes it. Rather, they are constructed into stories, “made up” as it were into something and then—​critically—​shared with and articulated by others. It is this sharing of personal stories and the advent of mutual (if sometimes only partial) recognition of oneself in the stories of others that forms the bedrock of collective social action. Thus, it is only when personal stories are thrust into the social domain that their potential as catalysts for social change can be realized. Here then it is the social nature of stories, the telling and listening to stories, that is critical in the consideration of the relationship between personal narratives and social change. Yet, having just made the distinction between the individual and the social, this is not a bifurcation to which I adhere. As a critical psychologist, I am not one who has ever insisted on the sharp divisions between the personal and the social, contending rather that there are elements of each that reside within the other. Even the most private of individuals exists in a social context that lends (or deprives) his or her life its framework of meaning. Equally, communities and other social groupings are comprised of individuals who have thoughts, feelings, passions, and revulsions that operate in the private sphere of their mind (even while such dispositions will be socially inflected). And while everyone has things in common with others, and all of us nonetheless retain something that we hope and believe is our own contribution to who we are, putting together raw ingredients of our lives in the way in which we do, to make up that constellation that in some ways is uniquely ours.

THE LIFE COURSE OF POLITICAL NARRATIVES

The work of the eminent political philosopher Hannah Arendt speaks directly to the significant transformation of private narratives into the public domain. Writing more than half a century ago, she argues:

[ 26 ]  Stories Changing Lives

Compared with the reality which comes from being seen and heard, even the greatest forces of intimate life—​the passions of the heart, the thoughts of the mind, the delights of the senses—​lead an uncertain, shadowy kind of existence unless and until they are transformed, deprivatized and deindividualized, as it were, into a shape to fit them for public appearance. The most current of such transformations occurs in storytelling and generally in artistic transposition of individual experiences.  .  .  .  Each time we talk about things that can be experienced only in privacy or intimacy, we bring them out into a sphere where they will assume a kind of reality which, their intensity notwithstanding, they never could have had before. The presence of others who see what we see and hear what we hear assures us of the reality of the world and ourselves. (Arendt, 1958, p. 50)

The final lines in this passage reveal the greatest power of the potential of personal narratives to effect social change: In the articulation, and communication, of private experiences is born the potential for what Ken Plummer (2017) calls “narrative mobilization and narrative making.” When persons can come to regard and understand the conditions of their lives—​no matter how luxuriant or desperate—​as being more than idiosyncratic, when they can recognize themselves in the stories of others, therein lies the potential to create alliances, upon which all social change depends. Plummer, drawing inspiration from Arendt’s work, has developed a differentiated sequencing of how, when, and why narratives are born, flourish, and die; in doing so, he provides a useful roadmap for those wishing to think more deeply about the relationship between personal and political narratives. Plummer’s (2017) model of “critical moments in the life of stories” include “the birth, institutionalization, renegotiation and ultimate entropy of stories” (p. 283). For our purposes here, examining how the telling of personal narratives affects social agency and social movements more generally, there are important implications. The opening “moment” in this life course of stories is that of narrative silence, or the story not told. This is then followed by the birth of a story, pushed into creation by the narrative imagination. This moment of creation is then followed by narrative articulation, when the story begins to be told, and narrative identity—​ that which forms in the repeated telling and reshaping of the story, when “stories become the person” (p. 284). But perhaps most relevant for our considerations here is the next moment, that of “narrative mobilization and community making.” Plummer describes this time as one in which

T h e M y s t e r y of t h e Da n g e r o u s   B o ok  

[ 27 ]

82

People come to meet people who want to tell and share similar stories—​ creating new social worlds, communities of support and, for many, new social movements. The story becomes overtly and explicitly political. . . . these stories from all political directions have helped to fashion political identities, construct political campaigns, foster imagined—​even utopian—​communities of past and future: to assemble discourses of the “others,” and write the literature of human rights. We can see it in South Africa, the Berlin Wall and Northern Ireland etc. where stories directly feature in bringing about change. (p. 284)

In the examples that Plummer has offered here, stories function in an overtly political manner. Undoubtedly, truth commissions, for instance, are forums where personal story telling—​with explicit terms of selection and framing set by the state—​is woven into, and indeed is the basis for building, wider national narratives; collectively, these stories write the narrative of the past, as they set the compass for the future. But the first part of this chapter demonstrates the calling power of a different kind of story, one that is more opaque in its message. If in Reich’s case, the repeated story told has “become the person,” it reveals him to be a person who decades after momentous political rupture continues to grapple with questions of his past, the tormented future he so narrowly escaped and the identity of the person who removed the book from the coal shed—​one who, for all he knows, could very well still be part of his daily life.

CONCLUDING REMARKS: THE CONSEQUENCES OF STORY-​T ELLING

The stories that emerge, from individuals and communities, carry with them much significance. Clearly, how people and groups make sense of their experiences, how they create their “stories to live by” (McAdams, 1993)  is not just random. Rather, there is a “cultural stock of plots” (Polletta, 2006,10) recognizable not so much in their particulars as in their general weave. Selbin (2010) expands upon this concept: “Stories,” he writes, essentially reflect the cultural values of their time and place as well as those who tell them. . . . Stories are reservoirs of views and values, a way for people to know themselves and associate themselves with (or distinguish themselves from) others, and are reflective of the past, present, and future their culture holds “true.” (p. 25)

[ 28 ]  Stories Changing Lives

Woodiwiss (2017) refers to the “consequences to our storytelling (p. 14); she highlights the importance not only of the stories that people (women, in her work) tell, but also those stories that are told about them. Herein the work of scholars comes under scrutiny. Woodiwiss insists that that is our responsibility to ask ourselves what the implications are for telling particular stories . . . as feminists, it is our responsibility to explore how and why some stories are told and not others, and why some stories can be and are heard and others silenced, or at times misrepresented. . . . We need also to ask what the advantages are of telling and hearing some stories and not others. (p. 16)

What stories are told, and ultimately tellable, has consequences for our ability to imagine the world otherwise, “delimiting the possibility of telling different stories, we are also delimiting the possibility of . . . living different lives” (p. 16). The claim is thus made for the importance of personal storytelling and the potential power it wields (both in terms of being a catalyst for positive social change, or conversely or effectively blocking such transformation). This is true not only of individual storytellers, but of the stories supported or challenged by academic scholarship: Are we opening up more spaces, challenging the expected storylines in circulation, or rather do we solidify them? Let me return, finally, to the mystery of the “dangerous book.” Jens Reich opens this captivating account by announcing that what he is about to tell me is something “that [he] will never understand.” This sense of not knowing is articulated three more times in the story he tells: “I don’t know how they could find out”; “I don’t know what they would have done”; and “To this day, I  don’t know the reason, and to where it disappeared.” Reich invites me, his listener, into a world of intrigue where the stakes are high. Despite not knowing how the book disappeared, it is clear that with its discovery, he could have been jailed for years. The story hinges on a moment in which the narrator was not present and requires a leap from both teller and audience. Ultimately, it delivers its punch from a contemplation of what did not happen, an alternative imagined (yet once fully possible) future that would have followed on the heels of any official reporting of the hidden book. Yet, despite Reich’s claims for all of his “not knowing,” it is clear that while this story conveys much about him, it offers insight into a world beyond any one individual:  the risks people were willing to take to promote their opposition to the state; the camaraderie they shared with fellow

T h e M y s t e r y of t h e Da n g e r o u s   B o ok  

[ 29 ]

03

underground activists combined with an acute awareness of the cost of betrayal; the pervasive feeling of surveillance; and the continued lack of certainty surrounding the activities of the Stasi, decades after their demise. It is a haunting tale; its expansive grey shadows linger still.

REFERENCES Arendt, H. (1958).The human condition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Dhaliwal, S., and Yuval-​Davis, N. (Eds.). (2014). Women against fundamentalism: Stories of dissent and solidarity. London, England: Lawrence and Wishart. Freeman, M. (2004). Cultural memory and autobiography. In M. Bamberg and M. Andrews (Eds.), Considering counter-​narratives: Narration and resistance. Amsterdam, The Netherland: John Benjamins. Henri, Y. (2003). Reconciling reconciliation: A personal and public journey of testifying before the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In P. Gready (Ed.), Political transition: Politics and cultures. London, England: Pluto. Jackson, M. (2002), The politics of storytelling; Violence, transgression and intersubjectivity. Copenhagen, Denmark: Museum Tusculanum Press. Jensen, M., and Jolly, M. (Eds.). (2014). We shall bear witness: Life narratives and human rights. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. McAdams, D. (1993). The stories we live by: Personal myths and the making of the self. London, England: Guilford Press. Plummer, K. (2017). Narrative power, sexual stories and the politics of story telling. In I. Goodson, A. Antikainen, P. Sikes, and M. Andrews (Eds.), The Routledge international handbook on narrative and life history. London, England: Routledge. Polletta, F. (2006). It was like a fever: Storytelling in protest and politics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Selbin, E. (2010). Revolution, rebellion, resistance: The power of story. London, England: Zed Books. Tilly, C. (2002). Stories, identities, and political change. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Woodiwiss, J. (2017). Challenges for feminist research: Contested stories, dominant narratives and narrative frameworks. In J. Woodiwiss, K. Smith, and K. Lockwood (Eds.), Feminist narrative research: Opportunities and challenges. London, England: Palgrave Macmillan.

[ 30 ]  Stories Changing Lives

CHAPTER 3

Using Narrative Analysis to Inform About Female and Male Sexual Victimization JENNIFER O’MAHONEY AND IRINA ANDER SON

INTRODUCTION

People use stories to make sense of their world, which is particularly helpful at various junctures in our lives such as in times of trauma, unexpected news, the thwarting of goals, or, conversely, during pleasant times such as when chatting to friends (Bruner, 1987; Riessman, 2008). The importance of personal stories for social change, more generally, has been at the focus of narrative psychology, addressing how people use stories to make sense of their world and account for the permutations in their lives. Personal stories can often occupy an ambivalent place between social hegemony and social change. In the context of sexual violence, the narrator may seek social justice via established victim status while dominant discourses concerning sexual assault may seek to question this. Thus, in personal stories of sexual assault,1 this ambivalent place can be particularly fraught and ambiguous when the narrator’s story is contested or resisted by the listener. Conversely, it may signal the legitimacy of the victim’s status as valid and justified if the narrative is allowed to progress without contest. Depending on how this contested space is resolved, it may limit the narratives’ progressive social change effects, leaving the narrator without an accepted victim

Jennifer O’Mahoney and Irina Anderson, Using Narrative Analysis to Inform About Female and Male Sexual Victimization  In: Stories Changing Lives. Edited by: Corinne Squire, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190864750.003.0003.

23

status role, neutralizing the narrator’s attempts for progress in both public and private acceptance, coping, and change, or it may unfold unimpeded. Narrative psychology explores the ways in which people tell stories about their lives to consider how they construct their worlds and identities. This approach is premised on the argument that personal knowledge is based on constructing stories of past experiences, and interpreting new experiences in light of old stories (Laszlo, 2008; Schank and Abelson, 1995). Narrative psychology often claims the core role of story in various psychological functions, such as remembering and self-​development. More specifically, narrative can be understood as a fundamental operation by which humans construe and negotiate the sense and meaning they give to their being in the world: ‘How we live and make sense of our lives, and, indeed, how we create ourselves in this process’ (Brockmeier, 2014, p. 1218). This chapter focuses on the subjective and personal narrative meaning-​ making of survivors of sexual violence (Davis, 2002; Emerson and Frosh, 2004) to critically consider the dominant and personal social discourses, which contribute to these narratives, and how the consequent ambiguities may be resolved in different directions, either supporting or hindering the narrator’s attempts at progress.

CANONICAL SEXUAL VIOLENCE STEREOTYPES AND THEIR FUNCTIONS—​T HE VICTIM TROPE

There is a strong debate about the use of the term victim or survivor in the literature on sexual violence. In a widely cited piece of research on sexual violence Basile and Saltzman (2002) explain: Although many who work in the field of sexual violence use the word “survivor” to describe the person on whom the sexual violence is inflicted, the word “victim” is used in this document in an effort to be consistent with agencies from which most traditional surveillance information is gathered. (p. 8)

The authors further explain that a victim is a “person on whom the sexual violence is inflicted. Survivor is often used as a synonym for victim” (p. 10). By contrast, many support organizations have a consistent utilization of some words (e.g., sexual assault and survivor) and resist others (e.g., victim), implying there are right and wrong ways to discuss sexual violence (Young and Maguire, 2003). The term victim generally refers to someone who is sexually coerced and infers a state of powerlessness and uncontrollability, while a survivor is

[ 32 ]  Stories Changing Lives

characterized as someone who lives (in spite of their victimization experience; Hunter, 2010; Leisenring, 2006; Muehlenhard et al., 1992; Thompson, 2000; Young and Maguire, 2003). While the term victim seems to focus on what actually happened to the person (implying a lack of blame and responsibility), the term survivor emphasizes what occurs after the encounter (focusing on agency and resilience; Hunter, 2010; Thompson, 2000). ‘The use of survivor may help the individual see past the incident and move forward with the recovery process’ (Young and Maguire, 2003, p. 42). These labels of victim and survivor represent complex issues of victimization, agency, and responsibility (Leisenring, 2006) and will be considered in the narratives presented here. Narratives are inherently social, requiring a teller and listener. For an individual’s story to be coherently conveyed to a listener, the narrative depends on the collective stories produced by that culture (Bruner 1987; Rice, 2002). As survivors retell their experiences of sexual victimization, this task can be understood as a descriptive, public retelling of what happened, how, and why, in a series of cause-​and-​effect relations chosen by the teller (Rice, 2002). As Rice (2002) explains, “there is a narrative structure to individual identity, and this structure is derived from collective—​ cultural—​narratives in relation to which, and only in relation to which, the story of an individual life can be rendered anything other than idiosyncratic” (p. 80). Cultural narratives can therefore be understood as the basis for organizing (and making coherent) individual identity. These canonical life narratives can conscript our telling stories about a range of people such as heroes, victims, perpetrators, etc. Bruner (2004) also recognizes how these canonical life narratives can be combined to construct life narratives to reflect the complexities of circumstance. Narratives of sexual victimization often follow a victim trope, reflecting our linguistic and cultural stereotypes of rape and sexual assault (Doherty and Anderson, 1998). Similarly, stories of sexual assault can reflect dominant victim discourses, while simultaneously resisting the role of victim and seeking social justice as a survivor works to organize and frame a trauma experience. As well as cultural canons, cognitive scripting can offer another frame from which to explain the stereotypical victim narrative. Cognitive scripts are mental structures or schemas of knowledge, which organize and inform how we understand the world (Shank and Abelson, 1995). Cognitive scripts consist of a sequence of actions related to frequently occurring events. Shank and Abelson (1995) define cognitive scripts as related sequences of actions that characterize frequently experienced events, which guide our expectations and behaviors by providing an internal template or scheme

U s i n g N a r r ati v e A n a ly s i s  

[ 33 ]

43

for situations. Sexual script theory, then, maintains that sexual behavior is similarly governed and controlled by scripts, which provide both a language for sexual situations, as well as guides for how to behave (Jackson, 1978). Jackson (1978) maintains that “these scripts also provide, in a variety of ways, for the occurrence of rape, since implicit in them are ‘techniques of neutralization’ which a rapist may use to justify his actions in advance and which therefore serve to motivate him” (p. 27). Rape myths can also be viewed as a form of sexual scripting, which can explain the prominence of the victim trope in narrative research The research on rape myths has noted the tendency for people to blame rape or sexual abuse survivors for the event based on “rape myths,” which are false cognitions about rape (Burt, 1980), a worldwide phenomenon according to Koss et  al. (1994). Examples of some rape myths are that real rape survivors will always have signs of injury and that women often lie about rape because they are spiteful. These are myths because research shows that approximately 44% of rape survivors present no signs of physical injury and there is little evidence to show that women commonly lie about rape (Doherty and Anderson, 1998). Researchers have argued that these rape myths also provide a common-​sense resource for making sense of rape because they are embedded in reinforced, culturally accepted stereotypical assumptions about gender role stereotypes and heterosexuality (Doherty and Anderson, 1998; Crome and McCabe, 2001). Cognitive and functional linguists believe that language is shaped and constrained by its functions, as well as psychological, developmental, sociocultural, and historical factors (Langacker, 1999). The interactive function of language is possible as a result of “symbolizations” it affords: “Language does have a conventionally determined structure that children have to learn specifically and linguists have to describe explicitly. . . . It has some kind of cognitive representation: major aspects of linguistic structure reside in individual minds” (Langacker, 1999, p. 19). Linguistic and cognitive scripts are interrelated, which allow for a consideration of cultural conventions of language use. Narratives will therefore reflect the “prevailing theories about ‘possible lives’ that are part of one’s culture” (Bruner, 2004, p. 694; also see O’Mahoney-​Yeager and Culleton, 2016). Understanding the prevalence of the victim trope in storying rape can play an essential role in whether or not a survivor of sexual violence receives social support to facilitate coping or even believes that their experience did actually constitute sexual violence. This chapter will consider examples of where survivors of sexual assault have resisted the dominant victim narrative to move toward personal and social change in their coping. However, these conceptualizations are not fixed throughout a person’s life. Many

[ 34 ]  Stories Changing Lives

researchers have noted that while some people show strong preferences for the label survivor, others avoid labels such as victim or survivor, seeing them as static and impeding their development (Peter, 2006; Reich, 2002; Young and Maguire, 2003). How these stories of sexual assault can reflect dominant victim discourses, while simultaneously resisting the role of victim and seeking social justice, as a survivor works to organize and frame a trauma experience, will be considered.

NARRATIVE SPACES OF SEXUAL VICTIMIZATION

While stories of sexual assault can reflect dominant victim discourses, the following excerpts demonstrate how narrators work to reframe their trauma experience, for a variety of reasons. This action creates the previously discussed contested and highly charged space, the resolution of which determines not only the narrator’s future well-​being but society’s relationship with this particular issue. Frequently, the survivors actively resist the role of victim within this dominant victim framework. While social hegemony restricts coping by providing a narrow victim narrative for a survivor of sexual assault, this ambivalent place between hegemony and social change can also provide opportunity for survivors to break out from these narrow narrative confines and progress through the trauma. The following excerpts will analyze personal stories of sexual assault and focus on how survivors’ constructions of self are challenged and fractious as a result of the sexual assault. In particular, the following analyses focus on how survivors constructed self and identity while narrating their social support experiences after victimization. Identities were often greatly impacted by invalidation and blame from friends and family. Survivors describe a redefinition of self in these personal stories as a result of these negative reactions. The following analysis focuses on how, in describing their own identities, the survivors consistently mobilize both positive and negative social support experiences as shaping their view of who they are, thus progressing through the trauma. The sample of four survivors presented here (two men, two women) was part of a larger study examining extensive narratives from 10 survivors of sexual violence recruited from an online community for survivors of sexual violence. The participants were aged between 18 and 32, and from the United States and United Kingdom. Since the online support group operates through written text, data collection also operated via written text online, providing a context for analysis. In terms of researching ethically sensitive topics like sexual violence, online interviewing has the important benefit of

U s i n g N a r r ati v e A n a ly s i s  

[ 35 ]

63

allowing the interviewee to remain completely anonymous, which has also been shown to facilitate participation, engagement, reflection, and honesty (Hinchcliffe and Gavin, 2009; Ho and McCleod, 2008). On average, each interview lasted approximately 1 to 1.5 hours. Since the responses to the questionnaire were collected online via an instant messenger service they were immediately saved to a computer file, and no changes were made to the written text of the conversations. However, all identifying information was removed and pseudonyms were assigned to the survivors and anyone mentioned by name in their interviews. Any other identifying information, such as name of the support group site, was also removed. Narrative analysis can be a particularly suitable tool for analyzing interview data, where a person recounts their experiences of sexual victimization in response to a direct question asked by the researcher. This is, after all, how storytelling occurs every day among people all over the world; narratives are told in answer to an outside stimulus and to establish a point of personal interest (Labov and Waletsky, 1967). The interviews were read for patterns of variability and consistency within and across interviews for both content and form. Regarding content, the interviews were examined for thematic categories (e.g., stories about personal relationships, stories about powerlessness, etc.). Regarding form, the stories in each theme were then analyzed for how they were structured, again looking for consistency and variability. In the following excerpt, Tim describes a transformation in his identity as a result of his sexual victimization. T at 1st she standoffish, but when she settled down she started to understand what did happen to me, she also was under the impression that only women could get raped I those rape myths are culturally very strong unfortunately . . . how did you feel about her response? T when she made it originally, I thought she was just being stupid, but afterwards I thought that she was very understanding. J you also mentioned that you told a friend about the assault—​can you tell me about when you told him/​her and their reaction? T I told my female friend about it in 1997 about 6 months after I met her, she is currently in a group therapy and is seeing a psychologist as well. Their reaction was actually very good, she did know it happens to men as well as women. J did you know about it happening to men before it happened to you?

[ 36 ]  Stories Changing Lives

T no, I don’t ever think I did know, after it happened to me, I thought I was just an isolated case, an aberration as some would put it. a normal reaction, even for women sometimes. [. . .] I how did you cope initially with such a negative reaction from the military Counsellor? T I wanted to have a sex change operation because of what he told me, I thought that if it was my fault maybe I would feel normal if i was a woman rather than a man. I  did it affect your feelings of sexual orientation as well as gender identity? T yes and no, yes because I thought if i was a woman I could have sex with men and feel normal in that aspect, and no I did not feel like a homesexual [sic], I still do not feel gay, I feel more at home with women than I do around any guy. . . . I still think about getting a sex change about 2 or 3 times a day, it is through my current psychologist that I found out that it is somewhat normal. the group already knew that men can get raped just as any woman can, but most of the women in the group said that they did not believe that any man could get raped while I was in the group. they also told me that if I wanted to get into their group again, I should go out and become a woman through a sex change before I come back to their group. I ?? wow you have had a time of it with unsupportive people! does it make any difference to have a female therapist? T YES IT DOES, I will never trust a man again in the field, as far as my rape goes, I still do not see any male doctors in other medical fields because of the rape. I is it hard for you to trust men in general now, or just in relation to your healing/​therapy? T I have a hard time even associating with men in general, I am not racist but since the rape happened with black men, I cannot even stand being around any black man, black women are fine with me, but not men. In the various excerpts, Tim highlights his identity issues with gender and sexuality as a result of his rape experience. Initially Tim refers to people’s reactions to his disclosure of rape as questioning his sexuality. First, Tim explains that he thought his wife’s belief that “only women could get

U s i n g N a r r ati v e A n a ly s i s  

[ 37 ]

83

raped” was “stupid.” Calling his wife’s reaction “stupid” ensures that Tim characterizes this belief as unacceptable and ill-​informed, making it unlikely that the listener will side with his wife’s views. Tim supports this statement by providing additional evidence that “it happens to men as well as women” in the corroborating form of a friend who is “currently in group therapy and is seeing a psychologist as well.” Tim’s corroborating evidence from a friend who is familiar with group therapy and mental health professionals serves to add support to his claim that men can also be raped, and to further support the feeling that his wife’s initial unsupportive reaction was, indeed, “stupid,” despite admitting that even after becoming a rape victim he did not know it happened to men, and thought he “was just an isolated case, an aberration as some would put it.” In this part of the narrative, Tim is making reference to the prevalent rape myths that exist, despite evidence to the contrary, which is echoed by myself, where I  stated, “those rape myths are culturally very strong unfortunately.” As a psychology postgraduate I  assumed that Tim would understand my reference to rape myths. Rape myths place the responsibility for rape with victims as a result of the way they were dressed, their behaviors, or substance use at the time of the assault (Burt, 1980; Doherty and Anderson, 1998), despite evidence in the literature showing that these “common-​sense” beliefs about rape do not hold true. For instance, Tim’s insistence that men can also be raped reflects the notion in society that only women can be raped. These rape myths serve to perpetuate the blaming of victims in society when they are not responsible for being raped (Doherty and Anderson, 1998). In the subsequent excerpt, Tim emphasizes how his transformation from feeling securely heterosexual to questionably homosexual is not of his own choice. He explains that because of the unsupportive reaction of the military counselor, he wanted to have a sex change operation because of what he told me, I thought that if it was my fault maybe I would feel normal if I was a woman rather than a man. . . . I thought if I was a woman I could have sex with men and feel normal in that aspect, and no I did not feel like a homesexual [sic], I still do not feel gay, I feel more at home with women than I do around any guy.

Tim’s description of his identity change is concluded with his emphatic statement, “I do not feel gay, I feel more at home with women than I do around any guy.” Tim explains that he only entertained the idea of being attracted to men because of the counselor. In fact, his drive to feel “normal” was so high that

[ 38 ]  Stories Changing Lives

he considered a sex change so that he “could have sex with men and feel normal in that aspect.” In describing his need to feel normal, Tim constructs how his rape experience and subsequent unsupportive reactions made him feel so abnormal, highlighting an abrupt and uncontrollable turn of events that he was not responsible for. Immediately after these statements Tim again states that even though he accepts these gender and sexuality identity questions were the fault of the psychologist, he qualifies this saying that he “still thinks about getting a sex change about 2 or 3 times a day, it is through my current psychologist that I found out that it is somewhat normal.” Once again, Tim illustrates his current need to have someone in his social support network confirm that his identity worries are normal. Tim’s narrative externalizes his identity change and signifies his role as that of a powerless victim in what happened. This construction of an uncontrollable change in identity allows Tim to describe these concerns for his sexuality openly while minimizing his culpability. Tim’s narrative also highlights how negative reactions from his friends, family, and mental health professionals were so detrimental that they led him to question his own identity and sexuality. It describes how his experiences led him to feel abnormal, a feeling that was also generated by his support networks. These unsupportive reactions had a profound impact on how Tim viewed himself. In describing these experiences, Tim also presents himself as a resilient individual. His descriptions of his wife as “stupid” and emphatic statements that, “I do not feel gay, I  feel more at home with women than I do around any guy,” highlight that he is no longer as affected by these reactions and that he is now able to view both himself and his identity on his own terms. In another excerpt depicting identity change as a result of sexual victimization, Paul rejects the description of himself as a “survivor” when I use the term in reference to him in the following excerpt. P so yeah, the experience was horrible to say the least I you’re certainly a survivor to say the least! P Nah I’m just a regular guy who had a horrible fucking thing happen to him. who’s trying to be “normal” now—​ha!:) I Is there anything you wish your parents would do to help you cope? P I wish they would trust me more. I feel unable to just let go and cry and be unhappy when i need to because they take it as meaning i will try to kill myself again I what kinds of things do you need to feel safe?

U s i n g N a r r ati v e A n a ly s i s  

[ 39 ]

04

P i have to lock myself in my house. i have to know where my girlfriend is and when she will be home. ppl have to ring me on my mobile so i will open the door to them I is there anything alse you wish your friends would do for you? P sometimes they forget im strong enough enough to make it. Id like them to worry less:-​) it’s great that you have people around you worrying:-​) i know I did telling your girlfriend change your relationship in any way? P yes she is more aware of needing to be patient with me its made her feel like i need to watched though which i hate I sometimes too much support is too smothering? As a term frequently used in feminist descriptions of having experienced sexual victimization, it is notable that Paul rejected the description of “survivor” immediately. As an alternative Paul suggests to me that he is “just a regular guy who had a horrible fucking thing happen to him whose trying to be ‘normal’ now—​ha!:).” This identity claim serves to construct Paul as a “normal” person. While Paul acknowledges the trauma of the abuse (“a horrible fucking thing”), he simultaneously constructs himself as being of strong enough character that the abuse did not damage his identity of sense of self who is now “just a regular guy.” He additionally presents himself as having a sense of humor as he “laughs” at his statement that he is “trying to be ‘normal’ now.” The addition of the smiley face (:)) to Paul’s “ha!” suggests humor rather than negating that he is “normal.” Paul’s rejection of the label of survivor mirrors Lamb’s (1999) arguments that labels such as victim or survivor can limit a person’s concept of personal identity, as well as others’ perceptions of the person. In the second section of his excerpt, Paul describes a list of everyday actions to make him “feel safe.” In describing how “i have to lock myself in my house,” “i have to know where my girlfriend is and when she will be home,” and “ppl have to ring me on my mobile so i will open the door to them,” what should be routine events are problematic for Paul. Describing these activities as things he “has to do” or “has to know” constructs these actions as being routine for him, while acknowledging that they are not typical for other people. Paul does not sometimes have to lock himself in the house; he has to lock himself in the house. These statements function to define Paul as being the type of person who would not normally choose to live a restricted existence as they are actions that he has to do, not actions that he chooses to do to make himself feel safe. However, despite these invasive actions Paul has to do, he makes the complaint that “sometimes they forget im strong enough to make it. Id like them to worry less” immediately

[ 40 ]  Stories Changing Lives

afterwards when asked if there is “anything else you wish your friends would do for you?” Paul’s statement works to suggest that although he is telling a story about dealing with a more restricted and dependent existence to cope with abuse he is “strong enough to make it.” In the final part of Paul’s extract, he explains that telling his girlfriend about being abused changed his relationship. Although his girlfriend is “more aware of needing to be patient with me,” Paul makes the complaint that “its made her feel like i need to be watched though which i hate.” In rejecting his status as someone who needs to be watched, Paul is justifying his complaint about too much support being smothering in a credible manner. Paul’s successful complaint of “too much support” is dependent on his identity as someone who does not need this level of support; if he did not see himself as someone who is able to cope, this complaint would not be received as believable by the interviewer. Making this complaint functions to construct Paul as a person who is not dependent, occasioning this description as a relevant feature of his narrative (Widdicombe and Wooffitt, 1995). Overall, how Paul constructs his narrative about not only coping but also the other issues has important implications for his story being understood and accepted as believable by the listener. Paul resists the notion of being a survivor in this narrative, while also recognizes that he is dependent on his girlfriend to function in many ways. Paul’s rejection of the term survivor suggests he conceptualizes a survivor as “being strong enough to make it.” He recognizes that his girlfriend’s support (in terms of telling him where she is, when she will be home, and being patient with him) provides support and validation, although sometimes this is “too much,” and he resists the notion of being dependent, as he did with being constructed as a survivor. In contrast to the previous excerpts, Paul provides an account of a supportive reaction from his girlfriend to his abuse experiences. While Paul appreciates her support, his narrative also highlights that the situation is not quite so simple. It is not simply a case that the presence of support is good and a lack of support is bad. Paul explains that while he needs the support, sometimes it is too much and perhaps hinders his moving on. However, Paul’s narrative of being somewhat smothered by his girlfriend also serves to construct him as resilient. Take, for instance, Paul’s statement that “I feel unable to just let go and cry and be unhappy when i need to because they take it as meaning i will try to kill myself again.” Paul’s statement suggests that while he had previously attempted suicide he is no longer suicidal and won’t “try to kill myself again,” presenting himself as resilient. While resilience here is closely counterposed to the canonical trope of victimhood, it is also presented as a more complex concept.

U s i n g N a r r ati v e A n a ly s i s  

[ 41 ]

24

Paul’s resilience represents a rejection of victimhood, while simultaneously recognizing that it is possible to still suffer and be unhappy, while being resilient. Similarly, the following excerpt shows Valerie also having issues with the label of survivor amidst negotiating larger issues of identity change as a result of her sexual victimization.2 I you’d been through a lot already; how did you react to the experience with your mother’s husband when you were somewhat older? V I was 13. My mother was gone with my sister. My mother was trying to be a whole new person (for a little while) and trying to make me and my sister like her so we would go move back in with her. When I was 12 me and my little sister got taken away from her—​finally! but she had visitation rights. After he molested me, he left and I screamed at the top of my lungs until I couldn’t anymore. I threw things, hit things, slammed doors, jumped up and down as hard as I could on the hardwood floors and then I filled the bath tub and scrubbed myself until I started to actually bleed—​and that’s when my mother came home with my sister, where I just put my clothes on and told her I wanted to go home and sat outside on the front porch until my father came to pick us up. I what is your relationship like with your father? V  We don’t really have a relationship other than “Hi, how are you? That’s good. Well, I gotta go, bye.” When I first moved in with him we had a lot of problems. I turned into a rebellious child, I didn’t know what to do—​I didn’t know what it was like to be safe, I guess, and I really resented him for not knowing what happened to me. That faded when I realized no one could know until I told them. We used to get into a lot of fights, we’d scream and yell at each other, and moved out of his house about six months ago, and for the first time in six months he said he loved me without me having to say it first. I did you ever tell you father about what happened? V No. Not to this day. I why do you choose not to? V There’s still a little part of me that thinks it’s my fault. And I know my family—​If I  told him (or my Grandmother or Aunt who live right next door to him) they would want to go track down my mother and bring her to court or something and I don’t want that, weirdly enough. I  haven’t seen my mother in about 5  years and I  don’t want to bring all of that up again. It sounds stupid, but

[ 42 ]  Stories Changing Lives

I’m finally beginning to be okay with all of the things that have happened to me—​I’m actually successfully working through being raped by my mother and I want to move forward, not backward. I always said I’d tell them when she dies or something. I no it makes sense—​in general, what did you need in terms of support when you were raped by your mother? V  I felt like I  needed a big brown paper bag that I  could fit my entire body into and never come out. I  wanted to die. I  hated myself. I hated her. I still hate her—​in time, I hope to overcome that. I hated everyone and everything. I still had no friends, I had no one to turn to, and all I wanted was to end my life. At 11, I was pretty morbid. I well its understandable that you would have been. what did you do to cope? V I began writing. i think a lot of people find writing therapeutic and art, but I’ve only painted once. the creative process seems to be calming I just filled a big piece of cardboard with the words “I am not a victim.” I how do you feel about those labels? survivor, victim, etc? V Sometimes I hate them. I don’t want to be a victim or a survivor. I just want to be someone who is working through being sexually abused. But at other times, it’s empowering. I like to be known as a survivor sometimes. I yes i understand. Like Paul, Valerie points out that the label of “survivor” actually hindered her ability to move on from the abuse as she explains that “sometimes I hate them. . . . I just want to be someone who is working through being sexually abused.” This label caused her to lose her sense of who she was before the abuse and to pathologize her further. This occurrence has been noted in the literature where Lamb (1999) argues that labeling people as victims or survivors can pathologize and suggest that the person is dysfunctional in some way. Lamb (1999) suggests that labels rob people of agency and the capacity to adapt and grow beyond their sexual violence experience. However, Valerie mitigates this “hatred” of the terms victim and survivor by admitting that “at other times, it’s empowering. I like to be known as a survivor sometimes.” For Paul and Valerie, rejecting the notion of “survivor” constructed life-​enhancing identities for them. For Valerie, also accepting the label of survivor provides corroboration to her story that she was sexually abused and that she is a strong and capable individual who is “working through being sexually abused.” Again, the term survivor is

U s i n g N a r r ati v e A n a ly s i s  

[ 43 ]

4

ambiguous and dynamic, as narrators employ the term in various ways to achieve certain narrative goals. The rest of Valerie’s narrative provides much more information concerning how sexual victimization has resulted in unwelcome identity change for her. Valerie sets up the narrative by beginning with a description of her mother who “was trying to be a whole new person (for a little while),” and a father with whom she “really [doesn’t] have a relationship.” Valerie’s initial orientation works to characterize her as having been at risk at an early age and, therefore, vulnerable throughout her childhood and adolescence. Valerie continues to construct herself as helpless throughout most of her damaging life experiences as she uses linguistic devices to describe herself as passive and submissive. Valerie’s explanation that “when I was 12 me and my little sister got taken away from her—​finally! but she had visitation rights. After he molested me, he left and I screamed,” illustrating how she was powerless to get away from her abusing mother until she “got taken away from her.” Even this positive change to her situation is negated by the fact that her mother “had visitation rights” and could therefore still have power and influence over Valerie. Valerie utilizes additional linguistic devices to highlight the trauma of her experiences, describing her subsequent abuse by her stepfather as so traumatic that I screamed at the top of my lungs until I couldn’t anymore. I  threw things, hit things, slammed doors, jumped up and down as hard as I could on the hardwood floors and then I filled the bath tub and scrubbed myself until I started to actually bleed.

The emotional terms Valerie uses (screamed, threw, hit, slammed, scrubbed) work to create dramatic images in the listener’s mind and construct Valerie as traumatized. Valerie’s use of strong, active verbs demonstrate her strong and violent actions. Despite Valerie’s extensive abuse, she mitigates her role as victim with her statement that when her mother and sister returned, “I just put my clothes on and told her I wanted to go home and sat outside on the front porch until my father came to pick us up.” This statement serves to illustrate that despite this trauma, Valerie has inner strength in her identity to resist and demand to be away from her abuser, even at the young age of 13. Valerie’s success at ending her mother’s abuse on this occasion provided her the opportunity to develop a more positive view of herself that stood in opposition to her previous narrative of powerlessness and helplessness. This part of Valerie’s narrative constructs her as a person of agency, working against her identity as a victim. Highlighting her act

[ 44 ]  Stories Changing Lives

of rebellion also serves to emphasize Valerie’s identity as a resilient individual, despite her lack of support from friends or family. Valerie follows this narrative of abuse with descriptions of her problematic relationship with her father and wider family network. In describing problem after problem through her narrative, Valerie constructs a world in which she is helpless and thrown from one problematic situation to another. This vulnerability to revictimization may be due to Valerie’s fragmented sense of self-​worth, where an expectation of abuse becomes part of herself (Herman, 1997; Finkelhor, 1990). Valerie’s narrative frames worry and trauma not only as something she has dealt with in the past, but as something that continues into her present with negative consequences. The story of her past becomes a rationale for her current behavior and identity. By sharing this story, Valerie highlighted the contrast between herself as an innocent child and herself now as a young adult. In doing so, Valerie drew attention to the lifelong impact her abuse has had on her functioning. Simultaneously, Valerie has provided a resolute account explaining the construction of her current identity by placing it in contrast to who she was before her abuse. Although Valerie’s narrative is harrowing, there are glimmers of hope and determination that Valerie positions as not having been destroyed by incest. In doing so, Valerie constructs her positive traits as having been suppressed but not extinguished. Aligning to these character traits, which were present before her abuse began, allows Valerie to portray herself as having a stable original self. In doing so, Valerie manages to construct herself as having a resilient identity, despite the strong negative overtones in her narrative. It is notable that the end of Valerie’s narrative is peppered with descriptions in the past tense, where she explains that “I felt like I needed a big brown paper bag”; “I wanted to die. I hated myself”; and “I hated everyone and everything.” The consistent emphasis of her hatred for her life reveals how traumatic her life was and, importantly, how Valerie resisted her life as it was and wanted something else. Although Valerie admits that “I still hate [my mother],” she mitigates this statement with the aspiration that “in time, I hope to overcome that.” Ochs (1997) explains that it is very common for narratives to be motivated by a person’s current dissatisfaction with how they or someone else handled a situation. Valerie’s experiences of incest, where her abuse involved a person who should have been a trusted role model, is particularly disruptive to her sense of self and identity. Throughout her story, Valerie emphasizes the traumatic nature of her abuse and highlights the continuous, damaging nature of what happened. Valerie’s coherent and poignant

U s i n g N a r r ati v e A n a ly s i s  

[ 45 ]

64

phrasing renders her narrative as more persuasive and therefore less likely to be questioned or distrusted by the listener (Mishler, 1986). Valerie’s betrayal by her mother and stepfather is followed by descriptions of failure in her subsequent relationships with her father and having “no friends,” highlighting the impact of her abuse on her social networks and the lack of support she received. In describing her experiences, Valerie presents a persuasive and emotionally compelling narrative, which Riessman (1993) argues is the most persuasive of all narrative genres. Sewell and Williams (2001) report that survivors of sexual abuse often refer to social disruption in their relationships (as Valerie does here, stating, “I still had no friends”), which occurs when a survivor’s relationships are continuously invalidated. In contrast to the beginning of Valerie’s narrative, the end emphasizes Valerie’s efforts to move past her “darker days” of abuse. Valerie constructs herself as taking agency over her life and identity, stating that “I’m finally beginning to be okay with all of the things that have happened to me—​ I’m actually successfully working through being raped by my mother and I want to move forward, not backward.” This part of the narrative shows that Valerie is working to distance herself from abusive people in her past to move beyond her abuse and beyond an identity as either victim or survivor. This recounting of negative experiences, combined with an evaluative judgment (McIntosh and McKeganey, 2000), can be characterized as a “re-​interpretation narrative” as Valerie reinterprets her relationships with unsupportive family and friends, as she constructs herself as moving beyond her states as a survivor of incest. This re-​interpretation narrative represents Valerie’s ability to reflect on her abuse and to construct her as having moved on from being a victim. In the final excerpt, similarly to Paul and Valerie, Abby also resists the notion of herself as a survivor without explicitly mentioning the label in her narrative. Abby’s excerpt provides a narrative of resilience and positive adaptation to her experience of sexual victimization, although in a dissimilar narrative style to that of Paul and Valerie. However, by contrast, Abby provides a narrative that constructs her identity as not having been affected by her abuse in the following excerpt. I did you ever tell your parents? A That’s a complicated answer. . . . I told my mother about the abuse that was occurring before the assault. She was unwilling to do anything to help me, she told me I should deal with this myself because it’s something every woman has to go through. And then, later on, I tried to tell her about the assault, but she just wouldn’t

[ 46 ]  Stories Changing Lives

hear me—​she said “don’t tell me you got yourself ruined.” Even then I knew, somewhere inside me, that was wrong I do you think you would have had an easier time coping if you had more support from your mother? A Yes, I think so. If she had been receptive when I told her about the abuse, it might never have escalated the way it did. And even if it had, I might have believed that it wasn’t my fault for failing to “deal” with it, the way she said I should. But, somewhere, in my mind, I knew she was wrong. I did her reaction to the assault change your relationship with your mother? A She doesn’t know it, but yes. I feel alienated from her. When I think back to her reaction, it makes me angry, and even though I love her very much, I resent her for not trying to help or even to understand. I think part of me didn’t want to tell my mum especially because I  thought she’d be mortified and perhaps blame herself I think another reason for not telling them, a rather selfish one, was I  didn’t want mum to become even more protective of me. I  didn’t want her to look at me differently either I  mean, they aren’t hugely overprotective but mum does ring at least once every few days and all but demands to know everything that’s going on with me I yeah i have a mother like that too:) since telling your parents have you told anyone else? A I told a therapy group for over-​eaters I went to I how did you feel about telling the group? A  quite ok actually by that point I  was quite comfortable with telling people I do you find talking/​telling can be therapeutic in its own way? A  sometimes. I’m still reluctant to tell people sometimes because I  don’t want to see their faces or the way they treat me change I worry they’ll either be disgusted by me or feel sorry for me. I’m not sure what I expect them to feel if not either of those but I just don’t like people feeling sorry for me more than anything I think I’d rather they were disgusted I nowadays what’s most important to you in dealing with the assault? A um, I don’t really know. I can’t think of anything really. I’ve more or less gotten to the point where I don’t think about it any more. I’ve accepted it was a horrible part of my life but I don’t see why I should keep mourning over it. I can’t change what happened. the most important thing now is to get my life together.

U s i n g N a r r ati v e A n a ly s i s  

[ 47 ]

84

While Valerie’s account is highly emotive, Abby provides a concise narrative describing what happened when she disclosed her abuse. While Abby’s narrative is not constructed in the emotional way of Valerie’s, Abby uses reported speech to illustrate the harshness of her mother’s response to her abuse. In contrast to the rest of her narrative, this blaming response by her mother almost jumps out at the reader (remember, this conversation was typed online). By recreating the words that were actually said to her, Abby adds believability to her account and constructs the statement as an extreme response on the part of her mother. In effect, this works to portray Abby as behaving in a routine and normal manner in wanting to tell her mother and receive some support, while her mother is seen as behaving irrationally. In effect, we see a dichotomy between Abby’s normal action and her mother’s unusual and damaging response. Creating this dichotomy encourages the listener to examine both sides of the story and to conclude that Abby’s mother’s response was unwarranted (Widdicombe and Wooffitt, 1995). Abby further provides her mother’s rationale behind expressing the worry that her daughter “got ruined,” constructing her mother’s extreme reaction as being based on her mother’s belief that abuse is “something every woman has to go through.” In this example, Abby’s mother is “seen as motivated not by reason, by less worthy factors, such as blind prejudice” (Widdicombe and Wooffitt, 1995, p. 124), which works to construct Abby’s actions and opinions as believable and normal in contrast to the extreme response of her mother. Despite this response from her mother, Abby goes on to explain that her initial reason she “didn’t want to tell my mum especially because I thought she’d be mortified and perhaps blame herself,” illustrating the complexity involved with social relationships. Abby was initially motivated not to disclose her abuse to protect her mother; in reality, her mother was the one who didn’t try “to help or even to understand” what happened. Abby even characterizes her reasons for not disclosing as “selfish” because she “didn’t want mum to become even more protective of me.” However, the subsequent reason for not disclosing is made apparent in Abby’s next statement: “I didn’t want her to look at me differently either.” This sentiment is repeated later in Abby’s narrative, where she states that “I’m still reluctant to tell people sometimes because I don’t want to see their faces or the way they treat me change.” In contrast to the other survivors interviewed, Abby resists the sympathy for which many of the survivors were striving. This emphasis on not wanting others to look at her differently constructs Abby as being strong and resilient and having a consistent identity that was not altered as a result of her abuse. Abby even goes as far as to say that she does not want to disclose her abuse because

[ 48 ]  Stories Changing Lives

she worries, not that people will not believe or that they will blame her but because “they’ll either be disgusted by me or feel sorry for me. . . . I just don’t like people feeling sorry for me more than anything. . . . I think I’d rather they were disgusted.” These statements are in direct contrast to the previous survivors, and may reflect Abby’s further progress in terms of coping and dealing with her assault. This is also supported by her subsequent comments on having moved on from thinking about her abuse, discussed subsequently. Abby’s sentiments here also depict her as being highly aware that her experiences are different from what other people have experienced. Sewell and Williams (2001) explain that this social disruption to interpersonal relationships is common with survivors of sexual abuse because they feel their victimization experiences are different from what others have experienced. It is not surprising that, after sexual victimization, a person may struggle with their social relationships and supports because they feel “different” and believe that their friends, family, and so on will not understand. Leitner et al. (2000) describe this phenomenon as an arrest of the meaning-​making system, which causes survivors to struggle to make sense of the event and engage in interpersonal relationships after being traumatized. In this situation, Abby felt unable to utilize her previous support systems. As with the previous survivors in this section, Abby broaches the issue of being labeled as a survivor (albeit, not explicitly as with the previous survivors’ excerpts). When asked what is important in dealing with her assault currently, Abby responds that she “can’t think of anything really.” She explains, I’ve more or less gotten to the point where I  don’t think about it any more. I’ve accepted it was a horrible part of my life but I don’t see why I should keep mourning over it. I can’t change what happened. the most important thing now is to get my life together.

Similarly to Paul, Abby resists the identity of a survivor, and explains that she is past needing to “think” about the abuse and “keep mourning it.” Abby once again supports Lamb’s (1999) argument that labels such as “victim” or “survivor” can limit a person’s concept of personal identity, as well as robbing them of the agency to move beyond the victimization. Abby similarly feels that she does not see why she should need to focus on the abuse. Abby consistently portrayed herself as resilient throughout her interview, referring to her “inner strength” twice in the brief excerpt, clearly constructing the ability for her positive adjustment to have been “inside

U s i n g N a r r ati v e A n a ly s i s  

[ 49 ]

05

me” and “in my mind” from the beginning, constructing her resilience as stable and continuously present, even during the worst of her experiences. This narrative is concise and leaves very little room for the listener to disagree with her version of events. This construction of meaning for Abby downplays any sense of blame or shame assigned to her by mother, which is common in many narratives of sexual victimization. Again, we have seen here how the survivors’ heterogeneous experiences have led to different attempts to cope and different experiences in life. What is again consistent across the stories is how the survivors presented their trauma and experiences by providing narratives describing their efforts to cope in order to construct positive identities for themselves. The construction of the aftermath of the narrators’ abuse allowed the survivors to construct and prove their resilient identities, suggesting that the survivors are not portrayed as permanent victims in their stories. Some narratives (e.g., Abby) highlighted positive adaptation by drawing attention to how they successfully coped with their victimization, while other narratives (e.g., Valerie) highlighted their continuous attempts to get to that point. It is notable, however, that Valerie provides a narrative that describes the most emotive impact on her identity of all of the survivors discussed here. It is possible that this is be due to the likelihood that sexual abuse may be more damaging to a developing, childhood sense of self than an integrated, adult self (Fleming et al., 1999). Valerie’s experiences of childhood sexual assault, where her abuse involved a trusted role model over years, are particularly disruptive to her sense of self. By associating the times where they were not believed or blamed for their sexual victimization with the resulting changes in their identities, the survivors in this study emphasized the importance of their social networks in constructing positive identities for themselves. These supportive relationships helped to mitigate the damage of the original abuse and subsequent unsupportive reactions and helped the survivors to be resilient and work to find or maintain their original concepts of identity. As with issues of blame, the survivors in this study did not simply accept the sequelae of sexual victimization. The survivors actively account for their changes in identity and construct explanations and meaning around who they were, who they are, and who they think they will be in the future. Ochs (1997) explains that we conceptualize the present in terms of the past and future; the past in terms of the present and future; and the future in terms of the past and present. In bringing the past into present consciousness for the respondents, narrative accounts help them manage their uncertain futures (Ochs, 1997). For these respondents, their

[ 50 ]  Stories Changing Lives

narratives about the past are also always about their present and future (Ochs, 1997). For these survivors, identity construction is part of the process of narrating an experience of sexual victimization. Identities are constructed alongside explaining the social interaction of disclosing abuse and dealing with issues of blame. As a result, a lack of social support effects feelings of blame and constructions of identity for these survivors. Validation of disclosures of sexual victimization helped the survivors to examine their identities and lives in a supportive and enhancing manner, while negation served to hinder the coping process and cause the survivors to question the very core of how they viewed themselves. These narratives highlight the very powerful impact of relationships on a survivor’s coping and sense of self. By providing narratives of how their sexual victimization resulted in identity changes, the survivors emphasized the impact of damaging relationships and supportive relationships and the positive adaptation that results.

CONCLUDING COMMENTS

Narratives of sexual assault are complex and often contested. The extracts examined in this chapter highlight how narratives create a space between dominant victim discourses and narrators’ resistance to these, which serves to reframe the trauma experience in different terms relevant to identity, coping, and future lives. Survivors’ active resistance of the victim trope has many important sequalae, predicated on several aspects of the victim/​survivor dichotomy. To recap, based on the literature, the term victim refers to someone who is sexually coerced and infers a state of powerlessness and uncontrollability, while a survivor is characterized by strength and determination in the face of obstacles (in spite of their victimization experience; Hunter, 2010; Leisenring, 2006; Muehlenhard et  al., 1992; Thompson, 2000; Young and Maguire, 2003). The term victim also focuses on what actually happened to the person (implying a lack of blame and responsibility), while the term survivor emphasizes what occurs after the encounter (focusing on agency and resilience; Hunter, 2010; Thompson, 2000). Additionally, the use of the term survivor is seen as a way for an “individual [to] see past the incident and move forward with the recovery process” (Young and Maguire, 2003, p. 42). Narrative psychology allows us to understand these labels of victim and survivor as representing the important but complex issues of victimization, agency and responsibility (Leisenring,

U s i n g N a r r ati v e A n a ly s i s  

[ 51 ]

25

2006). Agency is multifaceted, working from multiple positions, both personal and more broadly social. Importantly, agency in these narratives of change is progressive (O’Mahoney, 2018). If we understand narratives of sexual victimization as progressive, this, in turn, suggests that these conceptualizations are not fixed throughout a person’s life, but lead to altered states and malleable actions suited to the situation at hand. While researchers have noted that although some participants may show strong preferences for the label “survivor,” the survivors discussed here seemed to actively avoid these labels, seeing them as static and impeding their development (Peter, 2006; Reich, 2002; Young and Maguire, 2003). To the degree that this aspect can be focused on in survivor-​centered environments, it should be used to increase understanding and care afforded to the people caught up in this act. Resisting the victim trope has significance for the individual, but is also a social act as it challenges central discourses of sexual victimization. Narrative psychology recognizes both the powerful impact of stories with a sensitivity to the broader social context from which these stories are drawn. It also reveals how the act of storytelling, which often serves as an invitation to an audience to participate in the narrative, opens up spaces of resistance and flexibility around powerful tropes. The contested spaces that narration creates allow for precisely the flexibility that a sexual violence survivor seeks in both the immediate and longer term aftermath of the event. These valuable tools may be used not only in wider policy decisions but also in more individual counseling and workshop scenarios to improve education and personal trajectories surrounding sexual violence.

NOTES 1. Defining sexual violence is one of the most controversial issues in research on this topic (Basile et al., 2014; Muehlenhard et al., 1992). Based on recommendations in the literature, the term sexual violence here is used to represent behaviors that refer to nonconsensual sexual acts (Basile and Saltzman, 2009; Hearn, Andersson, and Cowburn, 2007). Therefore, this chapter uses the term sexual victimization broadly, to incorporate a wide variety of sexually violent experiences in the data examined. The terms sexual violence, sexual victimization, sexual assault, and sexual abuse are used interchangeably to reflect both the choice of term by the researchers discussed, as well as to highlight the broad, nonconsensual experiences described by these various terms. 2. In this narrative, Valerie recalls being abused by her stepfather and mother on different occasions.

[ 52 ]  Stories Changing Lives

REFERENCES Basile K., and Saltzman L. (2002). Sexual violence surveillance: Uniform definitions and recommended data element (Version 1.0). Atlanta, GA: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Basile, K., Smith, S., Breiding, M., Black, M., and Mahendra, R. (2014). Sexual violence surveillance: Uniform definitions and recommended data elements. Atlanta, GA: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. Brockmeier, J. (2014). Narrative psychology. In T. Teo (Ed.), Encyclopedia of critical psychology (pp. 1218–​1220). London, England: Springer. Bruner, J. (1987). Actual minds, possible worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bruner, J. (2004). Life as narrative. Social Research 71(3), 691–​710. Burt, M. (1980). Cultural myths and support for rape. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 38(2), 217–​230. Crome, S., and McCabe, M. (2001). Adult rape scripting within a victimological perspective. Aggression and Violent Behaviour 6, 395–​413. Davis, J. (2002). Narrative and social movements: The power of stories. In J. Davis (Ed.), Stories of change: Narrative and social movements (pp. 3–​30). New York:, NY State University of New York Press. Doherty, K., and Anderson, I. (1998). Talking about rape: Perpetuating rape supportive culture. The Psychologist 11(12), 583–​587. Emerson, P., and Frosh, S. (2004). Critical narrative analysis in psychology: A guide to practice. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Finkelhor, D. (1990). Early and long term effects of child sexual abuse: An update. Professional Psychology: Research & Practice 21(5), 325–​330. Fleming, J., Mullen, P., Sibthorpe, B., and Bammer, G. (1999). The long-​term impact of childhood sexual abuse in Australian women. Child Abuse and Neglect 23, 145–​159. Hearn, J., Anderson, K., and Cowburn, M. (2007). Background paper on guidelines for researchers doing research with perpetrators of sexual violence. Pretoria, South Africa: Sexual Violence Research Initiative. Herman, J. (1997). Trauma and recovery. New York, NY: Basic Books. Hinchcliffe, V., and Gavin, H. (2009). Social and virtual networks: Evaluating synchronous online interviews using instant messenger. The Qualitative Report 14(2), 318–​340. Ho, S., and McLeod, D. (2008). Social-​psychological influences on opinion expression in face-​to-​face and computer mediated communication. Communication Research 3(2), 190–​207. Hunter, S. (2010). Evolving narratives about childhood sexual abuse: Challenging the dominance of the victim and survivor paradigm. The Australian and New Zealand Journal of Family Therapy 31(2), 176–​190. Jackson, S. (1978). The social context of rape: Sexual scripts and motivation. Women’s Studies International Quarterly 1, 27–​38. Koss, M., Heise, L., and Russo, N. (1994). The global health burden of rape. Psychology of Women Quarterly 18, 509–​537. Labov, W., and Waletzky, J. (1967). Narrative analysis. In J. Helm (Ed.), Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts (pp. 12–​44). Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press.

U s i n g N a r r ati v e A n a ly s i s  

[ 53 ]

45

Langacker R. (1999). Assessing the cognitive linguistic enterprise. In G. Redeker and T. Janssen (Eds.), Cognitive linguistics: Foundations, scope, methodology (pp. 13–​ 59). Berlin, Germany: de Gruyter. Lamb, S. (1999). Constructing the victim: Popular images and lasting labels. In S. Lamb (Ed.), New versions of victims: Feminists struggle with the concept (pp. 108–​ 138). New York, NY: New York University Press. Laszlo, J. (2008). The science of stories: An introduction to narrative psychology. London, England: Routledge. Leisenring, A. (2006). Confronting “victim” discourses: The identity work of battered women. Symbolic Interaction 29(3), 307–​330. Leitner, L., Faidley, A., and Celentana, M. (2000). Diagnosing human meaning making: An experiential constructivist approach. In R. Neimeyer and J. Raskin (Eds.), Constructions of disorders: Meaning-​making frameworks for psychotherapy (pp. 175–​203). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. McIntosh, J., and McKeganey, N. (2000). Addicts’ narratives of recovery from drug use: Constructing a non-​addict identity. Social Science and Medicine 50, 1501–​1510. Mishler, E. (1986). Research interviewing: Context and narrative. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Muehlenhard, C., Powch, I., Phelps, J., and Giusti, L. (1992). Definitions of rape: Scientific and political implications. Journal of Social Issues 48,  23–​44. Ochs, E. (1997). Cultural dimensions of language acquisition. In N. Coupland and A. Jawroski (Eds.), Sociolinguistics: A reader (pp. 430–​437). New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press. O’Mahoney, J. (2018). Advocacy and the Magdalene Laundries: Towards a psychology of social change. Qualitative Research in Psychology 15(4), 456–​471. O’Mahoney-​Yeager, J., and Culleton, J. (2016). Gendered violence and cultural forgetting: The case of the Irish Magdalenes. Radical History Review 126, 134–​146. Peter, T. (2006). Mad, bad, or victim? Making sense of mother–​daughter sexual abuse. Feminist Criminology 1(4), 283–​302. Reich, N. (2002). Towards a rearticulation of women as victims: A thematic analysis of the construction of women’s identities surrounding gendered violence. Communication Quarterly 50(3), 292–​311. Rice, J. (2002). Getting our histories straight: Culture, narrative, and identity in the self-​help movement. In J. Davis (Ed), Stories of change: Narrative and social movements (pp. 79–​100). New York, NY: State University of New York Press. Riessman, C. (1993). Narrative analysis. London, England: SAGE. Riessman, C. (2008). Narrative methods for the human sciences. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Schank, R., and Abelson, R. (1995). Knowledge and memory: The real story. In R. Wyer Jr. (Ed.), Knowledge and memory: The real story (pp. 1–​85). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Sewell, K., and Williams, A. (2001). Construing stress: A constructivist therapeutic approach to posttraumatic stress reactions. In R. Neimeyer (Ed.), Meaning reconstruction and the experience of loss (293–​310). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

[ 54 ]  Stories Changing Lives

Thompson, M. (2000). Life after rape: A chance to speak? Sexual and Relationship Therapy 15(4), 325–​343. Widdicombe, S., and Wooffitt, R. (1995). The language of youth subcultures: Social identity in action. London, England: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Young, S., and Maguire, K. (2003). Talking about sexual violence. Women and Language 26(2), 40–​52.

U s i n g N a r r ati v e A n a ly s i s  

[ 55 ]

CHAPTER 4

Changing Lives in Unanticipated Ways? Disagreements About Racialized Responsibilities and Ethical Entanglements in Joint Analysis of Narrative Stories ANN PHOENIX

Interviewer: . . . And if you think about our discussion today is this the first time that you’ve thought about any potential impact of your visibly different household and family that you’ve grown up [in], who you are today, [the] kinds of experiences that you’ve had? Danny: . . . So you know I’ve thought about it a lot. The only thing I didn’t think about was how important my brother was which is like something I’ve just taken for granted I think. . . . ’es, so, you know, ah, that’s why I think that again my brother’s role was, was very, very important. I should tell him. Shit. I should tell him (both laugh). Just realised. I should really tell him about this. Yeah. OK. It has become a commonplace that stories change lives. Meretoja (2017) puts this succinctly:  “Narratives enlarge the space of possibilities in which we can act, think, and re-​imagine the world together with others and how they restrain or impoverish this space” (p. 6). The epigraph that starts this chapter comes from the end of an interview analyzed in the following text. Danny, a mixed-​parentage participant, gives a retrospective Ann Phoenix, Changing Lives in Unanticipated Ways? In: Stories Changing Lives. Edited by: Corinne Squire, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190864750.003.0004.

85

interview account of what it was like for him to grow up in a household where racialized differences were visible and in an almost exclusively White neighborhood. Of relevance to this chapter is Danny’s claim that, during the interview, he has come to the realization that his brother was crucial in helping him deal with the racism he experienced in his childhood. The telling of his story changed his world view and, hence, his life in ways that might be minor or major and is likely to produce ethical positions (cf. Meretoja, 2017). That narratives expand and diminish our “spaces of possibilities” has been made particularly clear in the work of political narrative scholars (Andrews, 2017). Francesca Polletta (2016), for example, suggests, Activists, like prophets, politicians, and advertising executives, have long recognized the power of a good story to move people to action. The tale of a chosen people’s wanderings that end in the promised land becomes a clarion call to revolution. A political official is reimagined as an emperor without clothes and dissent that was only whispered becomes voluble. An ordinary man recounts the moment at which he cast off years of fear and shame to acknowledge publicly his homosexuality and members of his audience resolve that they too will come out. (p. 3)

The ways in which narratives stimulate social change are more far-​reaching than this, however. Squire (2012b) suggests that narratives enable social change because key rhetorical tropes and story genres generate social connections that can support (or limit) and catalyze social change. According to Squire (2007), narrative genres are characterized by openness and flux and context serves to multiply narrative meanings. Context is also disruptive and productive in relation both to the future and to responsibility. Narrative thus produces, rather than simply reproducing or representing, morality and is implicated in the multiple ethical calls of the future (Squire, 2012a). It is, of course, not only that stories change the lives of their narrators, but that they are also designed to change the lives of those who listen to or read them. It is in recognition of this that the 2018 BBC Radio 4 series, The Tyranny of Story, starts from the premise that “stories bewitch us. And recent political events have demonstrated quite how potent they can be.” While this formulation has pejorative overtones, there is no one way in which particular stories “bewitch.” People (including narrators) interpret and understand narratives in ways that are contingent on their histories, positioning, ethics, desires and the context of the telling or receiving. Narratives can, therefore, produce different forms of “bewitchment” that

[ 58 ]  Stories Changing Lives

can generate controversy, contestation and division, often in unanticipated ways. Hearing a version of a story may convince some, while estranging others or arousing resistance. For this reason, narratives can simultaneously be received as progressive and as regressive. This has implications for narrative analysis, which necessarily draws on researchers’ perspectives and narrative imagination (Andrews, 2014; Hollway, 2015). In qualitative research more generally, it is commonly acknowledged that researchers are always subjectively engaged with their research material (Lewis, 2010; Thomson, 2011) and that research is co-​constructed between researchers and participants. This makes it important to find ways of making visible researchers’ particular, partial, and unrecognized, perspectives on their research material. One of the ways in which such unacknowledged partialities can be addressed is through joint analysis of research material, which, while relevant to all qualitative analysis, is helpful in understanding how stories can change the lives of participants and researchers. In particular, such group analyses can make analytic decisions transparent and open to challenge, thus offering some protection against unquestioned and idiosyncratic assumptions (Smithson et al., 2015). Yet, there are also problems and difficulties that arise when researchers conduct joint analyses and especially so when the area under discussion is as consequential and potentially vexed as racialization. Tensions between the approaches researchers adopt, and differences in power relations, positioning, and emotional engagement for different members of the research group can become evident in such joint work (Phoenix et  al., 2016; Rodham et  al., 2015). In consequence, the “tyranny of story” can be disrupted by challenges to particular versions of “bewitching” produced through collaborative work and dialogue, but at the cost of managing difficult dynamics and highlighting unequal power relations. The potential for social change may, therefore, result from the social connections that participants and researchers make based on the participants’ stories (Squire, 2012b) and the possibilities for the future they open up (Squire, 2012a). This chapter draws on analyses of two interviews that come from a study funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council that was concerned with the ways in which adults from three different family backgrounds re-​evaluate their earlier experiences over time. The examples, discussed later, come from the substudy of adults who grew up in households that were visibly ethnically different. Both examples are from adults who are of mixed Black–​W hite parentage, a category that is rapidly increasing in UK society and many others (Owen, 2007; Morning, 2012). The chapter considers the ways in which the two accounts are inextricably linked with

C h a n g i n g Li v e s i n U n a n ti c ipat e d  Way s ?  

[ 59 ]

06

the participants’ racialized, gendered positioning, and commitments, which are ethically entangled in their narratives. It focuses on both the narrative construction of identities, which includes the laying out of events as “big stories” and the empirical examination of “small stories.” “Big” and “small” stories are increasingly recognized to be complementary, rather than competing approaches (Bamberg, 2011; Freeman, 2011). The examples show that it is possible to see both small and big stories, micro and macro levels of analyses simultaneously in one set of narrative accounts (McCall, 2005; Wetherell, 2005, p. 170). The narratives of the two research participants presented herein have been selected because they generated analytic disagreements among the research team. They show how disagreements produced in joint analysis raise questions about racialized responsibilities and ethical entanglements in narrative stories. As a result, they have unpredictable impacts on “spaces of possibilities.” The chapter presents narrative analyses of portions of two interviews, one with a woman of mixed parentage (interviewed by me) and one with a man of mixed parentage (interviewed by another member of the research team). It shows some of the complexity of conducting joint analysis of participants’ stories of racialization and racism when researchers have different epistemological approaches to narrative interview research and to what are admirable ways of dealing with racism. In such contexts, ethical contestation about researchers’ responsibilities either to listen uninterrupted or to interrupt participants’ stories and for the analytic meanings to be attributed to participants’ stories allows attention to the ways in which stories change participants’ lives and how they shift the researchers’ “spaces of possibilities.” The two following sections consider, first, the contradictions that can arise in analyzing stories, evoking empathy in some ways and for some researchers and estranging others and, second, researcher contestation over whether or not interviewers missed opportunities to extend the participant’s “space of possibilities” and hence to act ethically in terms of racialization.

EVOKING EMPATHY, AROUSING ALIENATION: MICRO AND MACRO CONTEXTS IN “BIG” AND “SMALL” STORIES

Participants who take part in social research have given their consent to participate and are generally keen to help researchers with their research projects. They are, however, faced with the difficult task of having to make

[ 60 ]  Stories Changing Lives

sense of what the researcher wants and, at the same time, produce responses to questions the researcher has carefully constructed, but that they have never previously encountered. The decision to respond to the “inaugural request” (Burgos, 1991) by starting in one place, rather than another, and produce particular episodes or ideas for the telling can only partly be conscious because the participant has so much to think about and do in a short space of time. It is for this reason that many narrative theorists consider that the beginning of stories and interview responses are particularly rich for analysis, giving insights into participants’ preoccupations, experiences, and world views (Burgos, 1991; Riessman, 2008). Among the things to be negotiated as participants tell their narratives is tellability (Ochs and Capps, 2001). Accounts are only tellable (and hearable) if they are new, reportable, unusual, interesting, funny, or shared stories. Being asked to “tell your story” to a researcher fully focused on listening gives most participants confirmation that they are likely to have a story that is sufficiently interesting to be tellable in the interview context. However, while they meet the lower bounds of tellability, they have to negotiate the upper bounds of tellability (Norrick, 2005), avoiding damaging their reputation with the researcher or giving offense and losing an interviewer’s sympathy and liking. What is tellable is thus co-​constructed in that it is constituted from speakers’ identities together with their reading of what their listeners expect and will find acceptable (Bamberg, 2004) and what they themselves consider worthwhile. The analysis of what research participants consider tellable helps to illuminate the ways in which they are positioning themselves in power relations and political contexts over time as they tell their retrospective stories. As Wetherell (2005) points our “personal standpoints are built from often deeply contradictory and fragmented patchworks of cultural resources” (p.  170). How narratives are heard and the emotional response they evoke stems from researcher positioning and the dynamics of interactions. The tellable and hearable together help with the analysis of the micro-​interactional and macro-​cultural contexts as they intersect. The following extract comes from early in the interview from a participant of mixed Black–​W hite parentage who was in his mid-​20s and grew up with two White parents and was interviewed by a Black woman interviewer who was in her 30s. The first question, “OK. So if we can just start by you telling me your story in relation to growing up in a visibly mixed household?” elicited about a quarter of a page of transcript. The extract starts with the second question.

C h a n g i n g Li v e s i n U n a n ti c ipat e d  Way s ?  

[ 61 ]

26

I: Yeah. When you say that it was apparent that you were different—​ do you remember the first time that you were consciously aware that you were different? DANNY: Errm. Prooobbballyyyy the first time I looked in the mirror (laughs) was, was (inaudible). Um. I: Is that something that you can remember or? DANNY: I, to be honest I can’t remember, er, that. I can remember, erm, experiences of like bullying and teasing. That’s obviously something where at school, where you, you can remember that, yeah, you, your ethnic identity is different from ah, other children in the school. So I can remember like, um, being called a, a, yeah, a, like was it like, I can remember “curry face” was one of the, the (laughs) really, not supposed to laugh (laughs) one of the really, er, you know, um, er, er, kind of imaginative, um, (laughs) insults that I, I got. I think I was always fairly lucky in this respect because in terms of kind of children you have, you know, roughly speaking you always have dominance hierarchies and, um, at school and that’s what a lot of kind of bullying is about. And I was lucky in respect that I  was like physically bigger and stronger, um. And also kind of intellectually quite funny so I really could, I could, er, negotiate my way in, in the hierarchy very easily, um. And so the times when I did have teasing, um, I think it was, er, you know like I say, I can remember that and I can remember maybe two or three other times, er, where it always a case of like I’d essentially beat that person up—​which is, you know, is the right moral, you know, (inaudible) on the situation. But actually as far as children goes it worked quite well. So, um, you know, this was kind of something where it would, it was usually would there, er, er, there was a new person that would come in and they’d perhaps hasn’t, haven’t experienced a person of, you know, African descent and they might say something like that and then, er, things would (inaudible). So generally it was, you know, things would, er, go back to me in that kind of comfortable position within my school groups. Um and, you know, as far as dominance goes it, it was kind of high up, um. Which looking back on things now there’s big ethical issues to do with that but that’s roughly how it was. Um. So yeah. Er. That’s probably one of the areas where your, my ethnic identity was salient. Um. But . . . I: Do you remember how old you were when the bullying first (noises)? DANNY: (noises) errr. Well. Errr. (inaudible) coz I, I know bullying’s usually defined as er, consistent, er, over time, er, occurrence

[ 62 ]  Stories Changing Lives

would like, you can argue about definitions so I wouldn’t consider myself to have been bullied. I consider myself to have been racially abused. Um. And you know on occasion so probably like earliest, earliest memory would beee, ummm, about four, about four. No five. It would be five or six. I: What do you remember of that particular time—​the first one: DANNY: I can remember someone calling, like there was er, (noises) really didn’t like it. OK so I can remember someone that’s actually really good friend of mine now, er. I  can remember coming to a new school. So I’d changed school from, errr, what was it. I was at the first two years, after two years I changed primary school and moved to the new primary school and it was, it was there when I moved in like I was saying about, you know, people’s reactions to people that are different and they haven’t had the chance to kind of meet or being beaten up by (laughs) yeah, it’s er, er that was, I can remember then where a couple of guys were like, um, couple of new guys that I didn’t know that then turned out to be great friends of mine, um, were kind of teasing me. I think they called me “curry face” or er, “blacky” or something like that anyway. Um. And I can remember the, one of the guys that I knew, a friend that I had that was always at this new school, er. It was quite interesting because he seemed to be a bit of a Don King kind of fight promoter (laughs) coz he was like, yeah you know, here’s like er this guy Johnny and er Charlie and there was two guys that he kind of looked up to. They’re like these two hard guys, you know, when you’re five or six, you still have these, these hierarchies, um and it was like yes. I can remember him saying actually like verbatim, “Ah it’s, it’s about all the, the supermen here.” And Johnny lost (laughs) and I won. Um. You know. Which is, not a solution but (laughs) in the group conflict, um, but it essentially kind of worked because, um, I  didn’t have much, er, name calling or anything like that since, er, post that. So yeah I can remember, erm, beating Johnny up, pushing him into a wall. I  can remember chucking, er, another guy who was trying to get involved as well with the, with the, you know, the kind of, er, racism. Er. Kind of just chucking him over the, the, the fence and so I (laughs) I threw him over the fence um. So, er, so yeah. I can remember that. That was probably the earliest one, um. I: What ethnic background were they (inaudible) abusing you? DANNY: Well there, everyone was white British, yeah. I: Was that the case in the whole school?

C h a n g i n g Li v e s i n U n a n ti c ipat e d  Way s ?  

[ 63 ]

46

DANNY: Yeah. The whole school was, er, er, white British with the exclusion of, mm, myself and my brother. Er. And then there was a girl that I, I, I’m not sure what her ethnic background was but I  would imagine, errr, heritage would have been Asian, errrrm, maybe, er, Indian perhaps. I’m not sure. The previous extract contains “small stories” about bullying, being “racially abused” and overcoming this by beating up the boys who abused him, initially with the goading of other boys. This is a “small story” that recurs in the interview, showing that, as Burgos (1991) suggests, the inaugural scene is important in the life story. It also fits into the life narrative that Danny constructs. He makes clear that he is tougher and more intelligent than most of his peers, very much in control of his life and with clear understanding of his experiences both intellectually and emotionally. Danny recounts his story in a jocular manner, interspersed with laughter. This is not unusual in that laughter is the most commonly occurring paralinguistic feature in interviews (Myers and Lampropoulou, 2016). In Danny’s case, the laughter occurs at points where a listener/​reader would not necessarily expect laughter. It, therefore, raises the question of the nature of the laughter. The interjection of “not supposed to laugh” as a point where Danny steps outside the story to speak to the interviewer serves to mark what he is saying as humorous, even though racialized name calling would not usually be considered funny. In discourse analytic terms, this constitutes social action (Antaki, 2011). In this case, it serves to keep the interviewed/​reader “on side” because it is telling her that he does not usually find racist name calling “curry face” or “chucking him [another boy] over the . . . fence” as subjects for levity. It positions the interviewer and himself together before Danny works himself out of the potentially troubled subject positions of both thinking racism and beating up other boys are funny and that he is of low status because he has been called racist names. By taking a theoretical view of “teasing” and dominance hierarchies in school, he makes it clear that he is partly able to look back on this episode with amusement because he was high up the “dominance hierarchy” in his school being “physically bigger and stronger, um. And also kind of intellectually quite funny.” His confidence is not just described, but demonstrated when he rejects the interviewer’s assumption that what he had experienced was bullying before answering her question about his age at first memory of “racial abuse.” The nature of Danny’s telling and his positioning of himself no doubt explains why the interviewer picks up on what was done to Danny, but not his fighting. She does not, therefore, hold him morally

[ 64 ]  Stories Changing Lives

accountable as is common in interactions (Roulston, 2018) for potentially hurting his peers or claiming to have found it funny. The first few turns elicit sympathy or empathy for the participant, describing as he does being subjected to racist abuse as a small child who, at least from an adult perspective, managed the abuse without being painfully diminished or shamed. This is a comfortable and common position for interviewers and for narrative analysts reading such accounts. Yet, these same turns also raise issues of potential arrogance in his description of himself both physically and intellectually, and in his rejection of the interviewer’s assumption that he had been bullied. This impression is further reinforced by the apparent joy and enthusiasm with which Danny recounts the first fight he can remember, sparked by racist abuse aimed at him and encouraged by a peer, with the coda that his fighting worked because he did not have much name calling from boys who knew him after that. In a relatively short time, Danny sets up key themes of being powerful and in control of his life despite various experiences of racism. He sketches in macro relations in terms of racist abuse that enters his almost all-​W hite school any time that “new guys” come. The micro interactions he mentions are where he repeatedly fights to resist racism and establish himself as popular and high up the school (masculine) hierarchy. In telling his story, he also both says that he was “intellectually quite funny” and also does both current intellectual theorizing about the retrospective story he is telling as well as showing his humor. The interviewer found this account engaging and considered Danny inspiring for having risen above racism and being able to theorize his circumstances in an intellectually convincing way with humor. The other members of the analytic group who came both from the Visibly Ethnically Different project group and a project group on mixed ethnic identities were both Black and White and were less engaged and more ambivalent about his account, focusing on the valorization of violence and arrogance and questioning whether he was as unaffected by racist abuse as he suggested. These differences may, of course, be explained by the different histories of the team members and hence their differential positioning. It is, however, not entirely possible to explain the contradictions in responses to Danny’s narratives without going beyond his explicit narrative content to understanding his intertextual performativity in terms of all the identities he “does.” As Gubrium (2006) suggests, this requires paying detailed attention not only to what narrators say and how they say it, but also to the narrative and cultural contexts in which they produce a particular account.

C h a n g i n g Li v e s i n U n a n ti c ipat e d  Way s ?  

[ 65 ]

6

In other words, it requires multilevel analyses that attend simultaneously to “small stories,” “big stories,” and the wider cultural context. In the previous extract, the social positioning that remains silent but is culturally salient is gender and its intersection with racialization. The report of Danny’s recourse to fighting and its glorification as a favored way to gain dominance in social hierarchies is repeatedly found to be an important way in which boys negotiate and establish “hegemonic masculinities” at school (Bhana and Mayeza, 2016; Stahl et  al., 2017). Danny’s narrative reports his negotiation of racialized hegemonic masculinity at primary school and how he uses the intersections of gender and racialization to show why he was not troubled by racialized “abuse.” He is also, however, doing so in the interview context with a somewhat older Black woman. In that context, he “does” power relations by using humor and intellectual force to position himself as powerful and in control in the here and now as well as in the there and then of school. In working to negotiate this positioning in two time frames, he brings a racialized masculine identity into being. For those who only encounter a transcript of his interview, the imputation of arrogance and unease with the celebration of violence is more likely to be unsettling than for the interviewer, who directly negotiated the co-​ construction of the interview with Danny, experienced him as genial and admired his achievements in the face of racism. In Squire’s (2012b) terms, she saw singularities that opened up positive racialized futures. In relation to “stories changing lives,” the analysis indicates that one reason doing interviews often produces greater empathy than analyzing transcripts is because the negotiation of co-​construction in the immediacy and time pressure of an interview leads researchers to notice some issues more than others, whereas reading interviews jointly highlights other issues on the decontextualized page. For both Danny and the interviewer, the encounter is likely to have changed their lives in minor ways that may well be the start of a process of greater change. Through having his story listened to by an interviewer who, as she later made clear, admired his strength of character, gave Danny, not only the insight into what his brother contributed to his negotiation of racism, but also affirmed that his characteristic strategies were both successful and admirable. Such affirmation can be transformative. For the interviewer, Danny’s small stories were heartening, showing that Black and mixed-​parentage young men can deal with racism while remaining unscathed by it and achieving educationally, thus bringing hope to his racialized group. From this viewpoint, the challenge to Danny’s viewpoint from the analytic team did not only challenge the interviewer’s perspective, but challenged what could be viewed as constituting racialized

[ 66 ]  Stories Changing Lives

responsibility and hence an ethical positioning, particularly if racialization is considered in isolation from intersecting categories such as gender. The interviewer thus found it distressing that other researchers questioned her reading. The reasons for the differences would seem partly to be because the ways in which stories can change lives is partly dependent on whether the stories are encountered in two or three dimensions (flat on the page or in person). “Changing lives” does not, however, only result from the interpersonal context. It is also dependent on the sociostructural issues researchers take for granted as important to analyses. For the interviewer, the privileging of racialized analyses while I  took an intersectional gendered/​racialized reading differentiated our understandings and made it difficult for me to overlook the valorizing of violence and arrogance about hierarchical positioning. It was also related to future visions in that the interviewer hoped that her young child would grow up to be like Danny and so be part of a society where people of mixed parentage refuse racism and being positioned as inferior through toughness and intellectual prowess. Our desires and future hopes were, therefore, also different, and the joint analysis of this interview mobilized multiple, complex differences in positioning and so also the resources we brought to bear on hearability/​ seeability. The analysis of Danny’s extract illustrates how his key narratives are both macro-​ social and personal, located in particular sociohistorical contexts and discernible in unspoken silences as well as the explicitly narrated. Bringing together small and big narratives by paying attention to the co-​construction of narratives between a participant and researcher exemplifies microsocial and macrostructural contextual issues. In doing so, it shows that “local contexts” (the immediate context in which the interview takes place, including the interviewer–​interviewee relationship) and wider, societal contexts are inextricably linked.

MISSED OPPORTUNITIES TO TRANSFORM LIVES?

The second extract comes from an interview with a mixed-​parentage woman in her 30s whom I interviewed. Like Danny, she grew up with two White parents in a neighborhood that was almost exclusively White. As with Danny, Alice reported that her parents did not discuss racism. However, unlike his small stories, which all have redemptive features in which he prevails, Alice told a story of deep unhappiness in childhood about her racialized positioning.

C h a n g i n g Li v e s i n U n a n ti c ipat e d  Way s ?  

[ 67 ]

86

I: So did you then a–​a–​at ten you went home and th–​that was the first time you (.) you mentioned to your pa—​you said you mentioned to your mother that you were (.) you were brown. Alice: And she cried. I: Right, w–​what did she say? W–​what made her cry? Was it because you were upset or . . . ? Alice: Yeah, [I think . . . I: because] you’d noticed? Alice: No, she cried because I was upset and it hurt her, it deeply hurt her, she was very emotional, she always used to cry about everything. I remember from (.) as the word dot, we were sat in front of the telly, showin’ all the children in Ethiopia and we were made t–​to run around . . . to raise money to build wells in the Gambia. And the kitchen wall was just covered in photos of children that she sponsored round the world, and we’d be put in charity shop clothes and all her money and time went on CND and “Ban the Bomb” and this and that and the other. But she read my diary when I was 13 and it said “I’m black, I’m fat, I hate myself, no one’s every gonna love me.” I  developed bulimia as a form of coping, which I still suffer from now, which is very frustrating and even though she had read my diary, she never (.) approached the subject with me. I: How do you know she’d read it? Alice: Oh, ’cos I–​I came home from youth club and she was sat there cryin’, I could just tell by the look on her face and her stance, I knew she had read it and I asked her and she said she had. And I think she probably said “do you want to talk about any of this?” and I just said “no” and she never pushed it. It would have (.) I could have done with her to be more assertive . . . Our family didn’t talk about things, ’cos I said to her “no,” that was it, she left it, I was quite dominant, (.) always had to have things my own way, always had to be in control. She had no (.) she didn’t have any reins, there was no real discipline (.) with her, she’s so gentle, she doesn’t agree with shouting and smacking children. But I truly believe, because of my heritage, I could have done with smacks, I needed to have that, I smack my son, he gets some (.) shouts, he needs it, he is wayward and feisty and a–​I  think it’s that fighting spirit from the slave days, I think black children or mixed children are gonna have this energy and feistiness that (.) and you know, [they (white parents) were so calm and la-​de-​da-​de-​da [softly]]. . . . I: You didn’t get on with your brother or . . . ?

[ 68 ]  Stories Changing Lives

Alice: I did get on with him. I: Right, okay. Alice: We got on, just it (.) it was a very, very normal sibling rivalry, I did um (.) I was jealous of him, always, but I did care about him 3-​second pause I definitely took on a motherly role (.) sort of but it was always there. And I remember once, I was getting changed in the sitting room for school in the morning, because they didn’t used to put the heating on, she was tight with the heating ’cos of her upbringing. So I sat by the fire and he came in and went “arggh, put your black body away from me” ’cos I had my boobs out and he doesn’t remember saying it, my mum doesn’t remember him saying it, I remember him saying it. I: She was in the room as well? Alice: Um, no, she wasn’t, she was in the kitchen but he denies it to this day and he’s like “why would I say that?” and I think it was more he just didn’t want to see my boobs ’cos I was his sister but it just came out. I: Yeah, how old were you (.) then? Alice: Oh, I had boobs so I was probably in my teens, I guess. I: Right, and how did you feel, do you remember? Alice: Um, (.) I felt upset but I didn’t allow (.) the pain, so it came back as anger and resentment. But I think the biggest thing for me really, where (.) I am mixed parentage, now I’ve always tried to be white, all–​every summer all my friends would be playing on the beach, I would stay in ’cos as soon as I go in the sun, I go so dark. And I hated it, I used to come home and scrub, literally, for hours in the bath to get the tan off and it was really horrible and I just wore my hair tied back for years and years and years so that it (.) it didn’t notice. And luckily, one of my dad’s friends at his work said “you know, you can get hair relaxer for your daughter” and this is at fifteen, that was a turning point ’cos I find now I can wear my hair down. Both Alice and Danny theorize their racialized experiences, but Danny’s theorization fits with contemporary academic theorization of racism and ethnic identity, while Alice’s reads as both more old-​fashioned and as essentialist, negative popular stereotyping of one of the groups to which she belonged. The impact, therefore, is not just advocacy of unpleasant, and potentially dangerous, parenting practices of smacking children, but of consistent racialized self-​deprecation, whereas Danny was consistently assertive and self-​affirming.

C h a n g i n g Li v e s i n U n a n ti c ipat e d  Way s ?  

[ 69 ]

07

As with Danny’s interview, the joint analysis of Alice’s extract also generated division in the research team, with the researcher who had interviewed Danny expressing shock and anger that I had not challenged Alice’s account. This omission she saw as irresponsible in not giving Alice the opportunity to understand the world differently by disrupting Alice’s stereotypic view that her (Black) heritage meant that she and her son require physical disciplining when she says: But I  truly believe, because of my heritage, I  could have done with smacks, I needed to have that, I smack my son, he gets some (.) shouts, he needs it, he is wayward and feisty and a–​I think it’s that fighting spirit from the slave days, I think black children or mixed children are gonna have this energy and feistiness that (.) and you know (they were so calm and la-​de-​da-​de-​da [softly]).

For the Black woman researcher who protested, unhappiness about my lack of challenge is not only individual, but also about consciousness of the political. Small stories such as Alice’s assertion that she “needed” to be smacked in childhood because of her ancestral history of enslavement fits with stereotypes of Black culture as characterized by harsh disciplining of children and this being natural for Black children. This would have implications for how Black and mixed-​parentage people are viewed and potentially treated. It can also be read as a backward step that could be damaging to recent theorizations of the continuing, complex, and psychosocial impact of enslavement for the societies involved and the descendants (Flax, 2010; Gilroy, 2006; Walkerdine et al., 20123). The potential here is for stories such as Alice’s to change lives for the worse, including her son, if she tells such stories beyond the confines of the interview. It is certainly not the case that I considered this part of Alice’s narrative a praiseworthy world view. Indeed, it is noticeable that I close down the discussion by shifting topic immediately when she finished talking about Black children’s feistiness, going back to an earlier discussion of her brother. Instead, the disagreement in analysis arose from contrasting views of the nature of narrative interviews. I  wanted to hear and understand Alice’s stories from her perspective, with as little interruption as possible. It was, therefore, not appropriate for me to interject either comments or questions designed to challenge her views. This is not to pretend that it is possible to be unmoved by participants’ accounts that one disagrees with profoundly. Various researchers have analyzed the ways in which they have emotions that are deeply uncomfortable during interviews (such anger and hate) when their interview participants say things with which they entirely disagree (Hubbard et al., 2001; Lewis, 2009). There was, however, no one

[ 70 ]  Stories Changing Lives

emotion evoked in the interview. Alice, for example, used the interview as a safe space in which to narrate and re-​encounter her pain, for example, about her brother’s response to seeing her body, which evoked great sympathy in me. Indeed, Alice’s life story was moving in that she made connections between racialized isolation, racism, self-​hatred, and long-​lasting bulimia. For Alice, telling her story through a series of small stories led her to consider that she needed to make changes in her life such as moving with her son to a more ethnically mixed area, something that had crossed her mind before, but that was crystallized in the telling of her story and that she discussed after the interview. One of the narratives that can be read from bringing together the many small stories in Alice’s account is that she rejects the ways in which she was brought up with regard to racialization and is critical of the racism in the area in which she lives. As the interview, I learned a great deal about the complexity of racialized/​gendered intersections in everyday practices that make political change and understanding both difficult (her views of Black children being inherently feisty) and possible in small ways (her criticism of racism and her life and region and her desire to move her son away from such an area). Her potential futures are, thus, aiming toward racialized equality. For the research team, differences in reception of Alice’s account could have led to an entrenchment of strong understandings that racism is always to be challenged directly and immediately as the only possible ethical stance on the one hand and, on the other, her story as a potential turning point with both hope and potential danger.

CONCLUSION

Bringing Danny and Alice’s interviews together highlighted the importance of gendering racialization and racializing gender in that, despite the many similarities in their lives, physical fighting was clearly not an option for Alice in attempting to deal with the racism she faced in school. In addition, her denigrating of her skin color, size and hair are more commonly features of Black women’s narratives produced by the gendered nature of racism and colorism (Phoenix, 2014). She was also concerned with her role as a mother. Even a relatively short extracts from these interviews are thus powerfully inscribed with intersections of gender and racialization. It is, therefore, only possible to understand the nuanced and shifting power relations in which Alice and Danny are positioned and position themselves by taking a simultaneously intersectional and psychosocial approach. In particular, their narratives of racialization required that their personal narratives were situated in political narratives and evoked a range of different emotions for

C h a n g i n g Li v e s i n U n a n ti c ipat e d  Way s ?  

[ 71 ]

27

participants and researchers. Both participants’ narratives opened up particular “spaces of possibilities” in relation to racialization that were linked to their identities and their future visions. The “small stories” that both participants produced in their narrative construction of their identities as well as their “bigger” life stories produced tensions among the research team that were irreconcilable because the researchers were positioned differently and orienting to different aspects of the narratives. What is, however, clear is that these narratives were powerful and all the more so for being consequential. They produced very different notions of the possibility for social change in the researchers, sometimes in ways that were diametrically opposed and where there were sometimes emotionally difficult challenges to their world views. Together, the two interviews illustrate the complexity of the ethical entanglements that become evident when intersecting, potentially oppressive relations, and social positioning are brought into being in narratives. This produces complexity and difference in participants and researchers’ future visions and hence, produces social change in unexpected ways.

REFERENCES Andrews, M. (2017). Enduring ideals: Revisiting “Lifetimes of Commitment” twenty-​ five years later. Contemporary Social Science 12, 153–​163. Andrews, M. (2014). Narrative imagination and everyday life. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Antaki, C. (2011). Six kinds of applied conversation analysis. In C. Antaki, Applied conversation analysis (pp. 1–​14). New York, NY: Springer. Bamberg, M. (2011). Who am I? Narration and its contribution to self and identity. Theory & Psychology 21, 3–​24. Bamberg, M. (2004). Talk, small stories, and adolescent identities. Human Development 47, 366–​369. Bhana, D., and Mayeza, E. (2016). We don’t play with gays, they’re not real boys . . . they can’t fight: Hegemonic masculinity and (homophobic) violence in the primary years of schooling. International Journal of Educational Development 51,  36–​42. Burgos, M. (1991). Introductory talk. “Analyzing Texts” workshop (coordinated by J. Brannen & G. Wilson), Thomas Coram Research Unit, Institute of Education, University of London, England. Flax, J. (2010). Resonances of slavery in race/​gender relations: Shadow at the heart of American politics. New York, NY: Springer. Freeman, M. (2011). Stories, big and small: Toward a synthesis. Theory & Psychology 21, 114–​121. Gilroy, P. (2006). Multiculture in times of war: An inaugural lecture given at the London School of Economics. Critical Quarterly 48, 27–​45.

[ 72 ]  Stories Changing Lives

Gubrium, A. (2006). “I was my momma baby. I was my daddy gal”: Strategic stories of success. Narrative Inquiry 16, 231–​253. Hollway, W. (2015). Knowing mothers: Researching maternal identity change. London, England: Springer. Hubbard, G., Backett-​Milburn, K., and Kemmer, D. (2001). Working with emotion: Issues for the researcher in fieldwork and teamwork. International Journal of Social Research Methodology 4(2), 119–​137. Lewis, G. (2009). Birthing racial difference: Conversations with my mother and others. Studies in the Maternal 1(1), 1–​21. Lewis, G. (2010). Animating hatreds: research encounters, organisational secrets, emotional truths. In R. Ryan-​Flood & R. Gill, R. (Eds.), Secrecy and silence in the research process: Feminist reflections. London, England: Routledge. McCall, L. (2005). The complexity of intersectionality. Signs 30, 1771–​1800. Meretoja, H. (2017). The ethics of storytelling: Narrative hermeneutics, history, and the possible. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Morning, A. (2012). Multiraciality and census classification in global perspective. In R. Edwards (Ed.), International perspectives on racial and ethnic mixedness and mixing (pp. 10–​22). New York, NY: Routledge. Myers, G., Lampropoulou, S. (2016). Laughter, non-​seriousness and transitions in social research interview transcripts. Qualitative Research 16, 78–​94. Norrick, N. R. (2005). The dark side of tellability. Narrative Inquiry 15, 323–​343. Ochs, E., and Capps, L. (2001). A dimensional approach to narrative. In E. Ochs and L. Capps, Living narrative: Creating lives in everyday storytelling (pp. 1–​58). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Owen, C. (2007). Statistics: The mixed category in Census 2001. London, England: Runnymede. Phoenix, A. (2014). Colourism and the politics of beauty. Feminist Review 108(1), 97–​105. Phoenix, A., Brannen, J., Elliott, H., Smithson, J., Morris, P., Smart, C., . . . Bauer, E. (2016). Group analysis in practice: Narrative approaches. FQS 17(2). doi:nbn-​ resolving.de/​urn:nbn:de:0114-​fqs160294 Polletta, F. (2016). Storytelling in social movements. In H. Johnston (Ed.), Culture, social movements, and protest (pp. 43–​64). New York, NY: Routledge. Riessman, C. (2008). Narrative methods for the human sciences. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Rodham, K., Fox, F., and Doran, N. (2015). Exploring analytical trustworthiness and the process of reaching consensus in interpretative phenomenological analysis: Lost in transcription. International Journal of Social Research Methodology 18, 59–​71. Roulston, K. (2018). Qualitative interviewing and epistemics. Qualitative Research 18, 322–​341. Smithson, J., Holmes, J., and Gillies, F. (2015). Integration, assimilation or transformation: Introducing therapists to qualitative research methods, a focus group study. European Journal of Psychotherapy & Counselling 17(3), 296–​313. Squire, C. (2012a). Narratives, connections and social change. Narrative Inquiry 22,  50–​68. Squire, C. (2012b). Narratives and the gift of the future. Narrative Works 2(1). Stahl, G., Nelson, J., and Wallace, D. (2017). Masculinity and aspiration in an era of neoliberal education: International perspectives. London, England: Taylor & Francis.

C h a n g i n g Li v e s i n U n a n ti c ipat e d  Way s ?  

[ 73 ]

47

Thomson, R. (2011). Unfolding lives: Youth, gender and change. Bristol, England: Policy Press. Walkerdine, V., Olsvold, A., and Rudberg, M. (2013). Researching embodiment and intergenerational trauma using the work of Davoine and Gaudilliere: History walked in the door. Subjectivity 6, 272–​297. Wetherell, M. (2005). Unconscious conflict or everyday accountability? British Journal of Social Psychology 44, 169–​175.

[ 74 ]  Stories Changing Lives

CHAPTER 5

Hidden From View Some Written Accounts of Community Activism MICHAEL MURR AY

C

ommunity activism is concerned with various forms of community-​ based activity designed to improve the lives of disadvantaged, oppressed and marginalized groups. It can take various forms, from actions within a locality designed to improve the quality of life of the residents (e.g., organizing clubs and events) to activities designed to access increased resources, which may bring the community into conflict with outside agencies. Key to these developments is the role of individual community activists who are involved in organizing events and initiating actions. The aim of this chapter is to explore the work of such community activists through their written accounts and to consider the role of narrative in providing an organizing frame for local change.

RELUCTANT NARRATORS

While there are many autobiographies of political leaders, there are fewer of community activists. Their work often takes place “below the radar” and does not attract national or international attention. In many ways, these autobiographies can be described as reluctant narratives. The community activist is reluctant to take center stage, at least in subsequent

Michael Murray, Hidden From View In: Stories Changing Lives. Edited by: Corinne Squire, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190864750.003.0005.

67

writing after their actions. Andrews (2007) reports that many of the political activists that she interviewed felt uncomfortable talking about their role in activist activities. One of her respondents, when asked to recall her role, commented, “I felt it rather shocking because I felt it was very self-​ indulgent” (p.  55). The interviewees felt that they were part of a collective endeavor and that to focus on their contribution alone was in some ways narcissistic. These political activists were not people who gained national attention; they were more the foot soldiers who were involved in grassroots activism, and as such their lives overlapped with those of community activists who aim to achieve local change. Andrews (2007) recalled that in an interview with one of the political activists, she asked her about her identity. Her reply was It’s a funny word [identity] isn’t it? . . . I mean if I do something that I wished I  hadn’t, I  think about it, [but I] certainly don’t bother to think about identity . . . I suppose I would only think of myself in terms of . . . what I like . . . what I  do  .  .  .  Perhaps you as the younger generation think more in that kind of way . . . I wouldn’t think many people go on consciously thinking about themselves really. (p. 57)

It wasn’t the interviewees’ individual identity that mattered, but their social or collective identity as social activists. The political narrative they participated in was one of collective struggle for change. Their self-​ identity was subservient to the collective identity. However, the role of the individual social activist can be heightened in accounts written subsequent to their actions. This may not be the intention of the activist narrator, but in publishing their account there lies the danger of focusing on the role of one person in a collective struggle for change. This is especially the case when publication is assisted by a journalist or researcher. Besides a general reluctance to take the spotlight, community activists are often women, who have less of a tradition of preparing public autobiographical accounts, preferring “less public forms to record their life stories” such as letters and diaries (Watson, 1999, p. 1). Further, the few accounts of such activism that have been published are often disseminated by community publishers with limited circulation. This chapter explores the contrasting autobiographies of two Scottish female community activists, which illustrate how they constructed their accounts and how they used these narratives to build support for their ideas.

[ 76 ]  Stories Changing Lives

AUTOBIOGRAPHIES WITH A PURPOSE

Central to the autobiographies of social activists is the aim to engage the reader and in some ways to act as proselytizing documents. In her analysis of the autobiographies of five late 19th-​and early 20th-​century women activists, Martha Watson (1999) characterizes their accounts as rhetorical narratives. They were written with a purpose, which was to convince the reader of the legitimacy of their activism and to appeal to others to join them. Their accounts were not intended as a form of self-​promotion, but rather, as a means of drawing attention to their cause and attracting further support. An important component of such rhetorical narratives was the encouragement of the reader to identify with the rhetor or author. Watson refers to the literary theorist Kenneth Burke (1950) who argued that the key to persuasion lies in identification. The author is someone with whom the reader can identify. They are a person who in many ways is an idealized version of the reader. As Watson (1999) says, they “function to create an audience for their causes; by offering an appealing image of womanhood through enactment in their own lives, they work to generate new support and allegiance among the formerly uncommitted” (p. 5). In doing so, the women activist writers considered by Watson aimed to overcome objections and persuade the reader that not only was their cause just, but it was a cause that should be actively supported. The readers were persuaded to give their support through the process of identification. As Burke argued, “you persuade a man [sic] only insofar as you can talk his language by speech, gesture, tonality, order, image, attitude, idea, identifying your ways with his” (cited in Watson, 1999, p. 12). While most of these processes are not obvious in a written account, there is still opportunity to encourage identification through, for instance, imagery and anecdotes, which can convey both ideas and emotions, in the way that Burke describes. These processes of identification have also been detailed by Moscovici (1976) as being essential components of minority group influence. Another important factor in such influence is the behavioral style of the minority, which needs to include consistency in the message promoted, confidence in the ideas, appearing to be unbiased, and resisting social pressure or abuse. All of these factors are often present in the messages of social activists. A  consistent message is concretized in a future narrative or vision, presented with confidence and despite contrary social pressure. To be effective, this message cannot be presented in a dogmatic manner but needs to be made with flexibility, engaging with the audience and listening to their arguments sympathetically. The message cannot be seen as self-​serving;

Hidde n F r o m Vi e w 

[ 77 ]

87

rather, it will be received more sympathetically if the activist is perceived not to be receiving any personal benefits and even to be experiencing hardship and discomfort—​if they are martyrs for the cause, as it were. In our study of the narrative accounts of community activists, we will consider the extent to which these processes operate.

SOCIAL CONTEXT

Activist accounts are not only written to convince others; they are written in a certain social and political context. Diaries and memoirs are written around the time the events occurred, but in autobiographies, the narrator is often looking back to an earlier time. In exploring these accounts, it is important to realize that they are more than chronologies of events. They are, rather, a selection, ordering and interpretation of events written for a certain audience and located within a particular sociohistorical context. As Freeman (1993) has emphasized, autobiographies are written to convey a certain message for the present audience, but also from the present, looking back. The closer one is to an event, the more difficult it is to place it within that historical context. Although this chapter explores the lives of social activists through their autobiographical accounts, the full detail of their lives requires more detailed study of “less public forms” of reportage. An example of the study of such reportage is illustrated in the work of the historian Roy Foster (2014), who explored the lives of activists involved in the 1916 Irish revolutionary movement through a close reading of the participants’ diaries and letters. He summarized his impression of the future revolutionaries as typified by “disentitlement, frustration, provincialism, self-​dramatization, and the pervasive influence of education” (p. 15). From this background, the activists immersed themselves in the national story of Irish liberation, mixed with the dominant Catholic narrative of martyrdom, such that they were prepared to give their lives to promote national liberation. As Foster (2014) notes, “redemption, epiphany and resurrection provided recurring tropes for the Rising and its aftermath” (p. 291). Admittedly, the “less public forms” of reportage from which Foster developed his argument were largely written at the time of the uprising and less from a distance as is more the case with the political autobiography. However, the religious symbolism in the accounts of these revolutionaries are, as we shall see, not dissimilar to the symbolism in the accounts of some community activists. In exploring the autobiographies of community activists, we need also to consider when they were written and what period they were writing

[ 78 ]  Stories Changing Lives

about. A testimonio is a term used to describe an account by a social activist largely written in present time (Beverley, 2000). The events described are happening now, and the narrator wants to draw attention to them. They are in many ways reports from the front line. A political autobiography is written from a distance and as such the narrator has the luxury of placing events in a broader context. The autobiographies of community activists lie somewhat between the testimonio and the political activist’s autobiography, so we will briefly consider examples of each of these.

Testimonio

In the testimonio, the activist gives witness (cf. Ricoeur, 1972) to an event or series of events or experiences of oppression and exploitation that have been ignored or hidden and that the narrator feels urgently requires remedial action. The focus is less on the narrator, more on the events, what has been done, and what needs to be done. These testimonies, which are sometimes written in collaboration with a journalist or an academic, are illustrated by the accounts of two Latin American women activists, Domitila De Chungara and Rigoberta Menchu. Domitila De Chungara (b. 1937–​d. 2012) was the wife of a Bolivian miner. Her testimony, entitled Let Me Speak (De Chungara & Viezzer, 1978), which was written with the assistance of Moema Viezzer, a Brazilian sociologist, detailed her work in organizing women in Bolivian mining communities. This testimony drew international attention to the vicious exploitation of working people in Bolivia. It was the frontline nature of the narrative that attracted attention of a wide readership beyond Bolivia. In 2005, Domitila and another 999  “Peace Women” were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. When she died, the Bolivian President Evo Morales, who has since been ousted, declared three days of national mourning. Another testimonio was written by Rigoberta Menchu (b.  1959) a Guatemalan indigenous feminist activist who campaigned for human rights during and after her country’s civil war. In 1983, she told her life story to Elisabeth Burgos Debray, a Venezuelan anthropologist, and the resultant book was translated and published in at least five languages. In English the book was called I, Rigoberta Menchú (Menchu, 2010), and again the immediacy of her testimony attracted substantial international attention. In 1992. she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her work. The accuracy of her account was subsequently challenged by the anthropologist David Stoll, and there were calls that her Nobel Prize be withdrawn. The dispute emphasized the political nature of the testimonio as not being

Hidde n F r o m Vi e w 

[ 79 ]

08

intended to be a detailed chronology of events but more an immediate reaction to oppression, which builds emotional rapport with the reader and calls out for support to combat oppression. Critics can subsequently argue over details, but it is the centrality of the message of oppression and resistance which is important. In Menchu’s case, she argued clearly at the outset of her testimonio that she was trying to tell a collective story although it was through the voice of an individual: My name is Rigoberta Menchú. I am twenty-​three years old. This is my testimony. I didn't learn it from a book and I didn't learn it alone. I'd like to stress that it's not only my life, it's also the testimony of my people  .  .  .The important thing is that what has happened to me has happened to many other people too: My story is the story of all poor Guatemalans. My personal experience is the reality of a whole people. (Menchú, 1983/​2010, p. 1)

These testimonios are part of the collective struggle for change; the description of the life of the central narrator is considered subservient to that goal. Such lives are illustrative of the exploitation and denigration of whole communities. As individuals, the authors bear witness to the oppression of their communities and their accounts become calls to action by the broader society. Indeed, despite experiencing abuse, these indigenous activists continued to promote their ideas, and through their testimonios attracted support for them.

POLITICAL AUTOBIOGRAPHIES

Whereas testimonios focus on immediate events, the autobiographies of political activists adopt a longer perspective. However, again, the narrators tend not to draw attention to themselves, but rather to their cause. Their autobiographies are intended more as handbooks for action than as self-​ serving catalogues of events in which the authors have participated. In writing their accounts, the activists aim to explain why they became involved in the activities described and why they adopted their ideas. If their ideas were commonplace, they would be less likely to attract a new audience. What was it that convinced them to adopt what for many were minority views? They then have to detail the various struggles they engaged in, to convince others of the correctness of their ideas but also often of the many difficulties and challenges they had to overcome. This is followed by reflection on the impact of their ideas on themselves and others.

[ 80 ]  Stories Changing Lives

An example considered by Watson (1999) is the autobiography of Emma Goldman (b. 1869–​d. 1940), the anarchist. In writing her account, Goldman clearly detailed her aim: “I am writing the life of Emma Goldman, the public person, not the private individual. I naturally want to let people see what one can do if imbued with an ideal, what one can endure and how one can overcome all difficulties and suffering in life” (Watson, 1999, p. 31). Goldman clearly had a certain audience in mind. As she said, “I am anxious to reach the mass of the American reading public, not so much because of the royalties, but because I have always worked for the mass” (Watson, 1999, p. 32). Central to the political autobiography is the consistent message of change that is conveyed with hope and offering a vision of something better. It is this that is designed to attract the reader to the cause. Serbin (2010), in his analysis of tales of revolution and change, concluded: “Revolution, rebellion, and acts of resistance do not occur without the articulation of compelling stories that enable and empower people who seek to change the material and ideological conditions of their lives” (p. 194). The impact of these stories of change may be augmented by connecting them with religious and spiritual narratives as was the case with the Irish revolutionaries discussed by Foster (2014). Perhaps the most famous example are the speeches of Martin Luther King Jr., who drew upon religious imagery of a promised land to transform a disorganized movement for racial equality into an enthusiastic crusade that involved millions. More recently, Reed (2017), in his study of political activists in 1970s Nicaragua, found that religious stories of prophecy and redemption were interwoven with discussions about political change. Admittedly, the vision of hope may not always be clearly articulated; rather, it is described in the everyday lives of the activists. The very way of being socially active, working as a team and with conviction, illustrates what this vision entails. Indeed, stories of individual self-​sacrifice by religious and political leaders continue to be used to inspire followers in movements for social justice (e.g., Vogt, 2014).

COMMUNITY ACTIVIST NARRATIVES

Political actions take place at different levels. Their character reflects their site of activity, aims and history. Community actions are located in a specific locality, have certain focused aims, and draw upon various historical exemplars. To understand their waxing and waning requires an understanding of their historical and spatial locatedness. In Britain, there was an upsurge in different forms of political action in the 1960s and 1970s, which

Hidde n F r o m Vi e w 

[ 81 ]

28

was reflected not only in large demonstrations and industrial disputes but also in more localized community activism. In the industrial belt of central Scotland with its strong socialist tradition, community activism was commonplace in many of the large housing schemes, which were constructed on the peripheries of the major cities. Lucy Brown (2018) has noted that although the larger labor movement activities at that time have attracted substantial research interest, the more localized community activism has been neglected or even dismissed as conservative and insular. Yet, it is through an understanding of the operation of these community forms of activism, including those conveyed through narratives, that we can begin to see how certain more marginalized groups (e.g., women, older people, the unemployed) can become involved in radical political action. This chapter focuses on the accounts of two well-​known Scottish female community activists who attained substantial “notoriety” in the 1970s and 1990s for their sustained and often heroic work to improve the lives of the residents of their communities. HELEN CRUMMY

Perhaps the most well-​known Scottish community activist over the past 50 years has been Helen Crummy (b. 1920–​d. 2011). Helen was a resident of one of Edinburgh’s more disadvantaged neighborhoods—​Craigmillar. With her neighbors she established the Craigmillar Festival Society, which proved a model for the use of community arts as a driving force for community development. During her lifetime, Helen received many accolades, including an MBE and an honorary doctorate, which, she was swift to point out, were more recognition for the whole Festival Society than for her personally. In 2014, after her death, a statue in her memory was erected in her old neighborhood. She would surely feel uncomfortable about such public recognition but would be keen to award the accolade to her fellow activists. Writing Context

Crummy’s book, entitled Let the People Sing—​A Story of Craigmillar, is a detailed account of her role in the development of community activism in her housing estate. It was published in 1992, the year in which John Major was elected, the leader of a fourth Tory government in a row in Britain. This year inaugurated the closing stages of Thatcherism, during which the public sector in Britain had been savaged in the interests of a faltering

[ 82 ]  Stories Changing Lives

capitalist system. The 1980s had been a period of sustained industrial conflict as workers in the traditional industries, such as coal-​mining and steel-​making, which were very important in central Scotland, fought for their survival. It was the period of Thatcher’s “no such thing as society” philosophy (McSmith, 2011). In her account, Helen set out to challenge this viewpoint and to articulate a contrasting perspective of a caring, sharing society as epitomized by the residents of her housing estate. From the outset, Helen emphasizes in her account her reluctance to take credit for the various community activities in which she participated. “Hidden From View” is the title of the first chapter of this account of her life’s work, improving the conditions in a disadvantaged neighborhood. Although the title is used to describe the housing estate where she lived, in many ways it also captures her everyday experience of community activism. She dedicates the book to the people of Craigmillar and in the preface writes: “Although I pen the story, the story is theirs—​the thousands of Craigmillar folk, who for over sixty years have created and sustained their own brand of sharing, caring and neighborhood commitment” (Crummy, 1992, p. 13). To re-​emphasize the collective nature of “the story,” she follows this comment by listing the names of several hundred people who had worked with her for over half a century. Not only was the book an account of a collective endeavor, but so too was publishing the book. As Helen writes, “perhaps because this book asks some difficult and uncomfortable questions, it was maybe to be expected that there would be difficulty finding a publisher . . . reasons given—​too parochial; too general; not an academic book; not commercially viable” (Crummy, 1992, p. 13). In view of these difficulties, the book was published with help from the community and her family, and Helen lists all those who gave her financial and other support. The book was typeset by her son and the publisher was the author herself—​an example for the reader of cooperative working in practice.

Historical Context

Helen begins her account by locating her upbringing clearly within a neighborhood that from the outset had been neglected—​or in Selbin’s (2010) words, “lost and forgotten.” When she was just eight years of age, her family was rehoused to a new housing estate on the edge of the city of Edinburgh as part of what she describes as a social experiment:

Hidde n F r o m Vi e w 

[ 83 ]

48

Little did we dream we were in at the birth of a vast housing estate. . . . Nor were we aware that we were taking part in an experiment in social engineering. . . . No city father saw fit to inform us that they were guinea pigs, far less consult us, or gear the experiment to our families’ aspirations. They thought it was enough just to house us! (Crummy, 1992, pp. 23–​24)

She locates her early years in a larger world of extended poverty: “It was the hungry thirties! The streets abounded with bow-​legged children suffering from malnutrition, rickets and [tuberculosis]. Scarlet Fever and diphtheria were rife” (p. 26). However, although the community was disadvantaged this did not mean that she thought the residents did not have great strengths. In her own case, she recounts having a happy family life when she was growing up. Her father was a watchmaker, and she recalls both his interest in the arts and in politics. She describes her early exposure to socialist ideals: “Weaned on The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist and brought up on a diet of Dickens, Jack London and Keir Hardie’s socialism, it was hardly surprising that we were politically aware from an early age” (p. 30). Although the residents of the housing estate experienced many challenges, Helen emphasizes their positive qualities: “Yet from day one the Craigmillar community was a caring one!” (p. 32). It was the local people, through community groups, especially the Labour Party, who took up local issues and provided opportunities. The university opened a local education center, to which Helen was quickly drawn. According to Helen, “they were saying, ‘Every human being has a brain and every individual is of value to society. Therefore, each one should be given equal opportunity to develop to their full potential’ ” (p. 34). It was this philosophy that Helen emphasizes in her account. Her fellow residents might be guinea pigs in the eyes of the local authority, but they all had hidden talents, which her life’s work was to help develop. The message to the reader is that the same message would apply to current residents who were suffering the impact of Tory cuts. Helen traces the development of her dream to create a better world to her early adult experiences. Like many of her neighbors, she had joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force during the war. She details the discussions among her fellow women recruits about their big dreams for life after the war, and how they were going to lead this change: Late into the night we would talk politics, dreaming of the day we would build the new Jerusalem and give our children the things we never had—​access to a good education, good health and a nice house. . . . It was a wonderful feeling—​ something few generations of women have ever experienced before. No longer

[ 84 ]  Stories Changing Lives

were we the shy timid creatures who had left home. We came back from the war determined to kick down the door to freedom for women. (Crummy, 1992, p. 37)

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Her description of the combativity of the women postwar, foreshadowed that of the coalminers’ wives during the 1980s, with which Helen was familiar. She and her comrades fought then, and this spirit was one that Helen continued to promote. There would be no gains without struggle.

Change Narrative

The main portion of the book concerns the work of Helen and her colleagues to develop a range of community initiatives and to challenge local government neglect. She recalls that when she returned to the housing estate after her wartime experience, she was confronted by the continuing poverty of her neighborhood. The local school provided limited opportunities for children to learn music. Helen recalls that when she was told this, “A great surge of anger welled up inside me. . . . I resolved I would do something. I had been dithering about for years” (Crummy, 1992, p. 39). She joined the local mothers’ group and quickly became secretary. In this role she became quite active, and then, in discussion, the idea of a local community festival, in contrast to the establishment Edinburgh Festival, was mooted and quickly took off. Initially, it was supported just by a small organizing committee, but as it offered a vision of something exciting and feasible, it quickly attracted support. The communal aspect of the festival organizing is emphasized, but also the ability of ordinary people to take responsibility: That way we demolished yet another wide-​held assumption—​that ordinary people are incapable of taking on responsibility for any aspect of their own lives. To this day the Festival Society is run on the same principle; local people run the organisations, professionals support and help train the people, but never direct them. (Crummy, 1992, p. 44)

Helen was not only the convenor of the community Festival Society but also secretary of the local Labour Party—​a role she later gave up as she wanted the festival society to be seen as non-​political. Initially, many of her fellow Labour Party members thought that the idea of a community festival was frivolous, but she won them around through her consistency and flexibility. The initial festival was a great success, but it steadily grew

Hidde n F r o m Vi e w 

[ 85 ]

68

not just in size but in influence and remit, into a broad community development initiative. Helen again emphasizes the power of ordinary people once they begin to grasp the workings of the system: Information of course is power and ordinary people are on the whole denied access. If the Society was to gain credibility and take more effective action, we needed to do more than beat the loud drum. We had to learn how the system of government worked—​how to use it and beat the authorities at their own game. (Crummy, 1992, p. 50)

Throughout, Helen emphasizes that ordinary people have lots of talent but limited opportunities. It was through the process of conscientization (Freire, 1973) that they could begin to understand the political basis of their disadvantage. She argues with her colleagues who did not want to get involved in politics: “But gradually as they began to realize how the lack of amenities and resources affects community life, they came to see that perhaps only political action would ever bring about change” (Crummy, 1992, p. 53). Hidden from view, on the edge of the city, Helen and her team launched various campaigns. They began to lobby local government for better facilities. Outsiders were initially treated with suspicion, but the Society gradually began to build social links and to involve outsiders in their campaigns. This was a lesson for today: One source of outside power which many of us eyed with suspicion were professionals who told us that they knew best. We came to see that many professionals felt hostile to the work of the Society. It was a revelation though that there were others who were prepared to share their knowledge and expertise with us in order to right the wrongs. (Crummy, 1992, pp. 106–​107)

As the festival grew in size, more local people became involved. The hidden and wasted potential of ordinary people was revealed. Such wasted talent is something that Helen implied was as much the case in the 1990s as it was postwar. As she reflects, “but should we have thought this so remarkable. These talents are there, lying dormant in every community” (p. 63).

Collective Endeavor

Throughout her account, Helen emphasizes that she was part of a collective project. If community action was to succeed, it must be based upon collective endeavor, not on individuals. At one stage, she said,

[ 86 ]  Stories Changing Lives

The Festival Society became for many of us an extension of our family life. Not always a big happy one it is true! Sometimes we argued, fell out and did not always love our neighbour as we should, but woe betide anyone outside Craigmillar who attacked the area or a fellow resident. Then we spoke with one voice, quickly learning that unity is strength. (Crummy, 1992, p. 63)

When the society drew up a constitution, the emphasis was on equality. Helen was sketching a blueprint of how society should operate: “Everyone was equal. Each member of the committee, regardless of who they were, was addressed by their Christian name. But, above all, the emphasis was on doing, not talking” (p. 72). This collective endeavor was central, she felt, in any community organization, as we can see in her description of how the Festival Society was challenging the dominant Thatcherite individualism and the so-​called loadsamoney culture: Every resident in the Craigmillar ward is of right a member of the Society. ALL meetings are open to all residents and organisations. Written into the constitution were safeguards to ensure that the Society belongs for all time to the people of Craigmillar, not to the Society’s staff. The staff are the servants of the community! (p. 106)

However, raising community awareness, the process of conscientization, was not an easy task. Helen soon realized that the arts activities that were initially developed to provide entertainment and enjoyment for the community residents could also be political. Helen harnesses this potential through involving members of the Labour Party in the development of more political plays: The merging of culture and politics (politics with a small “p”) was the beginning of a partnership of men, women and children which was determined to bring great benefit to Craigmillar. But it was a merger with a difference. It was a partnership of equals, with responsibility equally shared, something which had not happened before. (p. 98)

For example, they produce a musical called Catle, Cooncil and Curse, about the lack of social housing. Included in this musical was the song that becomes the Society’s theme song and was included as the motto at the front of the book, highlighting its contemporary relevance: The powerful in the land Can’t bring a change of heart,

Hidde n F r o m Vi e w 

[ 87 ]

8

But history will be made When people play their part. At that time, in Scotland, the playwright John McGrath was having great success touring community centers with the socialist 7:84 theater group (DiCenzo, 2008). His plays with their evocative images of a plundered Scotland provided a vision to those who would use the arts to build political consciousness in working-​class communities. Helen realized the potential of developing similar arts projects in her community: “By marrying the passion of political action to the fun of the Festival, we fought for and won many battles to gain and retain basic amenities necessary for twentieth century urban life” (Crummy, 1992, p. 236). Throughout her account, Helen emphasizes the change potential of ordinary people. In closing, she restates her vision of a better world that underpinned all her community activism and that she believed continued to have contemporary relevance. She summarizes this vision of a new era in inspirational closing words: An era which will question the value system, and work to replace the competitive ethic with one of mutuality—​one of sharing world resources! An era which will free people from the bondage of poverty, widen horizons by providing opportunities to lead a fuller and more meaningful life in a more sharing and caring society! (Crummy, 1992, p. 199)

In Helen’s account, the members of the Festival Society operated like any successful minority group; through consistency and dedication, they attracted others. They were part of the community, and deliberately set out to involve more community members in the planning of events. It was through this process of open, collaborative working that they achieved success. Helen’s account was in many ways a collective autobiography and one that illustrated how through consistent collaborative working and community arts activities, a more sharing society could be modeled.

CATHY MCCORMACK

A complementary but contrasting autobiography, published 17 years later, is that by Cathy McCormack, another Scottish social activist. Cathy was involved in a range of community campaigns, especially around the issue

[ 88 ]  Stories Changing Lives

of poor housing. Unlike Helen Crummy, she was assisted in writing her account by a seasoned and sympathetic journalist, Marian Pallister, who wrote in her endnote to the book that “in helping to put together the text of this book I have tried to be true to Cathy’s voice” (McCormack and Pallister, 2009, p.  267). Marian also noted that Cathy had attempted to write an account on her own but had been distracted by her activities. Marian not only helped to shape the account, but encouraged Cathy to reflect upon her earlier experiences: We talked and talked and I  encouraged her—​sometimes cajoling, sometimes just plain bullying—​to seek out her roots, remember her schooldays, think about the reasons for her parents’ distant stance from each other and their children, and delve into the roots of her own passion to fight injustice. (p. 266)

The finished account portrays Cathy as playing a leading role in many of the campaigns. Unlike with Helen Crummy, Cathy’s account focuses more on her as an individual activist. Her life was what she described as a “journey from ignorance to understanding” (p. 7), at least as seen through the eyes of her editor. Under her guiding hand, Cathy’s account described her childhood and upbringing, then proceeded through her entry into local activism and her involvement in larger campaigns, ending with reflection on her journey. At one stage, Cathy reflects on the difficulty of putting her passion into words. She recalls her early love of imaginative writing and how she tried to use this for a more political purpose. In an echo of Burke’s advice on identification, she is aware of the importance of convincing the reader to identify with the message, but at the same time she found it difficult identifying herself: At school I loved English and I loved to write, but when I first became involved in the campaign I felt I’d become word blind. When I write it is very difficult because it’s about real stuff and it’s like giving birth. In that sense I can’t say I enjoy writing, but for me the most important thing is that people recognise themselves in it. My problem was that I could not recognise myself. Even as I write I have an identity crisis. (McCormack and Pallister, 2009, p. 135)

This identity crisis continues through her account. She lived and worked in the neighborhood she fought to improve, but throughout, she notes the challenges she faced from her neighbors.

Hidde n F r o m Vi e w 

[ 89 ]

09

Writing Context

Cathy’s book was published in 2009, just at the close of the Blairite years. This New Labour government initially attracted great enthusiasm among working people with its advocacy of progressive social reforms, but this turned to demoralization and conflict when the economic impact of its policies began to take effect. There was growing antipathy toward the Labour Party and the New Labour politicians (Steinberg and Johnson, 2004). When asked to stand for political office, Cathy drew back. Politics was another world. As she says, “something happens to politicians. They all speak the same tongue. I realized that to express an opinion in politics or religion, you had to be independent” (McCormack and Pallister, 2009, p.  157). Even as an independent community activist, Cathy experienced distrust among her neighbors and apprehension about her motives. In many ways, hers is a defensive narrative, about someone who campaigned for social changes but who sometimes experienced disparagement and conflict with her neighbors. Further, Cathy recalled that she was not just any activist, she was a woman activist. This meant that she had to consider her image—​how she dressed when going to meetings with officials. As she says: when you’re attending a meeting you have to get your hair done and buy a pair of tights and pay the bus fares. We couldn’t afford any of that and it’s very difficult to get reimbursed for things people don’t even think of. . . . These men we were meeting were power dressers with briefcases. I felt they wouldn’t listen if you turned up in a headscarf. I was never one for fashion, but if needs be, you’ve got to look the part. In my unemployed world, women wore tights with holes in them. Tights just weren’t in the budget—​but it was about making an impression on the people we were meeting. (McCormack and Pallister, 2009, p. 63)

It was not just the people who she met who criticized her image but also the people she represented. When her mother saw her on television her reaction was mixed: “Could you not have got your hair done? Why did you wear that old denim jacket?” (p.  96), she scolded her. Others denigrated her accent. In some ways, her book became a justification for her actions. Her dress, her manners, and now her writing were not designed to advance her own cause, she writes, but that of her community. She was not in it for personal gain, but for the whole community.

[ 90 ]  Stories Changing Lives

Historical Context

Cathy was born into a poor Glasgow family in the early 1950s. These early years set the scene for her life’s work, which was to fight to improve the living conditions of her community. Her father was portrayed as a distant figure, but she recalled him taking her to arts events and trade union meetings. Cathy had ambitions of possibly going to university, but her parents took her out of school early, and she started working in the local corner shop before progressing to work in a tobacco factory where she met her future husband. Looking back, she thought that perhaps it was not the best match—​but then again, “if I had not met Tony I could have been stuck up a leafy middle class suburb like Bearsden with 2.4 weans instead of fighting for justice—​what a boring life that would have been” (McCormack and Pallister, 2009, p. 37). Cathy was soon pregnant and the couple moved into a flat in Easthall, part of the largest public housing scheme in Europe. When she became aware of the dampness in the flat, she complained to the local authority, but they blamed the dampness on the tenants’ lifestyle. The dampness was not peculiar to Cathy’s flat, and she found that other tenants were also complaining. She was invited onto the organizing committee for a local antidampness campaign. This was the start of her local activism. She felt that underlying her activism was concern for her family. This was not something that she could articulate at that time, but it was an emotional reaction that she attributes to her “spirit,” which was a continuing motive for her activism: I felt I’d brought my kids into a society where people were prepared to kill each other for greed, not need.  .  .  .  But my spirit refused to allow me to roll over and pretend that I was dead. Instead it switched a light on inside my head that enabled me to see things that were not beyond my understanding at that time. I did understand that no one was coming to our rescue. And that my duty as a mother was no longer in the kitchen but in the world (McCormack and Pallister, 2009, p. 88).

Cathy was frustrated at what she saw was the negative view of her neighborhood that she encountered: “It was really hurtful to hear the propaganda. It was bad enough living in poverty without getting the blame” (p. 51). It was not just the material deprivation but the attack on her pride, her identity and that of her community. Like Helen Crummy, she was frustrated at the crushed talents of her community that was stigmatized by outsiders.

Hidde n F r o m Vi e w 

[ 91 ]

29

Collective Solidarity

Throughout her account, Cathy describes the challenges she faced in building local support for the various campaigns. She describes conflict in the committee, with her neighbors, and with her family. She felt that this was especially so because she was a woman activist, and as so transgressed traditional gender roles: One of the sad things about the dampness group was that we became so knowledgeable and so vocal that we left some of the residents’ association committee behind. The women in the group had to put up with a lot of hassle from the men. One night I was pinned up against the railings by a group of men who had just finished playing football. Then the teenagers started calling me an Easterhouse grass and giving me hassle. One neighbour stopped me in the street and said I could at least have learned to talk English before I went on the telly. In the committee, there was back-​stabbing. And at home, there was a broken marriage. (McCormack and Pallister, 2009, p. 87)

Despite these reactions, she continued to work on various campaigns. Admittedly, she had to adjust her activities to take account of local feelings, but throughout she felt driven by a belief in social justice. Cathy quickly learned that she could not run too far ahead of her neighbors. For example, when she got funding to make a video with local youth, she backtracks: When some parents objected to a play they were developing with local children they decided to hand the money back: by then I’d learned to go with the flow and to snatch every opportunity to work for justice. Some opportunities were good; some were a mixed blessing. (McCormack and Pallister, 2009, p. 95)

After many years of community action, she got the opportunity to go on a delegation to Nicaragua. Some of her neighbors felt that the visit was self-​serving:  “Word came back that ‘Cathy McCormack was getting ideas above her station and was looking for money to go on a junket’ ” (p. 103). She got funding and describes the impact of meeting the Nicaraguan community activists. The visit encouraged her to reflect on the community tensions in her own neighborhood. It made her realize that while conflict was inevitable, it was important to identify common issues and common ways to bring people together so as to build the necessary shared identity. As she says:

[ 92 ]  Stories Changing Lives

I envied these people and their struggle. At least the people of Nicaragua had diagnosed the root causes of their problems and could work towards a common cure. They were our problems too, but we were still waiting for an honest diagnosis. . . . They were transforming their society by reflecting and acting on their living conditions. They were learning from their own reality and gaining political awareness through defining their own experience. (McCormack and Pallister, 2009, p. 112)

These conflicts are a recurrent theme that Cathy traces throughout the book. Later in her account, she describes how she discussed the challenge with a community psychologist: “We talked about how you could get people to see they were all part of the same struggle and build a common vision” (McCormack and Pallister, 2009, p. 113). Often she felt alone with “all these voices saying I’d got it wrong” (p. 113). Her visit to Nicaragua highlighted the importance of developing a common vision: It’s been a long time in coming, and so much else has happened in my life; but it was the Nicaragua experience that fired me to change our society in the way they were changing theirs. What was most impressive was their solidarity, which didn’t only help strengthen their s truggle, but took away their individual isolation. (p. 113)

A common vision was essential but gaining support for it was the challenge. This was what Cathy struggled with throughout her account. It was not something that could be imposed: “Change has to come from within yourselves and from the community. Popular education gives you the power to change” (McCormack and Pallister, 2009, p. 190). Here she was referring to the Freirean philosophy (Freire, 1973) she had learned from her visit to Nicaragua.

Vision

One of the chapters in Cathy’s account is titled, “The Power of Words:  Without Vision the People Perish.” In it, Cathy details how she attempted to articulate a vision of change that would galvanize her neighbors. As she said, “I started to understand that vision was not just about seeing into the invisible future, but a conviction of the human spirit that what we saw could become visible and real” (McCormack and Pallister, 2009, p. 127).

Hidde n F r o m Vi e w 

[ 93 ]

49

One approach that Cathy explored was connecting her vision with broader religious ideas. This was an approach that she knew had its inherent dangers. Cathy had been brought up a Catholic but stopped going to church. Later, she began to see that the institutionalized church often sided with the wealthy and powerful. Despite these reservations about the institutionalized church, Cathy began to become aware that many religious figures on the ground were also involved in social justice issues. However, she was aware of the widespread apprehension toward public displays of religiosity held by many of her neighbors, particularly problematic when she was herself perceived by some as presenting a morally superior image. She recalls the reaction when she presented a short series of television programs about social issues in the late night religious slot. Although some neighbors agreed with her message, others were not so sympathetic. Cathy also had published a series of Letters to God in a religious newspaper. One started: God, I wish there was some kind of church I could go to for moral and spiritual support, where people could come together to share and make public their pain. A real church, God that belonged to the people instead of the dead churches that have become lost in their dogma and creeds. (p. 133)

Connecting her vision with religious ideas was difficult but it was an approach which Cathy felt gave her access to a common Christian tradition of working for social justice. However, there remained the risk of taking on a mantle of sainthood, which distanced her from some of her neighbors. As her work became more widely known, Cathy was invited to give presentations at national and international meetings. This was a development which again attracted criticism. There remained this tension between being a community activist with roots in a poor community, and being fêted at large international events. At the close, Cathy writes, “When I reflect on my life I can see that people like me are undermined in everything we do. . . . If somebody tells you you’re stupid or ugly or incompetent often enough, you end up believing it” (p. 225). Earlier, she reflected more broadly: “Like millions of other men, women and children, we have become the fag ends of international capitalism. I am not a politician. I am just a mother condemned to live in poverty for the past thirteen years” (p. 147). In the same way as some of her neighbors reacted with apprehension to McCormack’s activities, there was a slightly mixed reaction to her published account. For example, in the five short reviews on Amazon.co.uk, four were very enthusiastically five star, with comments like:

[ 94 ]  Stories Changing Lives

A rare book, in which an authentic local voice attempts to understand the connection between the local and the global, finding similarity rather than difference with the “underclass” in other countries, unflinchingly seeking the truth as only one who has nothing to fear from it can. Read it!

However, one was not so enthusiastic and instead commented, “Not the exciting insight into Community Development and people power I  was expecting. It came across as a long winded CV of a self-​centered person.” A display of achievements by community activists can serve to undermine their work. Hubris is the perception of excessive pride in one’s actions which attracts scorn from your peers. It is the balance between humility and hubris which ensures that the community activist can convince her peers.

NARRATIVES FOR COMMUNITY CHANGE

There were many commonalities in these narrative accounts of community action. The community activists were rooted in their community with which they closely identified, and they came from families with strong political or religious convictions. They were frustrated at what they perceived as the lack of resources and the negative “outsider” social representation of their communities, which they felt was not only unfair but impaired the health and wellbeing of their families. They were angered by the injustice in how their communities were treated, and the way that the residents were blamed for the poor living conditions. They felt that the many talents of the residents were being ignored and frustrated. The move to taking some form of action was gradual in these accounts but predicated on an increasing awareness of the inadequacies in service provision and the perception of relative deprivation in comparison with neighboring areas. The term collective identity was developed by Klandermans (1997) to describe how a shared social identity is connected with a political frame. To address relative deprivation meant developing such an identity, working together to campaign for improved provision of services or living conditions. This was the work of the community activist. A key issue for the community activist in both accounts was articulating a common vision of change. For Helen Crummy, this was achieved through the imaginative power of arts and drama. Her stories of collective endeavor and ignored talents were aimed at building collective solidarity. They were also aimed at challenging the negative social representation of their neighborhood (cf. Murray and Crummett, 2010). Cathy McCormack also used the arts as a means of building local solidarity. She explored potential linkages

Hidde n F r o m Vi e w 

[ 95 ]

69

between stories of local change and broader religious stories of social justice. The latter approach had many dangers as it risked the accusation of self-​righteousness from her neighbors. To be seen as self-​righteous and as profiting personally from the community action could threaten her ability to convince others of the need to become involved in some sort of action. Both these community activists’ accounts were rhetorical narratives of the kind described by Watson (1999)—​they were convincing the reader of the legitimacy of their actions and appealing for support. They were not doing this for any personal gain, but to improve the lot of all the residents. These accounts were those of female activists. Cathy McCormack’s account highlights the particular challenges women encounter from both other women and from men when they begin to publicly agitate for change. From other women, Cathy reported comments about her dress and her accent. From men, she received abuse simply for speaking up. Although these two accounts detailed similar struggles and a common vision, there were differences in how they were told. While Helen’s story was one of collective endeavor, Cathy’s was more a story of individual struggle and self-​sacrifice, perhaps as fashioned by her editor. She could have had a quiet middle-​class life, but instead, in this account, she is presented as having devoted her life to a struggle for social justice. Yet, to emphasize this story of self-​sacrifice risked distancing Cathy from her neighbors. The vision of a better world for all was one that had to be achieved through collective struggle. The two accounts were located between the immediacy of the testimonio and the more measured approach of the political autobiography. Whereas the former focuses on immediate events, the latter draws out ideological underpinnings. Both Helen’s and Cathy’s accounts drew attention to the lack of resources in their communities, and their stigmatization by local authorities. To challenge the dominant cultural narrative, which fostered community exclusion, they both promoted a counternarrative of mutual respect and self-​confidence. In Helen’s case, this counternarrative was based on the traditional socialist and cooperative ideas of the Labour Party but combined with local activism, whereas for Cathy it was based in the ideas of liberation theology around struggle and self-​sacrifice. The counter-​ narratives fostered through involvement in community arts activities and participation in various activist forms of resistance. It was through engaging in arts and other activities that the residents could become aware of their talents. This engagement was combined with the experience of building collective efficacy through activism and resistance. Previously, we have explored the different community representations held by residents of a disadvantaged neighborhood (Murray and Crummett,

[ 96 ]  Stories Changing Lives

2010). While some accepted the stigmatization of the residents, others were frustrated and angry, whereas yet others attempted to resist it in various ways. The role of community activists is to challenge negative representations through revealing the many hidden talents of the residents and campaigning for improved living conditions. Although Helen’s and Cathy’s activism was focused on improving conditions for residents of their communities, their experiences of struggle and resistance made them realize the need for broader change. While they might be condemned as the “fag ends of capitalism,” they deserved more. Their activism was not one with a definite closure but was part of a continuing struggle to create a better world. Their autobiographies were more than immediate testimonies; they were also attempts to place their community activist work within a larger social and political context. They drew out the many personal conflicts they faced, which were overcome by a commitment to social justice. As Dorothy Day (b. 1897–​d. 1980) argued: By fighting for better conditions, by crying out unceasingly for the rights of the workers, the poor, of the destitute . . . we can, to a certain extent, change the world; we can work for the oasis, the little cell of joy and peace in a harried world. We can throw our pebble in the pond and be confident that its ever widening circle will reach around the world. (cited in Vogt, 2014, p. 114).

REFERENCES Andrews, M. (2007). Shaping history: Narratives of political change. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Beverley, J. (2000). Testimonio, subalternity, and narrative authority. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Loncoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (pp. 555–​566). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Brown, L. (2018, February 2). Negotiated communities: Why the history of community action in Scotland matters. Scottish Critical Heritage. Retrieved from https://​scottishcriticalheritage.wordpress.com/​2018/​02/​02/​negotiated-​ communities-​why-​the-​history-​of-​community-​action-​in-​scotland-​matters/​ Burke, K. (1950). Rhetoric of motives. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Crummy, H. (1992). Let the people sing: A story of Craigmillar. Edinburgh, Scotland: Helen Crummy. De Chungara, D.B. and Viezzer, M. (1978) Let me speak. Testimony of Domitila: A woman of the Bolivian mines. New York: Monthly Review Press. DiCenzo, M. (2008). The politics of alternative theatre Britain 1968–​1990: The case of 7:84 (Scotland), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Foster, F. (2014). Vivid faces: The revolutionary generation in Ireland 1890–​1923. London, England: Allen Lane.

Hidde n F r o m Vi e w 

[ 97 ]

89

Freeman, M. (1993). Rewriting the self: History, memory, narrative. London, England: Routledge. Freire, P. (1973). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York, NY: Continuum. Klandermans, B. (1997). The social psychology of protest. Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell. Steinberg, D., and Johnson, R. (Eds.). (2004). Blairism and the war of persuasion. London, England: Lawrence and Wishart. McCormack, C., and Pallister, M. (2009). The wee yellow butterfly. Glendurel, Scotland: Argyll. McSmith, A. (2011). No such thing as society: A history of Britain in the 1980s. London, England: Constable. Menchu, R. (2010). I, Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian woman in Guatemala (2nd ed.). London, England: Verso. (Original work published 1983) Moscovici, S. (1976). Social influence and social change. London, England: Academic. Murray, M., and Crummett, A. (2010). “I don’t think they knew we could do these sorts of things”: Social representations of community and participation in community arts by older people. Journal of Health Psychology 15, 777–​785. Reed, J.-​P. (2017). The Bible, religious storytelling, and revolution: The case of Solentiname, Nicaragua. Critical Research in Religion 5(3), 227–​250. Ricoeur, P. (1972). The hermeneutics of testimony. Anglican Theological Review 61(4), 435–​461. Selbin, E. (2010). Revolution, rebellion, resistance.: The power of story. London, England: Zed Books. Vogt, B. (2014). Saints and social justice. A guide to changing the world. Huntington, VA: Our Sunday Vision. Watson, M. (1999). Lives of their own: Rhetorical dimensions in autobiographies of women activists. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press.

[ 98 ]  Stories Changing Lives

CHAPTER 6

The Power of Bearing Wit(h)ness Intergenerational Storytelling About Racial Violence, Healing, and Resistance ALISA DEL TUFO, MICHELLE FINE , LOREN C AHILL , CHINYERE OKAFOR , AND DONELDA COOK

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” —​Maya Angelou (1969)

W

e write to document and explore the witnessed and potential power of a truth and reconciliation commission (TRC), facilitated in Houston, Texas, galvanized by the vision of a dedicated Black minister working in collaboration with a group of historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). While TRCs are typically designed as spaces for speaking truth to the State and seeking repair, this project, and in this essay, we reconceptualize the TRC as a generative space for surfacing and circulating untold stories of racial violence across generations and as a provocative opportunity for unleashing the Black radical imagination and igniting personal and civic transformation that can arise from that. In this essay, we explore the careful, caring, and public intergenerational “passing” of painful stories of racial injustice and resistance. We do this by documenting an event in which “personal” stories were gracefully handed from elders to youth to be heard, archived, and circulated to further opportunities for change. We propose that through the interpersonal and intergenerational Alisa Del Tufo, Michelle Fine, Loren Cahill, Chinyere Okafor, and Donelda Cook, The Power of Bearing Wit(h)ness  In: Stories Changing Lives. Edited by: Corinne Squire, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190864750.003.0006.

01

transmission of stories of violation, multiple outcomes can arise: personal healing and a strengthened or renewed awareness of agency, deep listening and inspiration, intergenerational connection, leadership development, civic action, and the nurturing of empathy that crosses lines of difference.

OUR INVOLVEMENT

We (Alisa, Michelle, Loren, Chinyere, and Donnie) traveled to Houston to support and consider how one might document, understand, and communicate the power and impact of this event on the various participants (faculty advisors, student interviewers, narrators) that day and over time. Threshold Collaborative had been involved in helping to put the TRC together, bringing their decades of experience in developing community narrative projects to bear. Knowing of the City University of New York’s (CUNY’s) commitment to social justice and participatory practice through other collaborations, CUNY Graduate Center’s Public Science Project was invited to help develop methods to document and share the impact of the TRC; to communicate the power of this process to others; and to fine-​tune the process over time. We immersed ourselves in a day of intergenerational sharing, across communities, race/​ethnicities, (dis)abilities, biographies, and lives. The five of us functioned as ethnographers, shaping the design and planning of the TRC and observing the testimonial sessions, interviewing narrators and students, gathering perspectives from the organizers and the faculty involved. We spent the day troubleshooting, sitting in (when invited) on story sessions, speaking with narrators and interviewers, and listening, listening, listening.

BACKGROUND OF THE HBCU TRC

The HBCU Truth and Reconciliation Oral History Project was conceived by Rev. Steve Miller, founder of the US Christian Leadership Organization (USCLO; www.USCLO.com) and was sponsored by seven HBCUs and two Texas independent universities. Financial support for this effort was local and grassroots with enormous effort provided pro bono. Its title sponsor is Wiley College of Marshall, TX. Other institutions that participated are Texas Southern University, Prairie View A&M University, Southwestern Christian University, Jarvis Christian College, St. Philip’s College, and Huston-​ Tillotson University along with Baylor University and Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary as well as Threshold Collaborative, its

[ 100 ]  Stories Changing Lives

strategic partner. Faculty and graduate students from CUNY Graduate School in NYC participated as observers, documentarians and thought partners. The vision for the TRC specified many goals. In addition to personal healing (for narrators), impact on students (for narrative collectors), and the possibility of igniting a sense of racial history/​civic engagement and social change, another core goal of this and future USCLO TRCs (there has been one held each year at different HBCU’s in Texas in 2017, 2018 and 2019. The TRC planned for 2020 was cancelled due to the COVID 19 pandemic) is to develop and refine methods that will impact the southern evangelical church. As strategized by Reverend Miller, many HBCUs have their roots in the church and a focus of this TRC is and will be the broader faith community, with a particular emphasis on the evangelical church. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “It is appalling that the most segregated hour of Christian America is eleven o’clock on Sunday morning” (King, 1963). He, like many others, believed the Christian church could lead the charge when it came to racial reconciliation. This project is a link in that chain. Despite the pattern of continued segregation, 73% of Christians believe that the church has an important role to play in racial reconciliation. Because of this untapped potential, many believe that the southern evangelical church can and should be more broadly involved in racial justice work. The church must be equipped to move forward with a message of accountability, reconciliation, justice, and healing to participate fully and ethically in this work. Core to Rev. Miller’s vision for USCLO, the HBCU TRC proposes and will demonstrate that the way to engage the church in a manner that embraces these four values is through a process that not only shares the injustice and pain of racism, but also envisions strategies for healing and transcendence. This TRC is a process that will provide space for sharing of wounds, building bridges, and developing strategies for action that will move us forward—​together. To summarize, there are six interwoven goals of the USCLO TRC: 1. Transmission of experience and healing:  Provide the opportunity for people of color to share their experiences of racism and discrimination. 2. Learning and leadership:  Provide valuable learning and leadership opportunities for HBCU students to listen to the stories of and create empathic relationships with people of color who have experienced racism and discrimination. Many of the narrators are older individuals creating important intergenerational connections. 3. Scholarship: Seed research and curricular offerings at HBCU’s inspired by the oral testimonies.

T h e P o w e r of B e a r i n g W it ( h ) n e s s  

[ 101 ]

02 1

4. Civic social change: Develop strategies for civic engagement and change, in universities and youth organizing, through the insights surfaced through the narratives. 5. Faith-​based change and leadership:  Develop strategies for engagement and change within the faith community through the insights surfaced through the narratives. 6. The power of narrative: Develop a better understanding of how intergenerational public storytelling and listening impact those involved and others who eventually listen to, or access, these stories. 7. Building an archive of struggle and resistance, looking back and forward.

THE POWER OF STORIES FOR MAKING CHANGE

The HBCU Oral History Project uses the power of spoken words to heal and to create personal, spiritual, and social change. It does this by asking ordinary people of color to share stories of racial discrimination and documents them through audio and video recordings. Baylor University Oral History Department generously took responsibility for processing, archiving, and organizing all documentation for the material gathered in Houston on February 18, 2017. This took almost six months of work to insure that all materials were properly dealt with. These stories are being preserved and shared through the USCLO (www.usclo.com) website and in the Baylor University Oral History Archives. In addition to students from each academic partner school, faculty advisors also participated with a commitment to utilizing the archived stories for research, writing and curricular design and offerings. In preparing for our involvement in the TRC, we drew from the literature on the power of stories to “move” people and strengthen empathy, both literatures on intergenerational passing of stories and silences, and the literature on TRCs. For instance, we learned much from the significant research on stories passed down across generations in families, such as the elegant writing by Rina Benmayor on Puerto Rican families (Latina Feminist Group, 2001), Jen Ayala (2006) on Latina mothers and daughters and Janie Ward’s (2002) writing on “raising resisters” within African American families, as well as the adverse consequences of silences and traumas passed across generations in families affected by the Holocaust (see Richman, 2002) and Japanese American families who had been interned in the United States during World War II (Nagata, 1993). And we have been influenced by the power of public testimonios and archives gathered outside of families, across place, including the stunning work of Caro Munoz-​ Proto and colleagues (2013) on Memoscopio, as a public online archive of

[ 102 ]  Stories Changing Lives

testimonios for/​about nonviolence, and text-​based and online archives gathered to trace queer history (see Gieseking, 2020), Lesbian Herstory Project and OutHistory.Org [http://​ www.lesbianherstoryarchives.org], and OutHistory.org). In this essay we set out to understand the intergenerational dynamics animated in the local TRC. In her exquisite little book, A Human Being Died That Night, Pumla Gobodo-​Madikizela (2003) writes on the knots of violence, testimony, apology, and healing that entangle in a TRC—​filled with the promise and the inadequacy of telling stories about wounds that never heal: Nothing can ever reverse injustices committed against others. But an apology pronounced in the context of horrible acts has the potential for transformation. It clears or “settles” the air in order to begin reconstructing the broken connections between two human beings. (p. 17)

As Gobodo-​Madikizela explains, TRCs have typically been valued as an opportunity to “heal,” receive apology and hold the State and State actors to account. This was the strategic goal in South Africa, Rwanda, and the hearings held on the abuses in Native boarding schools in Canada. TRC’s in South Africa, Canada, Rwanda and now Colombia, have been held up as an opportunity to enflesh the violence, correct the record, take responsibility, clear the air—​and move on. While we do not have adequate space to catalogue the range of concerns articulated by researchers, activists, community members and narrators, TRCs as designed and implemented have been critiqued heavily (Kros, 2017; Segalo, 2016), problematizing: • who can/​does speak? • in what dialect? • who will listen/​hear? • what kinds of reparations will be provided? • will privilege be challenged or only pain addressed? • will apology suffice or material compensation/​redistribution be provide? • will stories of gendered violence/​rape/​sexual assault and homophobic violence be recognized as State violence? • will perpetrators be punished or exonerated? • will the State or corporations ever be held accountable beyond the individuals who enacted the abuse? • are the courts or the State commissions ever fully dedicated to hearing the systematic atrocities of colonialism, racism and oppression, or will they only persecute spectacular atrocities within the organized atrocity of colonialism/​capitalism/​W hite supremacy?

T h e P o w e r of B e a r i n g W it ( h ) n e s s  

[ 103 ]

0 41

(For examples of critical scholarship, see Gobodo-​Madikizela, 2003; Kros, 2017; Segalo, 2016). With these limitations in mind, we move to describe some of the differences and similarities of the TRC in Houston with others as previously shared (Table  6.1). TRCs represent many things in multiple places around the world. They are complex and multilayered, and we cannot possibly express the full significance of any of them. As the HBCU TRC works to re-​imagine transformational intergenerational storytelling for racial justice in the southern United States we felt it important to lay out some salient distinctions between this TRC and those that have come before. HBCU TRC

International TRCs

Grass roots

Government sanctioned or involved

One to one narrative process

Testifying both one to one and in front of a panel

Community funded

Large grants, UN or gov’t funding

Focus on mobilizing the faith community and other state institutions such as policing, employment, housing and education

Focus on reform in the government and civil sector

A prime focus is on the potential for inspiration and change for narrative gatherers as well as narrators. Secondary goals are to use narratives to motivate social change

A core concept is that personal healing and reparation will heal individuals and “the nation” providing a stronger basis for national healing and reform.

Narrative and advocacy happen at different times due to limits on resources

Testimony and impact occur sequentially

Event held at a location valued by the community

Official setting with significant significance in the eyes of the State

No harm doers were present

Perpetrators have a formal roll and may also provide testimony

Restorative Justice is a value

Restorative Justice is a deliberate goal

[ 104 ]  Stories Changing Lives

HBCU TRC

International TRCs

Story tellers were self-​selected

Those providing official testimony are vetted and chosen by officials Story gatherers are hired by the official TRC body Story sharing may or may not be inter-​generational

Story gatherers were all students at HBCUs Inter-​generational transmission was a key value

The HBCU Oral History Project stands on the shoulders of TRCs internationally, but was also quite distinct. In this TRC, there was no State involvement, either as representatives of the perpetrators of violence or as audience or arbiters of justice. The HBCU Oral History Project was a community and campus-​focused initiative, with more than 50 narrators, 70 students and faculty/​staff from eight universities. The core assumptions of this TRC include: • That storytelling contributes to personal healing from the wounds of racial injustice. • That hearing, documenting, and archiving stories is significant for future generations to know the struggles and the radical persistence of those who came before. • That the lived experiences of ordinary people offer a powerful for scholarship and research. • That hearing stories, within and across communities, within and across generations, can build empathy, solidarity, and action. • That narrating stories can build/​support the foundation for a civil rights movement, for justice and policy transformation in the heart, the community and in the State. • That the faith community has a powerful role to play in making racial justice a reality and that narrative can and should play a central role in that work. Rather than focusing on apology or reparation—​surely important goals—​ this TRC was designed to excavate a full, embodied accounting of racial violence in the U.S. South, across generations, to educate the young who were not taught these stories or histories in schools and to see these stories as inspiration and direction for social justice and change. The project sought stories of spectacular but also everyday violence to make evident how much

T h e P o w e r of B e a r i n g W it ( h ) n e s s  

[ 105 ]

061

racial injustice has been woven into our historic national fabric, moving under the skin of racialized communities and individuals, diving across generational lives, haunting us all.

A MEDITATION ON THE DAY

The day after students arrived by bus from their respective colleges to stay as a group at a Houston hotel, we all arose at 5 am and gathered to travel together, making real the event that we had been planning for the past few years. We entered the Barbara Jordan/​Micky Leland building, and wandered through the Texas Southern University Thurgood Marshall Law School, surrounded by quotes from Barbara Jordan and Micky Leland, Thurgood Marshall, Cesar Chavez, Harriet Tubman, Barack Obama, Chief Justice William Douglas, and Sonia Sotomayor. In that early morning we assigned students to teams (a greeter, documentarian, interviewer); we went over protocol, charged our equipment and then discussed interview techniques one last time. Once these important details were complete, we listened to a vision narrated by Reverend Steve Miller (the prime organizer of the TRC). Students and faculty from HBCU’s, other organizers, and our participant/​observer group listened to a vision of why our nation needs racial healing. We also heard how storytelling might help us to surface the wrongs that citizens of color had experienced and to bring about deeper understanding, empathy, healing, and social change. As we turned off phones and tablets, we were all aware of news of mounting alienation, rising hate crimes, evidence of impending violence from the tops of federal government, rippling across our states and communities. In a large lecture hall where we all gathered, we were collectively embraced in a space that honored those who sacrificed and led movements for racial justice. In brief conversations with students after the morning presentations, Chrissie, an undergraduate from Southwest Christian University, told us that we were “making history.” Another student, Malcolm reflected, “I wanted to be here to be a part of the movement that will help to heal the wounds of racism.” Sabrina offered: “As a young person I hope this will teach us how to understand so that we can be understood.” Once the plan was laid out, the working teams went into action. Narrators, who had come to tell their stories, were already lined up and ready to talk. Teams scurried to their assigned rooms; those at the sign-​in desk warmly greeted people who were waiting to talk and helped them with the paperwork they needed to sign so that their story could be recorded and shared. Once complete, they were escorted to their assigned room by

[ 106 ]  Stories Changing Lives

a “greeter” who brought them where they needed to go, introduced the interview team and told them they would meet them again when they were finished to take them to the hospitality room for refreshment and/​or conversation. Once in the room, the interview team took over to explain the recording equipment, make sure their paperwork was in order, and answer any questions. Interviews were video or audio recorded (narrators could choose) and took between 30 and 90 minutes. In addition, counselors were on site to provide support and care for anyone who might want or need it. Two narrators requested counseling out of over 50 interviews.

THE POWER OF BEARING WIT(H)NESS: AN INTERGENERATIONAL PROJECT FOR RACIAL JUSTICE

A central goal and value of this TRC is the idea that the connections made between narrator and interviewer have power in the moment and beyond for the young interviewer and narrator, and for the larger audience in the room and then working with the archives. What does it mean for those who have experienced discrimination in the past to share with those who essentially represent the future? We were reminded of Jill Bradbury’s (2012) essay “Narrative Possibilities of the Past for the Future: Nostalgia and Hope” in which Bradbury, a South African scholar, speaks on how “the engagement with youth suggests the possibility of writing ourselves into the future by extending our horizons in the lives of others.” (p. 43) In this piece we want to focus on the relationship and impact of the narrators to those who listen: those who gather the stories and those who bear witness and practice “withness.” That is, we want to contribute the concept of the TRC as an opportunity for intergenerational inheritance and inspiration. In Houston, ordinary stories of relentless racial injustice were gathered and recorded by young people (in this case from HBCUs and Christian colleges). By analyzing these dynamics, we seek to understand this TRC as a decolonizing practice—​to tell another story, to help young people hear a history they have been denied, and to model across generations the power of speaking truth and survivance (see Munoz-​Proto et al., 2013; Segalo, 2015, 2016; Segalo et al., 2015; Vizenor, 2008). Every story of discrimination, abuse, injustice, and violence was linked to narratives of survival, coping, and resistance. Although much has been written about the impact of storytelling on the narrator (Gluck and Patai, 2013; Munoz-​Proto et  al, 2013; Segalo, 2015), less studied is the power listening has on the narrative collector.

T h e P o w e r of B e a r i n g W it ( h ) n e s s  

[ 107 ]

0 81

In particular, we are compelled to think about what happens when we listen deeply to another person? How does this experience provide an opportunity for us to suspend our point of view and our own beliefs and judgements? What long-​term impact does sharing this experience with another, different human being do to our sense of identity, of otherness, of human connectivity? Can this form of story sharing inspire or strengthen leadership? Can listening to the stories of racial injustice nurture deeper commitments to work for racial justice? How might a meaningful encounter impact our vision of our history, community and our future? All of these questions are important and embody some of the significant impacts that we believe a TRC can have and are questions that we have only begun to explore. We have developed a process by which, over time, we plan to dive into these important questions. Our impact assessment includes informal conversations with HBCU students after their day of listening; an online survey that every student was asked to complete, and formal interviews with a subgroup of students. Although some of this work is complete, most is still in development and will inform our work as it moves forward. Although we cannot yet answer these questions with full authority we want to share a few of the more powerful expressions of impact that the TRC had on those who did the interviewing. • The more I can connect with the lived experience of those experiencing discrimination, the more likely I am to change my own life in a way that creates more Justice in the World. • It has meant so much more than words could express. It was powerful and heartbreaking at the same time. I was so honored be be a part of this movement. • I really appreciated getting to meet new people from all over the country and reinforcing the idea that there are still people who care enough about the state of our country to want to document other people’s experiences to help them heal. • I have learned a lot from this project. It helped me heal part of my past by telling my story. I also learned a lot by listening to others tell their story. I hope that everyone involved in the process will learn to love each other and treat each other with kindness and respect. • It will remind me on why showing love for everyone and not judging them, regardless of ethnicity, gender, lifestyle will help our communities unite and become stronger.

[ 108 ]  Stories Changing Lives

Much remains to be done in this area before we can draw any conclusions or develop programmatic, activist, or curricular suggestions. However, we will continue to explore the potential of “deep listening” as a means to reach across boundaries of age, class, gender, race, location, and experience. We will continue to document, examine, and explore these impacts as we move forward. We hope that this line of inquiry will expand and strengthen the reasons that oral history and narrative collection can be used as a powerful to bring about racial justice and healing.

THE POWER OF THE STORY

Now we will explore one testimonial scene to try to discern how personal narratives can shift the social world for the narrator, the interviewer, and the rapt young women of color listening to Quin Richardson narrating her story of employment discrimination: Wearing a bright blue and yellow dashiki, large wooden ankh earrings, and long dreadlocks braided into two, draping along her chest, Quin’s very presence was an act of defiance in itself. When originally asked by the Black female student interviewing her for the reason why she came, she gently smiled, paused, and said “I was looking for justice for me.” This quote set the stage for the conversation as we (Loren and Chinyere) slithered into right as the interview began. She graciously and patiently explained the details and context of her wrongful termination with the students and avoided any judgment on what they did or didn’t know. She bridged the gap to understanding all aspects of her situation without undermining and undervaluing the knowledge the students carried. Quin discussed how she was demanded by a new supervisor to no longer sit in an area within the airport because she was told that she was “a black spot on the computer or camera.” She knew because they were recording her every day. She was fired for “insubordination” and patiently describes the weight that doing so holds—​she explains the ways in which one can be denied their unemployment benefits and the corporeal effects that it has. “I have been living for a year without making any money because of a LIE.” She speaks on her loss of medical insurance, loss of income to provide for brother and mother, and how she can no longer visit her family who lives across the nation. The accusers kept referencing back to a policy that Quin explains never existed, because when she asked for the proof of the policy, United Airlines made no attempt or effort to prove such. Offering up another instance of the disrespect of the Black female body:  Quin explained that during the course of her tenure at United, a

T h e P o w e r of B e a r i n g W it ( h ) n e s s  

[ 109 ]

0 1

White woman employee hit her because she supposedly “blocked an area she was trying to get through.” Quin signals both the injustices and her own agency; storytelling becomes a dialogue across time, space, and generations, a story of yesterday but a warning about tomorrow. She details her “contribution” to the situation “I’m very suave with my words, I don’t have to cuss you out to get what I’m saying” and how she sought help: “I went to [human resources], management, and the union and demanded that a particular person not investigate the case against the white female employee because of his racist and prejudiced history with other workers of color.” Despite being wrongfully terminated, Quin told the group that she is committed to seeking justice and sharing her story with as many people that care to listen. She detailed how she repeatedly called the legal defense fund of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), although she has been unable to receive consultation from their lawyers on staff. Quin also contacted the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and was told that they have a large caseload and her case is not a top priority for the Houston office. With a rapidly approaching ending to her statute of limitations, Quin has dared to radically imagine how she can obtain justice outside of legal proceedings. She stated emphatically, “People often tell me that I look like a rebel but they haven’t seen rebel yet, but they will.” Quin Richardson was determined to narrate a story linked to struggles of the past, to embrace young African Americans in the quest for the Black radical imagination, to achieve justice for her workplace discrimination and encourage others to dream for their freedom as well. Emboldened and undeterred, Quin is creating a blueprint for Black justice. Mobilizing a protest on employment discrimination in Houston, she told the audience: I don’t care if I’m out there by myself because it’s my story and the only way I’m going to get somebody to hear me is if I bring attention to it. I will continue to bring attention to it because it’s not just me. It’s many of us.  .  .  .  I’m sick and tired of our people getting wrongfully terminated, killed out in the streets simply because of our color or speaking out against something that is wrong.

Quin connects her struggle to the marginalized collective of Black people in America, past, present and future. She embodies King’s words from his text, Strength to Love: We Negroes have long dreamed of freedom, but still we are confined in an oppressive prison of segregation and discrimination. Must we respond with bitterness and cynicism? Certainly not, for this will destroy and poison our

[ 110 ]  Stories Changing Lives

personalities.  .  .  .  To guard ourselves from bitterness, we need the vision to transfigure both ourselves and American society.

As if embodying King’s spiritual call, Quin refuses negativity and bends toward justice. “When people start talking to me negative I tune them out. I know what it takes. I have to do this. I have to complete this. If I don’t do anything in my life. I have to complete this for me. I have to stand for something. Many of my forefathers have stood for a lot of things and I have to stand for this for me and for them for what they endured for what they died for. I gotta go through it for my nieces and my nephews and for my brothers and sisters. I have got to go through this and I will go through this and I will stay to the end. No matter what the outcome is. I have got to face this company and let them know that what they did to me was wrong and you can’t continue to treat our people like this. This is my place in life. and I have to fulfill it.

Quin links her struggle to ancestors and freedom fighters who came before—​and as she embodied at Texas Southern—​she speaks responsibility for generations yet to come. In her testimony in Houston, Quin Richardson told a rapt audience of young African American women: I pray for you guys because you’re young. My advice is to stay true to yourself. Don’t let anyone convince you that you’re wrong. You’ll have people say to just move forward. You’ll have people that will try to convince you that what the company is saying is what you did. When you know that’s false but you’re in a vulnerable state and you may be tempted to believe. . . . If you know you didn’t do anything don’t let anyone tell you differently. We are only going to stop these things from happening to us by we facing them. It’s been difficult but we have to face them. and we will get justice. In some kind of way I know we will.

Quin ended her interview by speaking a hard truth wrapped in a blanket of radical love: I want a different type of change. For you guys because you guys are gonna go through it when you get out of college. You guys are gonna go through this stuff and you guys should have something implemented so that you don’t have to go through this. . . . Discrimination is gonna be there and they hide it in all types of faces okay? I don’t believe it is never gonna go away.

T h e P o w e r of B e a r i n g W it ( h ) n e s s  

[ 111 ]

2 1

Despite the seemingly pessimistic tone of this statement, its weight and honesty is something that can be held by the students in the room and evaporates like a puddle of water; at the very end of the interview Quin gives hugs to all present shouting “Gimme some love!” and hugging not only the interviewer but the other students and even Loren and me, exemplifying solidarity and Black sisterhood. To end on a quote from Quin itself that I think incorporates all that she brings up in her story as well as the excitement for the future, she holds her fist up and states “I just love my blacknicity. And I’m just gonna fight to the end.” We have been asked to consider how narratives provoke new awakenings and so we turn to Robin Kelley’s (2003) book Freedom Dreams where he writes: Black Radical imagination is the most revolutionary power available to us. Our imagination can enable us to imagine a new society, imagine something different, to realize that things need not always be this way. . . . We live in a society where destruction has become the dominant culture. In order to be truly revolutionary, . . . [we must counteract that by] creating spaces built on love and solidarity. (p. xxi)

In a separate piece, Kelley offers: “Progressive social movements. . . transport us to another place, compel us to relive horrors and, more importantly, enable us to imagine a new society,” 2002, www.newint.org/​kelley11202). The HBCU Oral History Project may be one of “those sorts of spaces—​ protected spaces, enclosed spaces—​not so much in the streets themselves, that people are able to articulate why they’re in it.”

WHAT WE LEARN FROM NARRATIVES OF RACIAL VIOLENCE

James Baldwin (1957) has argued for the power of the “light” in darkness: One discovers the light in darkness, that is what darkness is for; but everything in our lives depends on how we bear the light. It is necessary, while in darkness, to know that in oneself, waiting to be found, there is light. What the light reveals is danger, and what it demands is faith. . . . The light. The light. One will perish without the light. . . . For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we

[ 112 ]  Stories Changing Lives

cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out. (p. 60)

On the wings of Baldwin, with Quin Richardson and the other narrators in mind, we reflect next on the power of narratives as “light” in a world flooded with racial violence and resistance. We review the questions: What did we hear? What did we feel? What did we—​all of we—​learn? How do we now move in the world with these stories layered in the museums of our own bodies, as scholars, writers, activists, and women in a world writhing in pain and radical possibilities. To begin, we heard eloquently the historic continuities of structural violence, dispossession and resistance; we heard how discrimination metabolizes into activism. A month into the Trump administration, with news of hate crimes spiking, years of videos of police violence and murders of Black people circulating, and stories of public schools in Black and Brown neighborhoods closing, we heard stories of long ago, with echoes cut through to today. We could hear, for instance, stories of land being stolen, treaties being violated, and police murdering people of color with no consequence. One narrators spoke of returning home from World War II only to hear, “Whites only.” And we heard continuities of resistance, “Trump is taking us backward,” one Chicano elder explained. “I want children to know these unknown histories, so they can walk in the paths we have walked.” We also heard the pain of misrecognition and the radical demand for recognition of one’s complex personhood. While most writing on justice addresses redistribution, sometimes reparations, it was hard to miss the pain of misrecognition and how powerfully recognition, in the sense that philosopher Nancy Fraser describes, matters. To be seen with dignity; to be validated as a person with a deep grievance; to be appreciated as an agent of justice, a “disruptor, in the best sense” as Brittany described herself, was quite evident. To be in a community of many generations, and many racial/​ethnic groups, to speak a story of truth and receive a hearing—​a deep embodied sometimes tearful hearing, when students spoke back the words and asked for more. These moments were literally and existentially “touching.” They pierced what critical race theorist Charles Mills (2007) calls “epistemologies of ignorance” and revealed, to us all, how inadequate our educations have been. Third, we heard the painful biography of racial wounds, particularly as they fester in the body over time, rarely spoken aloud as children. Two Black women narrators told stories of a “little thing” that happened long ago, that remained like a spike in the belly; a wound of racial violence that provoked tears today. In both cases the women were surprised. There is

T h e P o w e r of B e a r i n g W it ( h ) n e s s  

[ 113 ]

4 1

very little research on the life span of racial/​gender violence. There are surveys of microaggressions and studies that link microaggressions to physical health consequences. But today we heard about incidents 76 years ago, 45 years ago, and 4 years ago; referenced as “small” but still alive like a virus that won’t die; unmetabolized/​discussed with no one or just a few/​ never mourned or resolved in the moment (as seems the case especially for women of color who voiced a commitment to being and seeming “strong”). Yet these wounds remain, and are “blotted out” “dissociated,” or “tried to forget,” but when the tears emerged, they were “amazed”—​”I guess I didn’t really take care of that one.” My little brother, in elementary school at recess, he didn’t freeze right away when the teachers told him to. They said line up. His teacher called him out and told him to grab his ankles and walk like a monkey. . . . Because he didn’t freeze. This may sound like a “little thing” but it hurt deeply. I used to have fear but I’m not scared anymore. As an African American, as a woman AND as an African American woman, I developed “thick skin” and learned “not to cry” and “not to show weakness.” But I am no longer afraid.

Black women were particularly compelling about enduring and embodying “little things” that cut to the core and last a lifetime, done to self and others, advocating and, in the language of Black historian Cheryl Gilkes (1983), “going up for the oppressed” and not showing “vulnerability.” “I didn’t even cry when it happened, surprised it’s still here.” Black women who are carrying individual, familial, structural, and racial pain for self and others, in intimate and public spaces, at work and school and home, have learned that strength matters. But the literatures on hypertension, blood pressure, and depression remind that Zora Neale Hurston’s insight that Black women carry the burdens of the world comes at a high price. And yet we discussed in two sessions, crying today “for the little girl” who never cried when hurt first occurred and dressing as both a slave woman and today’s “every woman” may be cleansing, healing, a way to prepare for collective resistance, and a model for young women coming up. Fourth, we listened to story after story of intimate betrayals in White institutions: While we heard many, “I know some good White people,” or “My godmother told me not all White people are bad,” we heard stories of deep, searing betrayals. Benny Martinez reminded his young interviewer, “We can back from war, and still we weren’t good enough.” Ms. Browning was surprised that in her largely White Lakewood Church, “I brought a

[ 114 ]  Stories Changing Lives

friend of mine, a White woman married to a Black man, and people were staring at her and us.” Chariss spoke about attending a middle school that was mixed, Black and Hispanic and then going to a “mostly White school” and this White boy said, “I would hang this nigger in a tree . . .” and he was a Christian. It hurt me bad. But I put it away; I hold things in a lot, I didn’t tell my family. Just the others who already knew it, and the Vice Principal. Still hurts. Felt so good to tell that story today. That story was living in a very dark place. Being heard—​that was eye opening. This is a history making moment, what we are all doing here.

And finally we were able to bear witness to both the power of cross-​ generational conversations within groups and cross-​ ethnic dialogues. We observed a number of cross-​ethnic dialogues—​a young African American man interviewing a Mexican American elder activist, a White woman interviewing an African American activist, and a Latina interviewing an African American woman. There was something distinct—​simply to note how unusual it is for people to engage with integrity, care, time, and gratitude across racial/​ethnic lines, to birth and midwife, care for and carry, stories from another’s soul.

ONCE THE STORIES ARE RELEASED

In a quite powerful essay, one of the few tracing how stories and their telling wear over time, South African scholar Cynthia Kros (2017) offers an analytically exquisite and painful examination of widows’ testimonies at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and then 20 years later at the Farlam (Marikana) Commission of Inquiry in South Africa. In “We Do Not Want the Commission to Allow the Families to Disappear Into Thin Air”:  A Consideration of Widows’ Testimonies at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the Farlam (Marikana) Commission of Inquiry,” Kros shapes an answer to Gayatri Spivak’s famous question, “Can the subaltern—​the widows of Marikana—​speak?” Kros explores how the women, in both commissions, positioned themselves as witnesses, victims, and survivors; as mourning; as wives of noble and relentless men killed by the officers paid by the mining company and the State; as mothers of traumatized children; and as exiles and “nonwomen” who had been rejected from within their home communities. With critical analytic skill, juxtaposing the TRC and Farlam testimonies, Kros reveals how the women creatively subverted the dominant scripts circulating about

T h e P o w e r of B e a r i n g W it ( h ) n e s s  

[ 115 ]

6 1

their husbands, the mining company, the union, and themselves. They contested the representations of their husbands as “hooligans” and “dangerous criminals” and opened the traumatic wounds of children asking “When will daddy come home?” Kros’s (2017) stunning essay on the performance of narrative in litigious contexts pries open the question of narrative reception, a significant question in Texas:  If the subaltern can speak, Which audiences are worthy? Under what conditions do dominant authorities listen and hear? and Is this even the point? When the crime is anti-​Black state violence, who are worthy audiences? And what are the personal and social consequences for those who testify when their narratives of pain and violence are rejected as not valid/​illegitimate? Kros’s (2017) work invites us to consider—​W hen does evidence convince, particularly evidence about State violence against Black bodies? Consider in the United States the endless stream of devastating videos of White police officers in the U.S.  shooting/​choking/​humiliating/​maiming Black women and men, and the relative absence of guilty convictions against the police in court. These graphic displays of state violence against Black bodies were no surprise to communities of color in the United States and “shocking” to most Whites. Indeed, the subaltern can speak, but who is listening? What is needed to unsettle the State’s (and elite Whites’) refusal to hear? Kros’s work is elegantly set in South African struggles and yet the global echoes of State refusal to acknowledge violence against historically oppressed peoples make us shiver as water cannons douse Natives in the United States, long aggrieved and never heard.

RADICAL POSSIBILITIES AND DISAPPOINTING LIMITS OF NARRATIVES: TURNING TO TEXAS

The Texas TRC, like others, was filled with possibility and flawed by obvious limits. Some narrators came seeking material compensation or legal help and were disappointed that they “only” got to tell their story. We were aware, as well, that stories of sexual violence and discrimination in LGBTQ community were not spoken into this evangelical space. The students were unevenly trained and were not always equipped to handle the emotional weight of the stories that were being foisted into their laps. And the range and velocity of travel, for these stories, remains, of course, to be seen.

[ 116 ]  Stories Changing Lives

Almost a year after the TRC, the bile of White supremacy, racism, anti-​Semitism and “White power” spilled onto the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, and it would be naïve to measure the power of this TRC against the sustained and perhaps fortified public display of White supremacist hatred. The audience for the Oral History Project was unapologetically Black and brown—​not White. The questions of how to stop the violence of White supremacist ideology remain. But the task of translation of stories, across place and time, across generations and movements, is crucial.

SPEAKING TRUTH AND SEEKING HEALING: HEALING FOR THE SOUL—​H OPE FOR THE STRUGGLE

Critical theorist Boaventura de Sousa Santos, reflecting on the World Social Forum, has argued for the “work of translation.” The World Social Forum, he writes, “holds out the hope that another world is possible but reveals the diversity of social struggles fighting against neoliberal globalization . . . and calls for a giant work of translation.. to build articulation, aggregation and coalition” (de Sousa Santos, 2005, pp. 15–​22). The TRC was an intimate, Texas-​based, church-​held “work of translation.” The TRC was, for all of the participants, a pilgrimage to find healing for our souls and inspiration and hope for continuing in the struggle to dismantle systemic racism and racial and anti-​immigration violence. Our time was marked by the bookends of the consolation of the 2008 election of the nation’s first Black president who won with a message of unity and hope and the desolation of the 2016 election of the 45th president who won with a message of divisiveness and hate. Additionally, recent years have been marked by frequent video recordings of police shootings and killings of Black and brown young men and women and accompanying not guilty verdicts for officers. Continual news reports of racism on college campuses brought to light by student protests, and students at HBCUs were front and center in Black Lives Matter protests. The murder of Black people at the hands of police has enraged the nation and the globe, as streets fill with protests and city councils vote to defund police departments, hold police accountable, transform our strategies for building community safety. Traumatic daily messages and demonstrations of hate speech and actions punctuated social media and the airwaves, throughout the 2016 presidential campaign. For three months leading up to our pilgrimage to Houston, participants were experiencing complex shock, grief, anger,

T h e P o w e r of B e a r i n g W it ( h ) n e s s  

[ 117 ]

8 1

despair, fear, and hopelessness of the election and inauguration of the 45th president and his accompanying weapons of mass destruction in the form of executive orders of immigration bans and increased deportations of undocumented residents, along with a national increase in hate crimes and rise in White supremacy groups. The time was ripe for the vision and passionate call from Rev. Steven Miller for folks to come to the TRC Oral History Project at Texas Southern University, to bring us out of a paralyzing sense of defeat into a renewed sense of hope in drawing strength from one another to continue in the struggle. The composition of place—​Texas Southern University, home of the Thurgood Marshall Law Center, the Barbara Jordan and Mickey Leland School of Public Affairs, and Dr.  Thomas Freeman’s legendary debate team, served to remind participants to “stay woke” to the ways that racial violence has been unleashed since the election, and the narratives of the past remind us not to lose hope as we continue in the struggle. We were in a privileged place where Quin, Brittany, Chariss, Mr. Martinez, Ms. Browning, and many others shared their stories of struggles, persistence, and some triumphs—​never giving up because it was too painful, never giving in when they felt hopeless—​knowing that they were fighting for more than their personal circumstances. The narrators shared more than their words, there was power in the narrators so freely sharing such personal stories with strangers—​and the strangers—​students who opted to dispose of interviewing, to enter more deeply into the lived experiences of the narrators until they were strangers no more. Narrators were healed by the freedom to speak without being judged, and students were healed as they listened without judging—​this was indeed the “holy stuff” of “bearing witness and witness.” Although strangers in meeting each other for the first time, interviewers and narrators were not strangers to actual experiences of racial injustices. The mutual appreciation, mutual understanding, kinship, and sense of community generated through the HBCU TRC Oral History Project was deeply inspirational, life-​giving, and healing. The intergenerational and cross-​racial/​ethnic bonds that occurred were steeped in historical and current accounts of radical persistence and resistance in fighting racism and racial violence that shook participants from the temporary stupor of defeat into fortitude for the continued struggle. This TRC began as a dream from a man with vision, forged at the intersection of history, religion and a yearning for racial justice. And yet in the enactment, the vision cast a bold shadow, with implications not only for the narrators but for a series of civic institutions—​churches and universities—​ that stood together to open and support a space where testimonies would

[ 118 ]  Stories Changing Lives

be spoken; intergenerational truths passed on, and where a radical imagination could be ignited.

REFERENCES Angelou, M. (1969). I know why the caged bird sings. New York, NY: Wiley. Baldwin, J. (1964, 2008). Nothing personal. Contributions in Black Studies. The Blues Vision 6(5), 49–​60. Baldwin, J. (1957). Sonny’s blues. New York, NY: Penguin Books. Bradbury, J. (2012). Narrative possibilities of the past for the future: Nostalgia and hope. Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology 18(3), 341–​350. Fraser, N. (2000, May–​June). Rethinking recognition. New Left Review 3. Gieseking, J. (2020). A Queer New York: Geographies of lesbians, dykes and queers. New York, NY: NYU Press. Gilkes, C. (1983). Going up for the oppressed. Journal of Social Issues 39(3), 115–​139. Gluck, S., and Patai, D. (2013). Women’s words: The feminist practice of oral history. New York, NY: Routledge. Gobodo-​Madikizela, P. (2003). A human being died that night. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin. Kelley, R. (2002). Freedom dreams. New International. www.newint.org (accessed 6.8.20). Kelley, R. (2003). Freedom dreams: The Black Radical imagination. New York, NY: Penguin Random House. Kros, C. (2017). “We do not want the Commission to allow the families to disappear into thin air”: A consideration of widows’ testimonies at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the Farlam (Marikana) Commission of Inquiry. Psychology in Society 56. http://​dx.doi.org/​10.17159/​2309-​8708/​2017/​n55a4 Latina Feminist Group. (2001). Telling to live: Latina feminist testimonios. Durham: Duke University Press. Mills, C. (2007). White ignorance. In S. Sullivan and N. Tuana (Eds.), Epistemologies of race and ignorance (pp. 13–​38). Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Munoz-​Proto, C., Lyon, A., Castillo, C., and Battisella, M. (2013). Memoscopio: Producing usable and collectively owned knowledge about the World March for Peace and Nonviolence. Journal of Social Issues 69(4), 754–​770. Nagata, D. (1993). Legacy of injustice.: Exploring the cross generational impact of the Japanese American internment. New York, NY: Springer. Richman, S. (2002). A wolf in the attic: The legacy of a hidden child in the Holcaust. New York, NY: Routledge. Segalo, P. (2016). Using cotton, needles and threads to Break the women’s silence: Embroideries as a decolonising framework. Journal of Inclusive Education 20(3), 246–​260. http://​dx.doi.org/​10.1080/​ 13603116.2015.1047661[dx.doi.org] Segalo, P. (2015). Trauma and gender. Social and Personality Psychology Compass 9(9), 447–​454. Segalo, P., Manoff, E., and Fine, M. (2015). Working with embroideries and counter-​ maps: Engaging memory and imagination within decolonizing frameworks. Journal of Social and Political Psychology 3(1), 342–​364. Vizenor, G. (2008). Survivance. Omaha, NE: University of Nebraska Press.

T h e P o w e r of B e a r i n g W it ( h ) n e s s  

[ 119 ]

CHAPTER 7

Living Lives of Resistance in Multiple Registers Dialogic Co-​Constructions, Genocidal Violence, and Postgenocide Transitional Justice M. BRINTON LYKES

Human rights are, in fact, social constructions. They are cultural inventions, and not natural discoveries . . . Human rights are an historical fact. . . . one cosmovision—​which can be enriched by others as much as it enriches others’ cosmovisions. . . . Every abstraction, every conceptualization, every classification or codification needs to be embraced with the humility that it is only one possible act of relation. . . . The act of knowing is always performed by a subjectivity specified by locations in cultural time and space. Esteva and Prakash (1998/​2014, pp. 121–​127)

T

he narrative turn in the social sciences in 1960s was, among other things, a shift away from an analysis of macro structural realities toward privileging individual stories or performances of identities (Riessman, 2008). During the same period social scientists in the Global South (Fals Borda and Rahman, 1991)  proffered an alternative turn through which they and peasants with whom they worked critically analyzed structural realities that marginalized and impoverished majority populations, developing critical consciousness and generating collective actions toward M. Brinton Lykes, Living Lives of Resistance in Multiple Registers In: Stories Changing Lives. Edited by: Corinne Squire, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190864750.003.0007.

21

transformative change. As a feminist activist scholar and community cultural psychologist, I  have iteratively deployed both of these onto-​ epistemologies while accompanying Mayan women and children during and in the wake of genocidal violence. Through drawings, dramatizations, storytelling, photography, and Mayan beliefs and practices women re-​ membered individual and collective violations and creatively imagined, and then enacted, community-​based projects. Twenty co-​researchers published their community’s photoPAR, through which Maya Ixil and K’iche’ women documented their experiences of the armed conflict and the women’s organization through which they were building a better life for their children and themselves (see, e.g., Women of PhotoVoice/​ADMI and Lykes, 2000; Lykes, 2010; Lykes et  al., 1999; see also Kessi, this volume, for a discussion of photovoice as a resource for dismantling current structures of oppression and colonial power). Through phototexts the women narrated war’s horrors and their sorrows, fears, and losses and some stories of resistance including one woman’s decision to join the guerrilla movement and what she learned therein. Although they revindicated their rights as women through multiple stories about their current organizing, la violencia (the violence) was the most common moniker through which these rural women voiced stories of their spouses’, siblings’, parents’ and children’s murders; rapes of local women; and massacres in surrounding villages. This photoPAR process stopped short of visibilizing structural marginalization and oppression of the Maya dating from 500 years of colonial dispossession or the ongoing violence and impoverishment that had mobilized so many from their families to join or support the armed resistance in the 1970s.1 Published after the 1996 signing of peace accords that putatively ended a 36-​year armed conflict between the Guatemalan army and the umbrella guerrilla organization, the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG, for its Spanish name),2 was la violencia a discursive performance developed during decades of being silenced by threats of assassination or disappearance? Or did it rather reflect present-​day campesinas’ (peasant farmers’) self-​silencing through which they evaded positioning themselves vis-​à-​vis the dominant militarized narrative of the genocidal violence or the liberatory counternarrative of the guerrilla? In this chapter I  discuss one Maya Ixil woman’s narratives about her life during two moments of significant social change within Guatemala: the 1980s armed struggle and the “judicial spring” of the 21st century. I met Maria Izabel (a pseudonym) in Mexico in 1984, and the narratives discussed herein are from interviews conducted in Guatemala in 1993 and 2015.3 She had joined the armed resistance during its ascendancy in her rural Ixil community in the 1970s and early 1980s.4 Within that context, she and

[ 122 ]  Stories Changing Lives

a dozen other Maya risked their lives in a high-​profile political action in Guatemala City (Falla, 2016; Lykes, 1994). After nearly10  years of living and working within the political resistance in exile in Mexico, Maria Izabel returned to Guatemala, alone, to an urban community that was not “her home,” silencing stories from her previous 15 years as a guerrilla and political refugee. She sought to reposition herself within a different sociopolitical, historical moment—​one dominated by peace accords and transitional justice—​and permeated by persistent gendered and racialized violence. Fivush (2010) argues that both voice and silence can constitute resistance narratives and that they must be analyzed “within evolving power structures at multiple levels of social organization” (p. 90). Bhattacharya (2009) demonstrates how women’s silence in response to sexual violence is one way of resisting complex power structures where different systems of oppression and marginalization intersect in rural India. Eastmond and Selimovic (2012) document how silence is a strategy through which former enemies living side by side in small communities manage daily life. Although I have experienced similar interpersonal dynamics in rural Guatemala, in this chapter I  analyze voice and silence as one Maya Ixil woman narrates herself within and over against dominant narratives in Guatemala at distinct historic moments.5 I argue that there is a continuous thread of resistance woven from Maria Izabel’s distinctive performances of voice and silence, both of which are dialectically performed vis-​à-​vis a dominant narrative characteristic of social change in these two historical moments. I  suggest that her praxis of silence is a counternarrative that resists the transitional justice paradigm and human rights culture. The analyses point to some of what we might find if we attend more carefully to the local beliefs and cosmovisions as well as the silences or unspoken gestures and performances of Mayan resistance and survivance (Vizenor, 2008). It resonates with a growing number of indigenous scholars and activists, among others, who critique the neoliberal or neocolonial discourse of universal human rights. Thus, the chapter serves as a cautionary tale for activist scholars who, like me, are outsiders, invited to accompany indigenous people and to humbly and reflexively recognize our own cosmovision as one within a pluriverse.

RESPONDING TO HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS: CRITICALLY ENGAGING TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE

The truth commissions (Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico [CEH], 1999; Oficina de Derechos Humanos del Arzobispo de Guatemala,

Li v i n g Li v e s of R e s i s ta n c e i n M u ltip l e R e g i s t e r s  

[ 123 ]

2 41

1998) were two among multiple responses to the gross violations of human rights in Guatemala during the late 20th century; others include criminal trials, reparations processes, and guarantees of the conflict’s nonrecurrence, constituting what have been called the “four pillars of transitional justice” or a “transitional justice paradigm” (Hamber, 2009; Hayner, 2001/​2011; Teitel, 2000). Guatemalan human rights activists and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) as well as survivors and their families seek redress from the perpetrator state that the CEH (1999) found responsible for 93% of the gross violations of human rights during the armed conflict. Some have partnered with lawyers to launch trials, several of which have successfully prosecuted those responsible in precedent-​setting cases.6 These initiatives in the wake of armed conflict rely in large part on victims’ testimonies about their own or their families’ violations, narratives that have successfully wrested some forms of redress from the perpetrator state. Trials and other transitional justice practices have required extraordinary courage and persistent protagonism on the parts of survivors, their families, and their communities. They have been accompanied by Guatemalan and transnational human rights lawyers, judges, and activists and together succeeded in holding a small number of perpetrators accountable for gross violations of human rights—​ actions that I  continue to respect and applaud. However, I, among others, have begun to question the universal application of these Western neoliberal, judicial processes (see Crosby and Lykes, 2019; Sieder, 2017). Criticism has focused on court cases’ almost exclusive dependence on individual victims’ testimonies.7 The latter are delivered in anticipation of receiving symbolic and material reparations, which are rarely awarded—​and even when they are, never return testifiers to the status quo ante, as promised by international law. Legal proceedings are discursively constructed within a transitional justice paradigm and include expert witnesses who draw on forensic and other evidence to support individual survivor’s personal stories. The format forces victims to verbalize unspeakable horrors and then “listen” as others, including Western-​trained psychologists and psychiatrists, testify “about them.”8 Based on extensive fieldwork, Vanthuyne (2008) argues that in Guatemala “the social and political-​legal recognition of survivors of massacres operates principally through the identity of victim” (p. 68). Crosby and Lykes (2019) and Razack (2007) critique a similar shift from the invisibility of women as victims of sexual violence during armed conflict to the current hypervisibilization of women-​as-​victims. Feminists and other human rights activists in postgenocide contexts who protest sexual violence against women all too often reduce women’s suffering to bodily assault, marginalizing gendered violations including the assassinations of

[ 124 ]  Stories Changing Lives

their husbands, the confiscation of their lands, and their and their children’s ongoing impoverishment (see, e.g., Crosby and Lykes, 2019; Laplante and Theidon, 2007). These transitional justice processes are grounded in Western philosophical assumptions of an autonomous or possessive individual who has, within the last 100  years, become the “possessor of human rights” (Esteva and Prakash, 1998/​2014, p. 122). This increasing globalization of a dominant “human rights culture” (Schaffer and Smith, 2004) reflects a modern construction wherein “[d]‌esires have been transformed into needs, and needs into rights,” replacing the earlier centrality of moral obligations and duties (p. 122). These changes shape and are mediated or shaped by local and international advocates and activists.9 TFirst, these TJ processes require survivors to narrate themselves as victims, marginalizing or restricting multiple other possible present or imagined future selves and stories potentially emergent in the wake of these atrocities (Vanthuyne and Falla, 2016). Second, by foregrounding individual perpetrators and victims, the processes eschew the possibility of interrogating and/​or transforming underlying structures of racialized gendered violence and economic inequities identified as root causes of many armed conflicts and gross violations of human rights (Gready and Robins, 2014). Third, this testimony-​based mandate to “speak” about terror imposes a singular performative speech-​ act wherein the “othered victim” and the courtroom communicate. Yet, as Raimón Panikkar (n.d.) has written, [A]‌n authentic understanding of the other that allows for true mutual communication . . . [requires that one] traverse the limits of one’s own particular language . . . looking to open oneself to him (sic) without fearing the loss of one’s own positions and even with the conviction that those positions will find themselves enriched by what the other brings.

The courtroom performance obfuscates such authentic understanding, preventing, in Panikkar’s words, listeners from “standing under” survivors, from opening themselves to the latter’s multiple, sometimes contradictory performances that may include silence immanent in the wake of horrific human rights violations. These mechanisms also marginalize stories of resistance including those of how and why Maya and ladinx sought a more just and equitable country through armed struggle or through organizing non-​violent protests and social movements (see Grandin et al., 2011). “Innocent victims” are the only ones permitted to testify, and “complex victims” (Bouris, 2007), that is, those who are both perpetrators and victims, are not legitimate claimants

Li v i n g Li v e s of R e s i s ta n c e i n M u ltip l e R e g i s t e r s  

[ 125 ]

261

for redress. Narratives of how protagonists sought transformative structural changes through armed struggle (see, e.g., Colom, 1998; Hernández Alarcón et  al., 2008; Payeras, 1983)  and, failing that, bonding together to ensure their survival and dignity through, among other initiatives, Communities of Populations in Resistance (CPR; see, e.g., Gurriarán et al., 2013; Falla, 2016) are forced to the margins, excluded from these processes. Also less well known are stories of the “normal abnormality” (Martín-​Baró, 1994)  of war or the ordinary-​exceptionality of the “everyday work of repair” postgenocide (Das, 2007, p. 62). Victim narratives become the primary or exclusive stories through which a wider national and international community as well as future generations re-​member Guatemala’s history. This chapter is a partial response to some of these challenges, filling some of the gaps in human rights and transitional justice scholarship through the analysis and reanalysis of narratives developed by one Maya Ixil woman at two distinct historical moments of profound social change.

REFLEXIVITY AND DIALOGIC RELATIONSHIPS OF SOLIDARITY

The narratives analyzed in this chapter were co-​constructed through two in-​depth interviews that bookend nearly three decades of a personal relationship that informed and was informed by my activist scholarship with Maria Izabel’s pueblo (people/​community). During those years I also sought to understand what seemed to me to be her contradictory positionings within and then outside of the Guatemalan revolution. Maria Izabel remained silent about her militancy upon her return to Guatemala as peace accords were being signed, despite having taken a public and publicly resonant action on behalf of her pueblo in 1980. In this chapter, I revisit this perceived rupture in her activism: an adolescent girl who “broke silence” through revolutionary praxis (Lykes, 1994) who was now a self-​silencing professional mother. Her ongoing protests against gendered racialized violence in the late 1990s and her defense of Mayan women in multiple venues in the early 20th century defied a linear, normative developmental psychological framing of the change. One might have positioned Maria Izabel as having moved from a youthful radical to a more accommodating adult professional and mother. However, she had not “burned out” or adapted to the system. Through reanalyzing narratives from the 1992 interview alongside those from 2015 and repositioning myself vis-​à-​vis the multiple possible meanings of postrevolution silence, I sought to “stand under” Maria Izabel’s narratives at these distinctly different historical moments of social change in Guatemala.

[ 126 ]  Stories Changing Lives

CO-​C ONSTRUCTING NOS/​O TRAS THROUGH AFFIRMATIONS OF DIFFERENCE

Maria Izabel’s dialectical social individuality is narrated as both emergent from her protagonism in 1980s Guatemala and as dialogically co-​ constructed through our friend-​as-​family relationship that was also the base from which I  accompanied Maya Ixil women and children in her pueblo. I  positioned myself in pragmatic solidarity (Farmer, 2013)  alongside civilian supporters of the Guatemalan revolutionary struggle. I  was also positioned as a UnitedStatesian whose government supported many of the horrors that unfolded in the Guatemalan Highlands in the 1970s and 1980s—​a participation that was only beginning to be publicly known yet persistently denied by U.S. officials when Maria Izabel and I met in Mexico in the 1980s. As an activist antiracist and feminist transnational scholar, my engagement with the resistance inside Guatemala was nurtured and took form through my “psychosocial accompaniment” (Watkins, 2015) of Guatemalan Maya in the United States and Mexico and, then, within Guatemala. The intellectual preoccupations that informed the PhD research on which I was working when I began this journey included a critique of U.S. exceptionalism and of the autonomous individualism underlying psychological theories of self and subjectivity (Lykes, 1985). Mayan communitarian values, beliefs, and practices informed my developing ideas about sociality and social individuality. The feminist participatory and action research that I  subsequently developed with Mayan health promoters and community women afforded me multiple opportunities to engage with, listen to, and co-​document stories of armed conflict and its sequelae (see, among others, Women of PhotoVoice/​ADMI and Lykes, 2000). Yet my solidarity with the Guatemalan movements for social change also constrained what I would/​could see and hear during those years.

NARRATING ONE CHOICE FOR ARMED STRUGGLE

As previously reported, Maria Izabel took up arms, joining a revolutionary struggle for social change when she was 14  years old. In describing that choice in both our 1992 and 2015 interviews, she focused on her experiences growing up among four sisters and many cousins, with ample time for playing in the surrounding Cuchumatanes Mountains. In the former, she had recently returned from exile in Mexico and encountered her parents, three of her sisters, and the news that her youngest sister, who had also joined the URNG, had been killed in a military ambush. The latter’s body

Li v i n g Li v e s of R e s i s ta n c e i n M u ltip l e R e g i s t e r s  

[ 127 ]

2 81

had not yet been recovered—​robbing her parents of fulfilling their desires as well as the Mayan practice of burying one’s loved one within her pueblo. By 2015 she had married and was the mother of an adolescent son. Despite these changes, both interviews focused on her father having raised his daughters to “do more.” She noted that he required them to wear caites (sandals), when most children did not have shoes—​and those who did were boys; attend school through grade 6, when few boys and even fewer girls had such opportunities; and speak Spanish and Ixil when most in her town spoke only the latter. Her family owned a plot of land, and her father brought her and her sisters with him to plant and harvest coffee, activities through which she developed an understanding of “hard physical labor.” She described having learned not only about the challenges of manual labor but also about the value of money and its attendant responsibilities and opportunities as her father had divided earnings among them to teach them such lessons. In 2015 she speculated about these atypical gendered experiences, stating, and this I never asked him and perhaps he would not answer me, but I say that, because we were all women my father saw himself as obligated to treat us as men. He taught us how to do hard work, he pushed us to study and to wear shoes, and if we would have had a brother he would not have treated us as he did.

Although the 2015 interview repeated some of the 1992 stories, she added details that further distinguished her family from others in Chajul. Her father regularly listened to the radio, explaining world events to his daughters; he bought them Escuela para todos (School for All; https://​almanaqueept. org/​), a publication that translated challenging scientific issues as well as everyday problems encountered by campesinos and campesinas (peasants/​ farmers) into language that was accessible to those who were not formally educated. He was active in Catholic Action, a movement within the Catholic Church widely recognized for having facilitated deepening critical consciousness and activism among rural peasants. She noted that these experiences introduced her to “other worlds beyond her rural village [and that] all of these things helped us to see things in a different way.” In contrast, her mother, whose family she described as “more traditional” and characterized by a simplicity that she reported respecting deeply, socialized her into domestic tasks, including weaving her Maya Ixil traje (dress/​ clothing), roles with which she resonated. Yet she resisted being subjected to her mother’s urging that she follow Mayan expectations and marry and begin her own family when she was only 12.

[ 128 ]  Stories Changing Lives

LEAVING HOME, JOINING THE ARMED STRUGGLE

Maria Izabel asserted her independence for the first time in leaving home to seek work shortly after completing 6th grade. She attributed this and later choices to “a character in which my parents formed us . . . to undertake things with responsibility, to know the entire process and I always had that idea, in all that I did, including in my exile in Mexico.” She noted that her first decision to “leave home” made it “easier to decide to later join a group of other youth,” including some of her cousins. The year after her initial departure from home they opted to protest the army’s “scorched earth policy,” including bombings that destroyed rural Mayan communities in the northern Quiché, by joining one of the armed guerrilla organizations. They embraced the group’s vision and promises to overthrow the repressive Guatemalan dictatorship and transform the neocolonial, capitalist state wherein the majority Mayan population lived in extreme poverty and marginalization. Maria Izabel notes that she did so without her father’s permission, as he would not have allowed her to go given her age.10 Her individual choices were deeply informed by the sociohistorical context, both in terms of the Guatemalan army’s attacks on her family and her pueblo and vis-​à-​vis the educational meetings with the EGP in which she and her cousins very likely had participated. Maria Izabel noted that she was still living in Chajul when the army began bombing the Ixil region. The EGP’s clandestine education and organizing of peasants in the area had begun in 1973 (Colom, 1998) at which time they established a base in the mountains above Chajul (Payeras, 1983). Although the Guatemalan army had had a presence in the area through the local military commissioners prior to that time, it was not until 1979 that they established their Chajul base. Shortly thereafter, in 1981, forcible recruitment of boys 16  years old and older to serve in the Civil Self-​Defense Patrols (Patrullas de Autodefensa Civil) began as part of the military’s counterinsurgency and intelligence efforts to quell local Mayan resistance. The army had begun to kill local peasants selectively in the late 1970s, accusing them of working with the guerrilla. In June of 1980 they assassinated Chajul’s pastor, Father José Maria Gran, and his catechist, Domingo del Barrio Batz. It was in that context that Maria Izabel joined the insurgency: So, in 1980, I remember it was in June of that year that I decided to go to the mountains because I thought that there was no other exit but to go there, to take up arms and unite myself with the guerrilla. I knew then what others were saying; the compañeras and compañeros [comrades] there said that life was not easy, that they suffered lots, and that effectively was the truth, but that was my decision.

Li v i n g Li v e s of R e s i s ta n c e i n M u ltip l e R e g i s t e r s  

[ 129 ]

301

Given the literature on child soldiers where such decisions are described as “forced recruitment,” kidnappings, or trafficking of children (see, e.g., Boothby et al., 2006; Wessells, 2006, among many others) and the suggestion that Mayan peasants did not “choose” to join the armed struggle but were rather forcibly recruited or “caught between two armies” (Stoll, 1994), I asked Maria Izabel directly whether or not she had been recruited into the EGP. She responded: “I felt that they [EGP] never recruited, that they never recruited but rather that they had been working in the communities and those who wanted to join with them could do so. It wasn’t ever that they say: come join us.” Each of these views requires cautious interpretation, as suggested by Esteva and Prakash (1998/​2014) when they argue that “every classification or codification . . . is only one possible act of relation. . . .The act of knowing is always performed by a subjectivity specified by location in cultural time and space (p.  127).” Yet the circulations of power and dispossession wherein academic northern-​based knowledge all too frequently marginalizes the voices of indigenous women confirms the importance of the single case and, more particularly, that we listen carefully to the historically marginalized Maya Ixil woman’s voice. Increasing threats against other Catholic Action lay leaders, including Maria Izabel’s father, followed the murders of Gran and Batz. She had left the family home shortly after those assassinations, but her sisters sent word that in subsequent weeks her father had been tortured and that one of them and her child had been threatened and assaulted by the Guatemalan army. Her father had been sleeping in his cornfields or in the homes of other relatives, seeking to avoid sequester or worse, but after this latest assault and additional threats from the Guatemalan army, the family decided to leave Chajul. Her parents, three of her sisters, and the children of two of them took refuge in the surrounding mountains, fleeing ongoing military bombardments and eventually organizing alongside thousands of other Maya who later became known as the CPRs. Yet due to her own then-​imminent decision, Maria Izabel would have no news of them for almost a decade—​and they, only intermittent news of her through clandestine routes.

NARRATING ARMED RESISTANCE OVER TIME

Maria Izabel’s first 18  months within the organization included being moved from one town to another as the army’s bombings intensified. She narrated some of those experiences, the many deaths she witnessed, and, more positively, the educational work she was doing and all that she was

[ 130 ]  Stories Changing Lives

learning. She had previously reported few details about her engagement in the EGP, about which she spoke in more detail in 2015. She noted that her decisions had been personal and political choices, ones rooted in the suffering and deaths of so many of her family, of her pueblo. She described that she and her compañeros determined that their current sociopolitical reality demanded a radical choice. We said: either we remain with our arms crossed and they kill us at any moment because that's the way it was—​or you do something. So I said: Better that they capture me really doing something than that it only be with my arms crossed. So it was then that I decided. I also knew that my family was not there. I knew what had happened [to them] so I said that if all of that had happened to them and if people continued to suffer in this way, we needed to denounce it.

They confronted the army’s horrific and ongoing gross violations of human rights in the face of what they determined were the Guatemalan government’s false promises to end its violence in the Ixil area in 1982. She responded proactively to that lie and to the social suffering (Kleinman et al., 1997) of her pueblo, of her cousin’s murder, and her family’s departure—​ absences described in multiple ways that later included her experience of living “alone” in exile (Lykes, 1994). Maria Izabel referenced her father’s expectations of her and his treatment of his daughters “as if” they were boys in explaining her choices to enter the armed resistance. Over time she developed a more explicit analysis of gender and its impact in her life, despite her not including it as informing her revolutionary praxis. Hernández Alarcón et al. (2008) also reported that gender oppression had influenced very few of the 28 Maya Ixil women in the EGP whom they interviewed. Sharp (2017) adds that most articulated a desire to redress extreme poverty and ethnic/​racial injustices while she had identified only one woman who spoke of gender-​ based oppression as having motivated her to join the revolution. Yet many of these and other Mayan women reported developing an awareness of gender oppression while participating in armed and civilian political resistance. Maria Izabel’s political experiences suggest a similar pattern, enhanced by more specific opportunities to participate in feminist and women’s groups in Mexico. Her 2015 narratives about her political choices in the 1980s were framed through an analytic distance of many years and her current positions as lawyer, as Maya Ixil mother, and, as I would learn in our interview, as one who remained in solidarity with the revolution. In describing her decision to occupy the Brazilian embassy alongside more than a dozen other Maya,

Li v i n g Li v e s of R e s i s ta n c e i n M u ltip l e R e g i s t e r s  

[ 131 ]

321

she first noted how those in leadership may have “thought of her” and then went on to describe how and why she chose to be with them. [H]‌ow was it that they thought of me; perhaps because I was a woman but also because I was Ixil and maybe also because I was there, at hand. So they asked me if I wanted to go, reminding me that I knew the history of what had happened in the Spanish Embassy11 . . . that there was no guarantee that we would exit alive from there, and I said yes. . . . I remember that there were five other women, all more or less of the same age, maybe one was 20. But we were all convinced. Some people say that we were used as cannon fodder, and I  understand that these are issues that one can debate, right? But I think that fundamentally there was a conviction that we needed to free ourselves from the reality [in which we were living], the poverty, the abandon. Because, also, as I was saying, at least we had also been in other spaces. We had a vision that was a little broader than that that many other people had, because, looking back to my childhood, my father had the idea that we study, . . . So, as you might image when we decided to occupy the embassy I was conscious of what I was doing.

She spoke of the occupation as lasting only two days, days packed with many activities. Ricardo Falla (2016) described the women and men’s occupation of the Brazilian embassy and the communiqué they released to the press “to denounce the ‘repression exercised by the army against the peasants in the western part of the country (p. 38).’ ” He noted that their “protest had been the strongest up to that point” and that many other organizations supported it publicly, despite the occupants being flown out of the country shortly after their press conference (p. 39). Maria Izabel further clarified these choices by referencing a recent publication analyzing the revolutionary movement’s decision to occupy the Brazilian Embassy. The article criticized their decision to take a second action that risked the lives of their members so soon after having lost so many in the Spanish embassy. She noted, [Reading this] I saw that the cold analysis [in the present] was right. Because it was saying that someone sent a group and that group was killed and now [the same organization] was sending another group, which was irresponsible. But if they had asked me, based on what I knew had happened, I [would have said that I] had my reasons for doing what I did. It is not just a question of a cold analysis and saying how irresponsible; because those [who made the decision] are in a context which others do not understand, [and] when one is in that context [such as we were], of course, one would do it again.

[ 132 ]  Stories Changing Lives

Maria Izabel narrated her personal choice as dialectically informed by and informing of a sociohistoric context and reaffirmed the decisions she had made as a young combatant during the ascendancy of the Guatemalan revolutionary movement. Despite its many promises, the URNG was forced to later acknowledge not only that it had underestimated the power of the Guatemalan army but also that it had overestimated its own capacities to protect the civilian populations that the military had sought to destroy, to “drain the pond of water” when it could not catch the fish. Despite the horrific costs of the genocidal violence, and her ongoing public silences about her participation as a member of the armed resistance since she had returned from exile (see following discussion), Maria Izabel revindicated her earlier decision, asserting that within a similar context she would make a similar choice. Knowing many of her choices since that action and her subsequent self-​silencing, I looked more closely at her narratives from our interviews.

SILENCING THE PAST TOWARD AN ALTERNATIVE PRESENT AND ENVISIONED FUTURE

Maria Izabel spent a decade with the compañeros and compañeras with whom she had occupied the Brazilian embassy in exile in Mexico. Some of them traveled to the United States and Europe to denounce the Guatemalan military’s ongoing violence, hoping to elicit international condemnation of the government’s actions. Space does not permit a more detailed discussion of those years, of the decision of the group of which she was a part in Mexico to put down arms and seek alternative political strategies for change, of her growing awareness of Mayan and women’s rights, and of her participation in a women’s mental health group to which she attributes a slowly emerging recognition, and then affirmation, of herself as a refugee. The latter included her acknowledgment of the pain she endured due to the many losses she had experienced: the death of her cousin and of her sister; the army`s attack on her family, their internal displacement and her exile; the loneliness and many uncertainties of life in Mexico; and the challenges of living alone, a single woman outside of her Ixil pueblo. The reasons underlying her decision to return to Guatemala alone remain opaque but are undoubtedly related to the evolving political landscape there, the CPR’s decisions to publicly enter the Guatemalan peace processes and the growing number of families, including her own, who sought to negotiate a return to their communities of origin.

Li v i n g Li v e s of R e s i s ta n c e i n M u ltip l e R e g i s t e r s  

[ 133 ]

341

Despite her longing for family and community, Maria Izabel chose to live in the second largest urban community, rather than return to her rural Ixil community when she returned to Guatemala from Mexico. The decision of where to build her new home was undoubtedly linked to her decision to “bury” or “silence” the young Maya Ixil revolutionary who had occupied the Brazilian embassy and the refugee woman she had become in Mexico. She was choosing a performance of “forgetting” vis-​à-​vis her participation in the armed struggle including the highly public and visible occupation of the Brazilian embassy. She silenced revolutionary subjectivities of resistance in favor of her education and the development of a professional self. In speaking about her silence vis-​à-​vis Mexico, she noted: I do not ever use that name, that is another person . . . here, the [person] that you knew in Mexico does not exist, she simply does not exist by name or by history. It is the border crossing; I tell you I have not tied that past with my present.

As I transcribed our conversation, I recalled Vanthuyne’s (2008) discussion of Mateo’s silence as she sought to converse with him several times about the Massacre of San Francisco. When she asked about him upon return to his village several years after their first meeting, she was told that he “had died.” Although she found him alive, she noted that the reference to his death reflected his having “forgotten” the story of the massacre about which they had previously spoken. He reported rather that he was suffering from susto (fright/​terror), noting that the NGO accompanying the exhumations in his community had told him this was the “illness” or pathology resultant from all that he had seen and experienced during the massacres and beyond. Vanthuyne (2008) draws on Michael Pollack’s writing about the silence of Holocaust survivors to frame her understanding of Mateo’s silence. She challenges the prevailing interpretations of Mateo’s “forgetting” or “silence” as reflective of an individual psychopathology or trauma, arguing that the massacres and acts of genocide are indeed unspeakable horrors. Thus, forgetting or self-​silencing may be “a new normal” in postgenocidal Guatemala. Rather than diagnosing psychopathology, she suggests interpreting Mateo’s silence as one of a very limited number of responses permitted within the human rights driven transitional justice contexts within which survivors seeking justice are positioned. Their positioning as “innocent victims” in truth commissions and trials limits the words available to them and constrains how they are permitted to perform or project who they are in the present and into the future. She interprets Mateo’s forgetting and silence as reflective of his resistance to

[ 134 ]  Stories Changing Lives

being rendered a victim, an affirmation of his “autonomous quest”: “Mateo never ceased throughout his life to seek to appropriate full control of his existence, in proposing to buy the finca (estate/​rural farmland) from its owner, in negotiating the acquisition of the lands of (his village,) Yulaurel, and in working today only for his own account” (p. 68). Without directly contesting their praxis or voicing objections, Mateo’s silence signals resistance to the human rights and transitional justice activists’ framing of him as a victim, drawing Vanthuyne’s attention to his persistent work for his own (and his pueblo’s) account. Maria Izabel and Mateo survived genocidal violence within and beyond their Mayan communities. Human rights trials, wherein “innocent victims” are the only believable testifiers, dominate Guatemalan justice-​ seeking postgenocidal praxis in the 21st century. Despite diverse gendered, racialized, and classed experiences and opportunities, both Mateo and Maria Izabel resist dominant discursive constructions of the “innocent victim.” They silently resist participating in a transitional justice framework that positions the Maya as a victim who must repeatedly recount the horrors of genocidal violence to be heard and/​or receive reparation. Their silence suggests a different register of resistance, an alternative stance through which survivors resist victimhood and assert multiple and diverse Mayan subjectivities and protagonisms (see also Bhattacharya, 2009). These performances complement indigenous and Native community’s contestations of the proclaimed universality of human rights in the United Nations’ (UN) General Assembly’s adaptation of the declaration on December 10, 1948 (http://​www.un.org/​en/​universal-​declaration-​human-​ rights/​ ). Affirming their centuries-​ old understandings of duties and responsibilities vis-​à-​vis their deities, the Earth, and each other evidenced in their cosmovision, they argue that all cosmovisions are constructed at particular historical moments within particular circulations of power, situating the UDHR as one within a pluriverse of many (see Esteva and Prakash, 1998/​2014, among others). As previously noted, others have challenged the neoliberal underpinnings of the transitional justice paradigm, noting that it not only fails to redress long-​standing structural injustices but also that it eschews indigenous knowledge systems for resolving conflict and repairing community violations.12 Attending more carefully—​ and quietly—​ to Maria Izabel’s silences, I  recalled something she had said earlier in explaining her life choices:  “Truthfully, [mine] was a difficult life story, one that was very hard, it has also served me as a life lesson.” Although she had repeatedly attributed much of who she had become as a Maya Ixil to how she was raised, in 2015 she also narrated as personal choices the decision to engage

Li v i n g Li v e s of R e s i s ta n c e i n M u ltip l e R e g i s t e r s  

[ 135 ]

361

in revolutionary praxis through armed struggle and to reinvent herself through self-​silencing upon return from exile. In 2015 she revindicated those choices and spoke, albeit pseudonymously, about the multiple counternarratives she had developed to resist dominant narratives at different historical moments of social change in Guatemala as reported in this chapter. She noted: I did not stay in [or] say: so here I am, I am a victim, I have suffered and I don’t have opportunities. You know [my town]; you can imagine what it must have been like 40 years ago. . . . Right? But I don’t stay in this kind of thought. Clearly, if you say: Good, you have had many opportunities, you have left [that community], you have participated in mental health workshops, you been in lots of things. But also [I say that] I have had the will, the maturity, and the openness to accept these things, as I know many people who have been in these spaces with me and have not.

Maria Izabel embraced both her suffering and her opportunities, acknowledging with gratitude the ways in which her family and her pueblo “raised her up” and asserting a social individuality that has been dialectically performed within and over against macro-​level social change movements. Continuing to voice her choice for revolutionary struggle in the 1970s she opted for silence rather than being positioned to speak as a victim in the 21st-​century judicial spring. These distinct narratives of resistance are dialogically co-​constructed in this chapter through the intimacy of our transnational friend-​as-​family relationship.

CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS

In my earlier analysis of the 1992 interview with Maria Izabel, I framed her narratives as “breaking silence” (Lykes, 1994). This re-​examination of those narratives alongside those from our 2015 interview extends that interpretation, storying multiple diverse performances as a Maya Ixil woman. She narrated the actions she took in 1980 within the armed revolutionary movement, reflecting her beliefs in its promise of radical social change. She revindicated that choice in 2015, despite the movement’s failures, including its inability to protect her pueblo from genocidal violence. She chose silence, not voice, in the 21st-​century postgenocidal judicial spring. She narrates her silence about both her revolutionary praxis and her and her family’s suffering upon her return to Guatemala postexile as a strategy through which she resists another dominant narrative, that of transitional justice.

[ 136 ]  Stories Changing Lives

Truth commissions and trials of alleged perpetrators, for all their importance in documenting horrific violations and holding some perpetrators responsible, have unanticipated and underappreciated effects for those who speak therein. As argued herein, these judicial processes are possible if and only if Mayan survivors are prepared to narrate their lives and their pueblo as “innocent victims.” I argue here that this dominant narrative is rooted in a humanitarian, human rights discourse, and praxis whose assertion of its universality risks erasing centuries of Mayan performances of survivance and reinforcing a 21st-​century neocolonial marginalization of the Maya. As a feminist and human rights activist scholar, I  have accompanied survivors of genocide, victims of sexual violence, migrants, and deportees in community-​based processes. In Guatemala, I have resisted a discourse and praxis of their victimization through developing and facilitating co-​ constructed participatory workshops grounded in their traditions and cosmovision. Mayan women participants have imagined and creatively narrated and performed their resistance to the dominant narratives previously described and taken actions within and beyond their communities in search of a better future for themselves and their children (Crosby and Lykes, 2019; Women of PhotoVoice/​ADMI and Lykes, 2000). Through my commitment to, facilitation of, and belief in collective, community-​based transformation, I have perhaps overemphasized stories of active resistance toward social change, overlooking the contributions of other forms of resistance. Moreover, in the wake of a “failed” revolution, I  too sought recourse in the judicial turn described herein, both supporting yet critiquing transitional justice processes (Crosby and Lykes, 2019). This chapter’s embrace of the multiple alternative onto-​epistemologies described in its introduction facilitated my re-​examination of narratives of social individuality and, more particularly, of one Maya Ixil woman’s narratives in social change processes. The narratives reported herein, co-​constructed over more than 25 years of a friend-​as-​family dialogic relationship, have facilitated my “standing under” Maria Izabel’s silence, an alternative register of resistance.

NOTES 1. In 1999 the 12-​volume report of the Commission for Historical Clarification documented not only the historical context that gave rise to that movement and to approximately 36 years of armed conflict but also concluded that “acts of genocide” had been committed against el pueblo (people/​community) Maya Ixil (CEH, 1999, Vol. 3, p. 358; see also the Catholic Church’s Human Rights Office’s Recovery of Historical Memory (REHMI, for its Spanish title) project; Oficina de

Li v i n g Li v e s of R e s i s ta n c e i n M u ltip l e R e g i s t e r s  

[ 137 ]

381









Derechos Humanos del Arzobispo de Guatemala, 1998). Both truth commissions confirmed that the armed conflict was rooted in deeply skewed inequities of economic and political power resulting from a history of colonization. The latter contributed to the dispossession and exclusion of the indigenous population from sociopolitical and economic life; Mayan women were particular targets of racialized gendered harm, including sexual harm (Fulchiron et al., 2009). Despite this important historical and structural analysis, this victim-​centered approach to transitional justice (discussed further in this chapter) draws on testimonies of individual survivors to document the gross violations of human rights. The CEH (1999, Vol. 3, pp. 37–​38, 252; Vol. 5, p. 21) also estimated that more than 200,000 people (of a population of approximately 7 million at the height of the violence) had been murdered or disappeared; between 500,000 and 1.5 million people were displaced within the country or beyond its borders; and more than 626 massacres destroyed Mayan villages and communities. This overt violence—​ that included the direct and indirect intervention of the United States (Grandin et al., 2011)—​was at its worst between 1980 and 1983. 2. Representatives from the armed groups as well as from civil society negotiated over multiple years, signing final accords on December 29, 1996 (Jonas, 2000). One of these accords, an Agreement on Identity and Rights of Indigenous Peoples (1995), was the country’s first official recognition of the identity of indigenous peoples and included the assertion of respect for them and for the exercise of their political, cultural, economic, and spiritual rights, as well as proposals for changes in the Guatemalan constitution that would guarantee these rights. Parties also agreed to work toward implementing the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (1979) toward redressing violations and ensuring rights of indigenous women. Although the agreements on indigenous peoples and women have, for the most part, not been implemented, their articulation frames how many Maya are organizing during this postgenocide period. 3. These in-​depth interviews are part of a larger, longitudinal participatory and action research project with Maya Ixil and K’iche’ women between 1992 and 2017. The project, in its diverse iterations, was approved by the institutional review boards of Rhode Island College and Boston College. Interviews were conducted in Spanish and translation of all quotes into English are by the author. 4. According to Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP for its Spanish name) leader Mario Payeras (1983), the Guatemalan guerrilla entered into overt and generalized war between 1979 and 1981 while the army’s counterinsurgency began in 1980 and was in full force by 1981–​1982. 5. The first of these is during the 1980s at the height of armed conflict and the second in the late 20th and early 21st century during a period in which survivors of the armed conflict and local and transnational human rights activists sought truth, justice, reparation(s), and the nonrecurrence of genocidal violence through transitional justice processes. The successes of some trials of alleged perpetrators of genocidal harm in the first two decades of this century contributed to some referring to this period as a “judicial spring.” Recent electoral transitions, ongoing corruption, and impunity have contributed to increased violence against human rights defenders and Mayan communities, belying the successful prosecutions noted herein (see UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, 2019).

[ 138 ]  Stories Changing Lives

6. See, for example, the trial of Efraín Ríos Montt and Mauricio Rodríguez Sánchez (Burt, 2016) and Sepur Zarco Trial (Impunity Watch and Alliance to Break the Silence and Impunity, 2017). 7. This dependency is particularly ironic in Guatemala where the discourse of testimonia (testimony) became widely known within and beyond its borders through Rigoberta Menchú’s testimony, as told to Elizabeth Burgos-​Debray (Menchú, 1984), through which she narrated both personal loss as well as the destruction of her pueblo, that is, the many Mayan communities wherein men, women, and children had been raped, murdered, and/​or disappeared; crops and clothing destroyed; and animals eaten or stolen by the Guatemalan army. 8. The testimonies of expert witnesses, particularly in the case of sexual violence, include professional’s diagnoses of traumatic sequelae or disorders, often asserting the improbability of recovery or healing (e.g., expert witness testimony of Karen Peña Juárez in the Sepur Zarco case; see Crosby and Lykes, 2019; Impunity Watch and Alliance to Break the Silence and Impunity, 2017). 9. In Guatemala, international NGOs include, for example, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the Network in Solidarity with the People of Guatemala, and local victims associations, including, for example, the Mutual Support Group (GAM, for its Spanish name) and the National Coordination of Widows of Guatemala (CONAVIGUA, for its Spanish name), among many others. 10. Maria Izabel and her cousins were among many Mayan youth who took up arms in the EGP in the 1970s. Despite her being one of only a few women, 7 of the 28 Maya Ixil women interviewed in Hernández Alarcón et al.’s (2008) documentation of Maya Ixil women’s participation in the EGP spoke of having joined by the time they were 15; three others joined between 15 and 20 years old, and several others mentioned joining as children or when they were very young (see also González and Falquet, 2012). 11. In January 1980, activists from the Committee of Peasant Unity (CUC, for its Spanish name) occupied the Spanish embassy in Guatemala City to protest repression against Mayan peasants in the countryside. A day later, the Guatemalan government responded by firebombing the building, burning 36 people alive inside including Vicente Menchú, a founder of CUC and the father of the future Nobel, Rigoberta Menchú. 12. The transitional justice literature is increasingly vast as is the ongoing critique of what have been promoted as universal processes toward a democratic peace. For an introduction to the field, see, for example, Teitel (2000). For a critical engagement of the field’s failure to redress economic, social, and cultural rights and its overemphasis on civil and political rights, see, among many others, Gready and Robins (2014). And for a critique of the failures in current transitional justice processes to respect, draw on, or defer to traditional or indigenous justice processes in Latin America, see, among many others, Sieder (2017). Within Guatemala, Lieselotte Viaene’s (2010) ethnographic work in the postwar period with some Q’eqchi’ communities in Alta Verapaz describes “an absence of a demand for justice for those responsible for atrocities” during the war (p. 289). She identified myriad and intersecting reasons for this absence in the social and political local context as well and the community’s emphasis on the Mayan “normative system” of maintaining a balance between “the sacred, harmony, respect and shame” (p. 293) as possible explanatory factors. In communities where victims and perpetrators live side-​by-​side, she argues that “impunity . . . is not the end of accountability, nor truth recovery or

Li v i n g Li v e s of R e s i s ta n c e i n M u ltip l e R e g i s t e r s  

[ 139 ]

4 01

reparation. Apparently, the internal logic of the cosmos through an invisible force creates a space in which the perpetrator can reintegrate into communal life and through which victims’ pain and suffering are acknowledged” (p. 290). Her work illuminates at the micro-​level one of the local Mayan alternatives to the transitional justice domain of postconflict redress.

REFERENCES Bhattacharya, H. (2009). Performing silence, gender, violence, and resistance in women’s narratives from Lahaul, India. Qualitative Inquiry 15(2), 359–​371. doi:10.1177/​1077800408326844 Boothby, N., Strang, A., and Wessells, M. (Eds.). (2006). A world turned upside down: Social ecological approaches to children in war zones. Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press. Bouris, E. (2007). Complex political victims. Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press. Burt, J-​M. (2016) From heaven to hell in ten days: The genocide trial in Guatemala. Journal of Genocide Research 18(2–​3), 143–​169. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (1979, December 18). UN Treaty Series 1249, p. 13. Retrieved from http://​www. refworld.org/​docid/​3ae6b3970.html Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico [Commission for Historical Clarification]. (1999). Guatemala: Memoria del silencio Tz’inil Na’tab’al [Guatemala: Memory of silence]. Guatemala City, Guatemala: Oficina de Servicios para Proyectos de las Naciones Unidas (UNOPS). Retrieved from http://​www. centrodememoriahistorica.gov.co/​descargas/​guatemala-​memoria-​silencio/​ guatemala-​memoria-​del-​silencio.pdf Colom, Y. (1998). Mujeres en la alborada: Guerrilla y participación femenina en Guatemala [Women in the dawn: Guerrilla and women’s participation in Guatemala], 1973–​1978. Testimonio [Testimony]. Guatemala City, Guatemala: Artemis and Edinter. Crosby, A., and Lykes, M. B. (2019) Beyond repair? Mayan women’s protagonism in the aftermath of genocidal harm. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Das, V. (2007). Life and words: Violence and the descent into the ordinary. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Eastmond, M., and Selimovic, J. (2012). Silence as possibility in postwar everyday life. International Journal of Transitional Justice 6(3), 502–​524. Esteva, G., and Prakash, M. (1998/​2014). Grassroots post-​modernism: Remaking the soil of cultures London, England: Zed Books Ltd. Falla, R. (2016). Al atardecer de la vida . . . [At the sunset of live . . .]. Vol 4a and 4b, Ixcán, masacres y sobrevivencia, 1982 [Ixcán, massacres and survival, 1982]. Guatemala City, Guatemala: AVANCSO. Fals Borda, O., and Rahman, M. (Eds.). (1991). Action and knowledge: Breaking the monopoly with participatory action research. New York, NY: Apex Press. Farmer, P. (2013). To repair the world: Paul Farmer speaks to the next generation. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Fivush, R. (2010). Speaking silence: The social construction of silence in autobiographical and cultural narratives, Memory 18(2), 88–​98. doi:10.1080/​ 09658210903029404

[ 140 ]  Stories Changing Lives

Fulchiron, A., Paz, O., and Lopez, A. (2009). Tejidos que lleva el alma: Memoria de las mujeres mayas sobrevivientes de violación sexual durante el conflicto armado [Weavings of the soul: Memories of Mayan women survivors of sexual violence during the armed conflict]. Guatemala City, Guatemala: ECAP, UNAMG, and FandG Editores. González, O., and Falquet, J. (2012). Reseña del libro: Memorias rebeldes contra el olvido: Experiencias de 28 mujeres combatientes del área Ixil [Book review: Rebel memories against forgetting: Experiences of 28 women fighters in the Ixil area]/​Paasantzila Txumb’al Ti’ Sotzeb’al K’ul. Guatemala City, Guatemala: Magna Terra Editores. https://​julesfalquet.files.wordpress.com/​2012/​06/​ cr-​memoria-​rebeldes-​4.doc Government of Guatemala –​Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca. (1995, March 31). Agreement on identity and rights of indigenous. Retrieved from http://​www.usip.org/​sites/​default/​files/​file/​resources/​collections/​peace_​ agreements/​guat_​950331.pdf Grandin, G., Levenson, D., and Oglesby, E. (2011). The Guatemala reader: History, culture, politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Gready, P., and Robins, S. (2014). From transitional to transformative justice: A new agenda for practice. International Journal of Transitional Justice 8(3), 339–​361. doi:10.1093/​ijtj/​iju013 Gurriarán, L, et al. (2013). El camino de las palabras de los pueblos, Iniciativa para la Reconstrucción y Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica [The path of the pueblo’s words: Reconstruction and recovery of historical memory]. Guatemala City, Guatemala: Magna Terra. Hamber, B. (2009). Transforming societies after political violence. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publications. Hayner, P. (2001/​2011). Unspeakable TRUTHS: Facing the challenge of truth commissions. New York, NY: Routledge. Hernández Alarcón, R., Carrillo Samayoa, A., Torres Urízar, J., López Molina, A., and Pelaéz Aldana, L. (Eds.). (2008). Memorias rebeldes contra el olvido: Experiencias de 28 mujeres combatientes del área Ixil [Rebel memories against forgetting: Experiences of 28 women fighters in the Ixil area]/​Paasantzila Txumb’al Ti’ Sotzeb’al K’u’l. Guatemala City, Guatemala: La Cuerda, Plataforma Agraria, AVANCSO [Associación para el Avance de las Ciencias Sociales]. Impunity Watch and Alliance to Break the Silence and Impunity. (2017). Changing the face of justice: Keys to the strategic litigation of the Sepur Zarco case. Guatemala City, Guatemala: Authors. Retrieved from https://​www.impunitywatch.org/​ changing-​the-​face-​of-​justice-​the-​se Jonas, S. (2000). Of centaurs and doves: Guatemala’s peace process. Oxford, England: Westview Press. Kleinman, A., Das, V., and Lock, M. (Eds.). (1997). Social suffering. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Laplante, L., and Theidon, K. (2007). Truth with consequences: Justice and reparations in post-​truth commission Peru, Human Rights Quarterly 29(1), 228–​250. Lykes, M. B. (1985). Gender and individualistic versus collectivist notions about the self. Journal of Personality 53, 356–​383. doi:10.1111/​j.1467-​6494.1985. tb00370.x Lykes, M. B. (1994). Speaking against the silence: One Maya woman’s exile and return. In C. E. Franz and A. J. Stewart (Eds.), Women creating lives: Identities, resilience, and resistance (pp. 97–​114). Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Li v i n g Li v e s of R e s i s ta n c e i n M u ltip l e R e g i s t e r s  

[ 141 ]

421

Lykes, M. B. (2010). Silence(ing), voice(s) and gross violations of human rights: Constituting and performing subjectivities through PhotoPAR. Visual Studies 25(3), 238–​254. doi:10.1080/​1472586X.2010.523276 Lykes, M. B., Caba Mateo, A., Chávez, J., Laynez Caba, A., Ruiz, U., and Williams, J. (1999). Telling stories—​rethreading lives: Community education, women’s development and social change among the Maya Ixil. International Journal of Leadership in Education: Theory and Practice 2(3), 207–​227. Martín-​Baró, I. (1994). Toward a liberation psychology. Writings for a liberation psychology. (A. Aron and S. Corne, Eds. and Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. McEvoy-​Levy, S. (2006). When former child soldiers grow up: The keys to reintegration and reconciliation. In N. Boothby, A. Strang, and M. Wessells (Eds.). A world turned upside down: Social ecological approaches to children in war zones (pp. 135–​153). Bloomfield, CT: Kumairan Press. Menchú, R. (1984). I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian woman in Guatemala (Elisabeth Burgos-​Debray, Ed., Ann Wright, Trans.). London, England: Verso. Oficina de Derechos Humanos del Arzobispo de Guatemala [The Human Rights Office of the Archbishop of Guatemala]. (1998). Nunca Más: Impactos de la Violencia, Informe del Proyecto Interdiocesano de Recuperación de la Memoria [Never again: Impacts of violence. Report of the interdiocesan project of the recovery of memory]. Guatemala City, Guatemala: Litografía e Imprenta LIL, SA. Panikkar, R. (n.d.). Dialogic dialogue. Retrieved from http://​www.raimon-​panikkar. org/​english/​gloss-​dialogical.html Payeras, M. (1983). Days of the jungle, the testimony of a Guatemalan guerrillero, 1972–​ 76. New York, NY: Monthly Review Press Razack, S. (2007). Stealing the pain of others: Reflections on Canadian humanitarian responses. Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 29, 375–​394. Riessman, C. (2008). Narrative methods for the human sciences. Los Angeles, CA: SAGE. Schaffer, K., and Smith, S. (2004). Conjunctions: Life narratives in the field of human rights, Biography 27(1), 1–​24. Sharp, L. (2017). From Guatematecas to guerrilleras: Women’s participation in the Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres [Guerrilla Army of the Poor] (MA thesis). Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN. Sieder, R. (Ed.). (2017). Demanding justice and security: Indigenous women and legal pluralities in Latin America. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Stoll, D. (1994). Between two armies in the Ixil towns of Guatemala. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Teitel, R. (2000). Transitional justice. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. (2019). Report of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. Retrieved from https://​reliefweb.int/​report/​guatemala/​report-​office-​united-​nations-​high-​ commissioner-​human-​rights-​activities-​office-​high Vanthuyne, K. (2008). Ethnographier les silences de la violence [An ethnographic approach to the silences of violence]. Anthropologie et Sociétés, 32, no hors série, 64–​71. http://​id.erudit.org/​iderudit/​000225ar Vanthuyne, K., and Falla, R. (2016). Surviving in the margins of a genocide case in the making: Recognizing the economy of testimony at stake in research on political violence, Journal of Genocide Research 18(2–​3), 207–​224.

[ 142 ]  Stories Changing Lives

Viaene, L. (2010). The internal logic of the cosmos as “justice” and “reconciliation”: Micro-​level perceptions in post-​conflict Guatemala. Critique of Anthropology 30, 3, 287–​312. doi:10.1177/​0308275X10372462 Vizenor, G. (Ed.). (2008). Survivance: Narratives of Native presence. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Watkins, M. (2015). Psychosocial accompaniment. Journal of Social and Political Psychology 3(1), 324–​341. doi:10.5964/​jspp.v3i1.103 Wessells, M. (2006). Child soldiers: From violence to protection. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Women of PhotoVoice/​ADMI and Lykes, B. (2000). Voces e imágenes: Mujeres Mayas Ixiles de Chajul/​Voices and images: Maya Ixil women of Chajul. Guatemala City, Guatemala: Magna Terra.

Li v i n g Li v e s of R e s i s ta n c e i n M u ltip l e R e g i s t e r s  

[ 143 ]

CHAPTER 8

Narrative Subjects Tense, (In)tension, and (Im)possibilities for Change JILL BR ADBURY

INTRODUCTION

For human beings, the past is perpetually present. More than simply providing the structures of an exterior social environment in which we live, the sociohistorical experiences and meanings of previous generations remain alive within us, in our formation as narrative subjects. In this sense, self or personhood is understood as told-​into-​being, through the stories of our experience and through the experience of the stories of others. In this chapter, I argue that it is, paradoxically, the same psychosocial processes that make it impossible to escape the past that simultaneously orientate us toward imagined not-​yet-​present futures. The temporal structure of human experience as articulated in the tenses of our languages spans past and future, enabling and demanding a dialogical engagement with present political and psychological tensions and creating possibilities for intentional action. The languages of life transmit culture or the taken-​for-​ granted meanings and patterns of life established by previous generations and join the natural parameters of physical life in producing the contours of social life as simply “the way things are” in the world. The constraints of the natural world are experienced as part of our unthinking bodies as we breathe and move about without being aware of the qualities of air and gravity that make these actions possible. Similarly, language functions to Jill Bradbury, Narrative Subjects In: Stories Changing Lives. Edited by: Corinne Squire, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190864750.003.0008.

461

naturalize the social world and enables us to live, breathe, and engage with others without consciously attending to how this world is organized.

A PARTICULAR TIME AND PLACE IN TENSION

The historical juncture of (post)apartheid South Africa, particularly as enacted and experienced in the learning/​teaching spaces of university life, provides the context for these reflections on the (im)possibilities of change. Although the perpetual processes of change and continuity are universally characteristic of human life, the disjuncture between the past and the future is amplified and accelerated in so-​called postconflict societies such as South Africa, both enabling and demanding the development of an engaged praxis. Dramatic large-​scale political change may be marked by significant dates on the calendar (such as 1994 when the first democratic elections happened) and imbued with almost magical qualities as turning points in the national narrative, but this narrative is simultaneously tenuous and totalizing. The national narrative of conversion1 from the apartheid past to a democratic present with an ostensibly linear path illuminating the way forward to an increasingly progressive future conceals narratives that are simultaneously alive and actively unfolding at both the more micro level of individual lives and in the wider global context. This simultaneity is exemplified by the fact that the South African magical number of 1994 is elsewhere on the continent—​in Rwanda, a year of genocide, a date that signifies dehumanizing horror and death. These national narratives in which 1994 features equally prominently but as an antithetical signifier, are often presented as severed from one another whereas they are inextricably intertwined, threads in the larger global history of colonialism, contiguous in space and concurrent in time. Both countries subsequent to this date embarked on truth and reconciliation processes, although differently conceptualized and articulated (Makhunga, 2019) in which the narratives of ordinary people were both solicited and silenced to create a national narrative that would consign the past to history. Without wishing to engage the debates about the commensurability of the two goals of truth and reconciliation about which much has been written elsewhere (e.g., Gobodo-​Madikizela, 2013; Makhunga, 2019; Ntsebeza, 2006; Tutu, 1999), it is incontrovertibly evident that, far from closing a previous chapter of history, this narrative remains incomplete, unraveling in multiple directions with no clear end in sight. The apartheid past is inscribed in contemporary South African society, literally marking and demarcating racist inequalities in the material spaces of social life. Likewise, at the

[ 146 ]  Stories Changing Lives

personal or individual level, our interior lives are scratched, scoured, and scarred by psychic storylines of the past. These structural and psychological traces of the past that lie beneath the surface always potentially threaten to erupt into the present. The South African Fallist Student Movement that began in 20152 represents a particularly powerful eruption of this kind, troubling the present surface of life, generating new articulations of protest against the legacy of material inequality, and animating the embodied anxieties and anger of raced subjects in an ostensibly deracialized society. The first focal protest action of the movement was centered on the statue of Cecil John Rhodes on the campus of the University of Cape Town that valorized an oppressive racist colonial history. The removal of this statue symbolically initiated the ongoing project of decolonization and triggered the subsequent countrywide protest actions focusing on multiple dimensions of alienation experienced by students on university campuses, including financial exclusions and pervasive gender-​based violence. The process of decolonizing education (and minds) is variously interpreted and the implications for the form and content of knowledge construction are hotly contested.3 Regardless of the particular inflections that may yet alter the flow and direction of this movement in unpredictable ways, it is evident that reshaping the higher education landscape will entail not only the transformation of curricula and pedagogy but will also radical reformulations of the languages and cultures of institutions beyond formal classroom walls.

LANGUAGE AND THE FORMATION OF SUBJECTIVITY: INNER DIALOGUES AND INTENTIONALITY

These intellectual debates and political processes highlight the pivotal role of language in both perpetuating historical legacies and in articulating resistance. The meanings of language and are always imposed from the outside for successive generations who use this linguistic heritage to generate their own meaningful worlds. However, the forceful imposition of the language of the colonial other creates an oppressive monolingualism, contracting cultural horizons and possibilities for meaning-​making. As Derrida (1998) articulates this process: First and foremost, the monolingualism of the other would be that sovereignty, that law originating from elsewhere, certainly, but also primarily the very language of the Law. And the Law as Language. Its experience would be ostensibly autonomous, because I have to speak this law and appropriate it in

N a r r ati v e S u b j e c t s  

[ 147 ]

4 81

order to understand it as if I was giving it to myself, but it remains necessarily heteronomous, for such is, at bottom, the essence of any law. The madness of the law places its possibility lastingly [à demeure] inside the dwelling of this auto-​heteronomy. The monolingualism imposed by the other operates by relying upon that foundation, here, through a sovereignty whose essence is always colonial, which tends, repressively and irrepressibly, to reduce language to the One, that is, to the hegemony of the homogeneous. This can be verified everywhere, everywhere this homo-​hegemony remains at work in the culture, effacing the folds and flattening the text. (Derrida, 1998, pp. 39–​40)

The project of decolonization may be understood as resistance to this flattening of the complex contours of social life, against the reduction of multiple histories into a single story-​line, against the preposterous idea that a single language has the capacity to produce all legitimate meaning. However, while the imposition of meaning from the outside is most clearly visible in contexts where the language that is learned is the language of the other, a colonial language, all language learning serves to insert children into the language of others, into meanings derived not from the child’s own engagement with the world but through others. To put this idea into the psychological language of development, into Vygotskian language, the world of the child is mediated; in his famous words: “The path from the object to the child and from the child to the object, passes through another person” (Vygotsky, 1978, p.  30). In Derrida’s terms, the child’s mind is “colonized” by an other, usually in the first instance, by the maternal other but also beyond the home, in the terrain of education where children’s thought is “schooled” in the “traditions” (Gadamer, 1975)  of knowledge and the understandings of others. As I have argued elsewhere (Bradbury, 2012), we cannot do otherwise; it is only possible for us to become ourselves through these collective frameworks of meaning, through what Ricoeur (1981) calls “the long detour of the signs of humanity deposited in cultural works’ (p. 143). In this way, our conscious cognizing of the world is socialized and formed through shared language, shared understandings, and shared meanings. But the most forceful impact of tradition lies beyond the engagements of parental influence and teachers’ stocks of knowledge. Children join the flow of history in ways that are less reliant on the (best) intentions of adults, developing a “narrative unconscious” (Freeman, 2010) linking them into intergenerational chains of meaning-​making. This heavy baggage of collective memory creates a subterraneous mapping of the world against which experience is interpreted, determining the

[ 148 ]  Stories Changing Lives

languages in which narratives can be articulated and constraining the tales that we can tell. Despite the essentially communicable character of consciousness given its creation in shared language, this process is always incomplete, always open to a surplus of mutable meanings. The malleability of language is evident in the remarkable pace of children’s language acquisition and in the creative ways that they produce novel linguistic constructions, never previously uttered or heard. This is the basis for Chomsky’s (1986) rejection of the impoverished behaviourist explanation of language learning by imitation. Two stories of the then two-​and-​a-​half year old son of my close friend, Jude Clark, provide delightful illustrations of the manipulation of language in its learning and in making the world of experience. One afternoon, Thando was driving around on his toy tractor, calling out, “I’m a farmer, I’m a farmer!” and then suddenly said, “I’ll take you to the pharmacy!” On another occasion, he was singing a song and then stopped midway. In response to the enquiring looks of his parental audience, he announced, “I’m buffering!” In neither case is he imitating the speech of others; he forms his own connections between sounds and meanings, crossing contexts and generating new applications for words. This process is not thought through in advance. Rather, through actively using the language, new thought or meanings are produced. His humor delights and surprises not only his adult listeners but himself too! Where education is not about cloning (Essed and Goldberg, 2002) but about the formation of critical subjects, this innate creativity and novelty of language and the forms of thought it makes possible should be nurtured and facilitated rather than closed down by the process of schooling in disciplinary languages and traditions. Whereas art or literature (and science) must always belong to tradition and use the (past) languages of others, the best art (and science) always entails innovation rather than mere replication or reproduction. Thus, we always have the capacity for becoming what Judith Butler (1997) calls “bad subjects.” I take this to mean more than the negative notion of subjects that fail to adequately perform the roles into which they are interpellated, or who misrecognize themselves in the mirror of society. Bad subjects resist subjectification, actively subverting or twisting the processes of becoming subjects. In the process of making themselves, they may also act in ways that affect the textures and structures of the social world, bending the arcs of future trajectories of contextual collective histories. Perhaps this potential is most evident in the young. Each successive generation is simultaneously trapped within and yet escapes the “prison house” (Jameson, 1975) of language and the straitjacket of history by breaking with tradition and embracing change. There is no shortage

N a r r ati v e S u b j e c t s  

[ 149 ]

501

of compelling theories that explain how we are thrown or trapped or colonized by a preordained world inhabited by others or, to borrow again from Freeman (2014) with a slight twist, how we are subject to the priority of the other. But, there are surprisingly few theories that explain the equally compelling processes of change that provide the narrative of history and without which we would remain trapped in a perpetual priority of the present. This ability to go where no one else has gone before is possible only because language is not received as an inert set of instructions or even potential meanings that must simply then be articulated anew in the appropriate circumstances. Rather, the language of the other, is internalized as dialogue, enabling us to talk to ourselves. A well-​known story from Vygotsky illustrates how the development of the ability to talk to oneself enables new relations with the world and provides the means for the transformation of thought and action. A  little girl is observed trying to get hold of some sweets stashed beyond her reach, solving a problem of great importance to her –​and most children! (Stands on a stool, quietly looking, feeling along a shelf with stick.) “On the stool.” (Glances at the experimenter. Puts stick in other hand.) “Is that really the candy?” (Hesitates) “I can get it from that other stool, stand and get it.” (Gets second stool.) “No that doesn’t get it. I  could use the stick.” (Takes stick, knocks at the candy.) “It will move now.” (Knocks candy.) “It moved, I  couldn’t get it with the stool, but the, but the stick worked.” (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 25)

This story demonstrates the way in which “children solve practical tasks with the aid of their speech as well as their eyes and hands” (Vygotsky, 1999, p. 20). Initially, using what is called egocentric speech, the child merely comments on her actions as they are happening. But then she begins to use this form of speech to plan what to do next and coordinates and reorganizes objects (or tools) and her actions (or herself). Finally, she concludes with a model of successful action that might be usefully deployed in the future to solve similar problems. Language thus enables decontextualization or abstraction from the specifics of a given situation and changes the structure of the perceptual (particularly visual) field. It articulates memory facilitating the potential transfer of understanding to new situations and releasing imaginative alternatives.

[ 150 ]  Stories Changing Lives

This function of language to regulate our thinking selves in advance of our acting in the world creates the possibility for intentional action, for projection into, not-​yet-​real, imaginary future scenarios. Even the most remarkable acts of animals, such as the nest-​building of birds or the patterns of movement that bees use to communicate spatial mapping, are different in kind to the practices of human architects or choreographers who plan the activities of building and dancing in advance of their execution. Vygotsky (1999) identifies this planning in advance as pivotal to the development of meaningful collective life: “The fact that he provides himself with a tool in advance is undoubtedly the beginning of culture” (p. 64; emphasis added). The possibility of dialogue with one’s self enables new relations with the world, the possibility to imagine alternatives and transform the present parameters of our situation. Culture therefore not only forms us but also is formed by us, enabling us to “create new worlds that were not there before” (Manganyi, 1973, p. x). As Vygotsky 1978) says, children become the “subjects and objects of their own behavior” both made by and makers of the world and themselves (p. 27). In narrative terms, it makes it possible for us to be both narrators and characters in our own life stories, subjected to histories and the subjects of present experience and future imaginings. Manganyi (1973) refers to the making of culture through these imagined possibilities and transformative actions as a “shared human necessity,” definitive of rather than a superfluous addition to human life (p. x). Miller’s (2011) explication of Vygotsky’s ontogenetic developmental account focuses on his conception of the “social self,” emphasizing that what is internalized with language is not just the contents of social talk, the cultural baggage (or capital) of history, but, more important, the structure of conversation: [I]‌n verbal thinking, the social other is not out there but is part of the social interaction with oneself. . . . This concept of the person as a social individual, a person who is socialized not from the outside but from within, a person for whom the other is also me, my-​self, a person who does not live in opposition to society but who, by living constitutes society, culture, and history. . . . Social activity may originate in interaction with others but it culminates in an inner dialogue. (p. 27; emphasis in the original)

This inner dialogue is tensed in that the split-​subject both speaks and listens, taking up dual interlocutory positions and talking to herself as both remembered and imagined characters with whom she is identified and yet differentiated. Speaking to our earlier, past, and future potential selves releases us from the exigencies of the immediate present, and in the

N a r r ati v e S u b j e c t s  

[ 151 ]

521

tension between past and future, intentional action and change become possible. Narrative psychology thus picks up the story from Vygotsky for whom all words tell a story and all stories are told with words. In this view, we are narrative selves whose inner conversations create connections, continuities, and coherence (or at least an account of disjunctures and fragmentations in the story) across disparate spaces and, importantly, through time. Human experience is temporal, and all languages are tensed, both reflecting and driving this experience. As Hoffman (2009) so beautifully puts it: it is hard to imagine any human act or endeavour that does not depend on the ability to conceive the existence of time beyond the immediate moment. We could not have intentions or decide to go out of the house, or build dwellings or voyage across the sea and savannah, without some projection into the future. We could not recognise ourselves each morning as the person we were yesterday without the mind’s constant reach into the past through memory. We could not even register the awareness of a fleeting moment without the perception of time’s fleeting progress. (pp. 63–​64)

Like all living creatures, we live in time, unable to turn back the clock but, unlike other creatures, we are able to imaginatively talk the clock backwards and forwards. Our inner stories are not woven through the simple accumulation of past events and experiences, rather both social histories and personal life stories are perpetually rewritten, with once central events slipping to the periphery as merely incidental or even entirely forgotten, depending on their significance or relevance to present circumstances and present interlocutors or audiences. While our bodies can only live forwards, our narrated inner stories are not linear, oscillating between past and future, forgetting and remembering and changing direction. As Brockmeier (2009, 228) says, “narrative is our most powerful device to ‘subjunctivize’ the world. It opens up the hypothetical, the possible, and the actual. It invites us to live in more than one reality, in more than one context of meaning, in more than one order of time” (p. 228). The process of inner dialogue or conversation (Archer, 2000), therefore, inserts us into culture and inserts culture into us. Individual subjectivity or a sense of oneself as a person is thus formed in language, which simultaneously constrains us and creates capacity for intentional action, through memory and imagination. The narrative subject is both subjected to the stories and meanings of others and, in the grammatical sense of the term, the subject of future-​ tensed utterances and actions.

[ 152 ]  Stories Changing Lives

NARRATING (DIS)PLACEMENT AND TRANSLATING SELVES

The question of change entails the challenge of how to live innovatively rather than repetitively, in ethical relationship with others in ways that will create conceptually and politically transformative futures. We need to develop and strengthen these ligaments of relational care not only toward those with whom we live but also toward those beyond our spatial and temporal horizons, particularly to the memories of those who suffered historical violence and to those who are subject to societal violence in the present that truncates their futures. Eagleton (2000) alerts us to the ways in which language both frees and constrains us, enabling us to be both our best and worst selves: “Only a linguistic animal could fashion nuclear weapons, and only a material animal could be vulnerable to them. We are not so much splendid syntheses of nature and culture, materiality and meaning, as amphibious animal caught on the hop between angel and beast” (p. 98). Resisting the presence of the past is only possible in and through our familial and disciplinary languages, transmitted through intergenerational dialogues. But these languages are vibrant, alive to the present and constantly being reworked and translated. Said’s (2003) observations about the estrangement of exile can be applied to our thinking about temporal dislocation and the imperative for translation and multilingualism in our intergenerational dialogues: Most people are principally aware of one culture, of one setting, one home; exiles are aware of at least two, and this plurality of vision gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions, an awareness that, to borrow a phrase from music, is contrapuntal. For an exile, habits of life, expression, or activity in the new environment inevitably occur against the memory of these things in another environment. (p. 8)

I want to introduce two autobiographical voices that speak to this experience of crossing boundaries in both time and space and the ways in which encounters with new languages and versions of the world cause us to both lose ourselves and remake ourselves. Two women retrospectively narrate the sense of displacement and disjuncture that characterized their entry into the language and culture of North American life at different times in history. Appropriately, the first extract is from Looking for Palestine: Growing Up Confused in an Arab-​American Family, written by Edward Said’s daughter, Najla, who articulates her father’s theoretical ideas about exile in the embodied experience of a girl.

N a r r ati v e S u b j e c t s  

[ 153 ]

54 1

For me, . . . growing up the daughter of a Lebanese mother and a prominent Palestinian thinker in New York City in the 1980s and 90s was confusing and unsettling. I  constantly questioned everything about who I  was and where I fit in the world, constantly judged my own worthiness and compared myself to others, and I struggled desperately to find a way to reconcile the beautiful, comforting, loving world of my home, culture, and family with the supposed ‘barbaric’ and ‘backward’ place and society others perceived it to be. I wondered why I was ‘an exception’ to the rule of what both Arabs and Americans were ‘supposed’ to be like, and why I was stuck in such an uneasy position. . . . After years of trying desperately to convince people that they really didn’t understand me or the place my family came from, I stopped trying, especially since there was never anyone around to make me feel less alone in my assertions. I resigned myself to believing that everything people said about my culture was true, because it was exhausting and futile to try to convince anyone otherwise. Strangely, though, I also held tightly to what I knew to be accurate and real about my family and culture. My parents and extended family are entirely responsible for that. I spent years simultaneously pushing them away and drawing them close, until I found a place where I could exist together with them and completely apart from them. Letting go of the idea that I had to have one identity, one way to describe myself, one “real me” hasn’t left me any less confused about who I am, but it has certainly left me inspired, engaged, interested, complicated, and aware. And I’d rather be all of those things than just plain old “American,” or plain old “Arab.” (Said, 2013, pp. 2–​4)

This story of a migrant childhood of dislocation and duality, of the daily rituals and routines of exclusion and othering, culminates in the assertion of hybridity (Bhabha, 1994). However, Najla convinces neither herself nor us as readers that this is a neat resolution, and it is evident that actively holding together contradictory senses of herself requires effort and attention. The very explicit articulation of the value of not being plain old one thing or the other points to the necessity to defend this complex identity. Nonetheless, the multiple sources of the self (Taylor, 1992) on which she can draw make it possible for her to simultaneously be distanced from and yet appropriate aspects of these social worlds (Ricoeur, 1981). Family and school, private and public circles of life, intersect in her. The sense of being out of place creates new vantage points for reading the world and herself in new ways, and releases new possibilities for meaning. In Eva Hoffman’s wonderful book, Lost in Translation, in which she describes her experience as a hinge generation (Hoffman, 2004) child, the daughter of Polish Holocaust survivors, encountering the otherness of America, we hear earlier echoes of Najla Said’s experience.

[ 154 ]  Stories Changing Lives

My American Friends and I are forced to engage in an experiment that is relatively rare; we want to enter into the very textures, the motions and flavors of each other’s vastly different subjectivities—​and that requires feats of sympathy and imagination in excess of either benign indifference or a remote respect. . . . Of course, in these entanglements, our positions are not exactly symmetrical. In the politics of daily perception, I’m at a distinct disadvantage. My American Friends are so many, and they share so many assumptions that are quite invisible to them, precisely because they’re shared. These are assumptions about the most fundamental human transactions, subcutaneous beliefs, which lie just below the stratum of political opinion or overt ideology: about how much “space,” physical or psychological, we need to give each other, about how much ‘control’ is desirable, about what is private and what public, about how much interest in another person’s affairs is sympathy and how much interference, about what’s a pretty face or a handsome body, about what we’re allowed to poke fun at and what we have to revere, about how much we need to hide in order to reveal ourselves. To remain outside such common agreements is to remain outside reality itself—​and if I’m not to risk a mild cultural schizophrenia, I have to make a shift in the innermost ways. I have to translate myself. But if I’m to achieve this without becoming assimilated—​that is, absorbed—​by my new world, the translation has to be careful, the turns of the psyche unforced. To mouth foreign terms without incorporating their meanings is to risk becoming bowdlerized. A true translation proceeds by the motions of understanding and sympathy; it happens by slow increments, sentence by sentence, phrase by phrase (Hoffman, 1990, pp. 210–​211).

Hoffman’s account highlights the asymmetrical exchanges of meaning in which the burden of interpretation and translation lies with her as the outsider. She needs to carefully tread the paths that lead her into the thickets of the dominant culture but without losing herself along the way. As she literally learns to speak the English language, she realizes that she is articulating more than just new sounds. Together with the linguistic learning curve, she is developing new grammars of meaning-​making, new versions of herself and the world. While Najla Said seems to settle for a kind of dualism, Eva Hoffman (1990) suggests she must “shift in . . . innermost ways” (p. 211). This is a precarious process and she has to “translate” herself carefully, so as to become a new version of herself, rather than an assimilated imitation of the other. Spivak (2008) suggests that in the process of acquiring their first language, the child is “inserted into a language with a history and a future, which will last after the child dies, but nonetheless the child will then invent himself or herself in that language” (p. 4, emphasis added).

N a r r ati v e S u b j e c t s  

[ 155 ]

561

Eva Hoffman is negotiating (Eco, 2003)  this translation on unequal terms, where the target language and culture has the potential power to erase and silence her earlier voice or remnants of lingual memory (Spivak, 2008, p. 4) that she still feels to be the articulation of an authentic self. Eco’s (2003) theory of translation as negotiation develops from the paradox that translation is either unnecessary (when language is shared) or impossible (as without shared language, one cannot understand the other). Nonetheless, translation does happen. In Eco’s view, translation does not proceed by reference to some transcendental language-​as-​law as suggested by Derrida (1991; even if only to resist it) or even by resorting to ostensive reference, but by negotiation of meaning at both surface and deep levels. In other words, translating the self, entails attempts to preserve the deep meaning of who we are in a new form. However, in language and life, form is not merely a surface rearrangement of an anterior meaning. This is why the process of translation changes meaning, entailing possibilities for both loss and enrichment and always occurs in a “field of power” (Spivak, 2008, p. 5). Ngũgĩ wa Thiongo (1986) describes his encounter with the colonial fields of power in his entry into formal schooling as a young child, learning the foreign tongue of English through “a coercive system of rewards and terror” (p. 18). This violence refers to more than the corporal punishment and general discipline of colonial schooling, rupturing the harmony between language and communal life or culture and, by extension, between self and world:  “Language as culture is thus mediating between me and my own self; between my own self and other selves; between me and nature. Language is mediating in my very being” (p. 389). The (psychological) costs of repairing such ruptures through translation may thus be very high indeed. Perhaps more productive possibilities for change or resources for declonization may be generated by resisting translation or developing what Carli Coetzee (2013) refers to as new accented voices or by inventing what Njabulo Ndebele (2007) refers to as ways of living at the intersections of multiple languages.

TENSE AND TENSION IN INTERGENERATIONAL DIALOGUES

While the illustrative narratives of Najla Said and Eva Hoffman both tell stories of migration and movement in place, they speak powerfully of temporal movement too, in which all of us are engaged in travelling from not-​yet-​dead pasts toward unknown futures. Particularly in periods of sociopolitical change, narratives of the past cannot provide clear storylines for the future, and the usually incremental, silent, and invisible formation of

[ 156 ]  Stories Changing Lives

human subjectivity becomes accelerated, articulated and visible. The accelerated processes of change are, however, no easier to grasp by virtue of their visibility. On the contrary, the immediate articulation of the meanings of these changes is provisional and as fleeting as the events themselves. We may resist the imposition of the monolingual formulation of the past and the ways in which this makes us feel out of place, but speaking the language of the future entails moments in which of all of us will feel “lost in translation” as we negotiate the contents and form of ourselves in new languages. We live tensed and tense lives in which the present represents a pivotal point of tension between past and future. This demands a precarious balancing act in which we must lift one foot still embedded in the past before being able to tentatively place the other in the future. These risky movements are navigated in narrative, connecting the past, present and future, and negotiating memory and imagination in dialogue with others. As Miller (2011) reminds us, our internal dialogues have their origins in social conversations, and in this way, individual stories are entwined with history, and our potential humanity is realized: “But before we talk to ourselves in the course of our inner conversations and in order to do so, we first must talk to others without whom our humanity remains only a possibility and our souls a singular impossibility” (p. 406). Importantly, we need to open ourselves to voices not only from the past but the future too, so as to become what Xolela Mangcu (2011) terms “worthy ancestors.” In as much as successive generations need to learn from history, the future horizons of the young are beyond our reach, and their vantage point is therefore critical in informing the present. In the 2016 annual Steve Biko Memorial Lecture, “Unfinished Activisms”, Angela Davis drew parallels between the contemporary struggles of Black Lives Matter and the South African Student Fallist Movement, and the histories of the US civil rights movement and the anti-​Apartheid struggle. She argued that these current political movements can be understood as engaging with the ‘unfinished business’ of earlier battles against racism, and economic and cultural inequalities. Despite the historical achievement of political freedom, the younger generation view this as a hollow victory, while many of the older generation feel that the present world this is not the future they were fighting for. Although the older and younger generations live in the same contemporary time zone, they do not live in the same worlds. While the young are highly critical of the older generation for giving in or up too soon, for failing to finish the fight, they did not live in the worlds of overt racism and brutal state power in which their parents had to survive. However, it could be argued that despite this lack of direct personal experience, young people’s interpretations of these earlier times

N a r r ati v e S u b j e c t s  

[ 157 ]

581

are as legitimate as the understandings of those who lived through those events. Past protagonists do not have absolute authority on the meanings of historical events, particularly in terms of their later impact in the future-​ of-​now. Conversely, it could be argued that the perspective of the older generation is not irrelevant to current events although the youth are the main actors. Davis (2016) insists that young people should be ‘left to make their own mistakes’ even when they seem to be repeating the errors of previous historical moments. However, successive generations are interconnected and this intergenerational quality of human life is simultaneously the source of beauty and terror. In this sense, the mistakes (and new victories) of the youth in the present are not solely their own but those of all living (and dead) generations. While the autobiographical past experiences of the older generation are quite literally consigned to history by the young and the older generation will not live into the extended futures of the youth, the present is a shared, overlapping space. This space is a multidimensional chronotope (Bakhtin, 1981) in which elements of both the past and future exist in a complex interface. Present actions are informed by vibrant threads of remembering and imagining, even (or perhaps especially) when these are not conscious processes. In this sense, the present is a space of shifting sands, processes of activity and understandings that are always in motion. This sense of flux and uncertainty cannot be contained in assertions of fixed standpoints or by privileging the vantage point of either the past or the future. To draw on Gadamer’s metaphor of the horizon as human beings we can never come to an overview of the whole which would allow us to systematize it but instead find ourselves under way within an entirety of speaking and thinking which always exceeds the horizons of our perspective” (Smith, 1980, p. xiii).

CONCLUSION

Paradoxically, without the constraining parameters of past meanings and actions, it would not be possible to develop new forms of action and understanding. Intergenerational knowledge should make it possible for both the past and the future to inform the present. The question is whether generations who do not speak one another’s languages can find common meanings in translation and forge ways to participate in multilingual conversations. The exigencies of this present moment mean that it is imperative to ensure the inclusion of multiple traditions and contradictory voices, voices that speak from the past and echoes from as-​yet-​unformed futures. The mythical Ghanaian sankofa bird represents an inspirational metaphor of the

[ 158 ]  Stories Changing Lives

tensed narrative subject who flies forward while looking backward to collect the wisdoms of the past, creating new storied trajectories and lines of flight (“Sankofa,” n.d.). The famous aphorism from Kierkegaard captures a similar sense of the contraflows of action and narrative understanding: “Life must be lived forwards but can only be understood backwards” (cited in Crites, 1986, p. 165). We are compelled (or perhaps even condemned) to be propelled forward in action on the basis of the understandings of others, acting in advance of our own understanding, which cannot but come after the fact. As parents and teachers, we may build nests to nurture the young and prepare for the future, and as intellectuals and researchers, we may pursue new lines of thinking in the hopes of transforming the world. But we do so precariously perched on the tensile high wire of the present, in which the past remains electrically alive and entangled with the surging currents of the future.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

An earlier version of this chapter was presented at the first international conference of NEST (Narrative Enquiry for Social Transformation) at the University of the Witwatersrand, July 2015. The ideas in this chapter are engaged in greater depth in Bradbury (2020) Narrative psychology and Vygotsky in dialogue:  Changing subjects. London: Routledge. I would like to thank my colleagues and friends, RonaldMiller, Bhekizizwe Peterson, and Corinne Squire for their critical readings of the chapter and constructive feedback.

NOTES 1. Mark Freeman provides a narrative analysis of one of the earliest autobiographical texts, that of St. Augustine, which provides an exemplar of a conversion narrative, in this case, literally from sinner to saint (Freeman, 1993). This conversion pattern in which the self is articulated in terms of a distinct break between a “before” and “after” can be applied to other lives in which a particular traumatic or liberating event is a pivotal point for the narrative structure. For example, coming-​out narratives (Plummer, 1995) or health and illness narratives (Squire, 2013). 2. For accounts and analysis of this recent history of the South African Fallist Student Movement from diverse perspectives, see, for example, Heffernan & Nieftagodien (2016), and a contribution by student activists themselves (Chinguno et al., 2017).

N a r r ati v e S u b j e c t s  

[ 159 ]

6 01

3. Decolonization is not a recent project; on the contrary, its history is arguably as long as that of colonization itself. A seminal text by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind was published in 1986. More recent intellectual voices on the subject include Achille Mbembe (e.g., Mbembe, 2016) and Walter Mignolo (e.g., Mignolo, 2009).

REFERENCES Archer, M. (2000). Being Human: The problem of agency. Cambridge, England:  Cambridge University Press. Bakhtin. M. (1981). The dialogic imagination (C. Emerson and M. Holquist, Trans.). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Bhabha, H. (1994). The location of culture. New York, NY: Routledge. Bradbury, J. (2012). Narrative possibilities of the fast for the future. Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology 8(3), 341–​350. Bradbury, J. (2020). Narrative psychology and Vygotsky in dialogue: Changing subjects. London, England: Routledge. Brockmeier, J. (2009). Reaching for meaning. Theory & Psychology 19(2), 213–​233. Butler, J. (1997). The psychic life of power: Theories in subjection. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Chinguno, C., Kgoroba, M., Mashibini, S., Masilela, B., Maubane, B., Moyo. N., . . . Ndlovu, H. (Eds.). (2017). Rioting and writing: Diaries of Wits Fallists. Johannesburg, South Africa: Society, Work and Development Institute. Chomsky, N. (1986). Knowledge of language: Its nature, origin, and use. New York, NY: Praeger. Coetzee, C. (2013). Accented futures: Language activism and the ending of Apartheid. Johannesburg, South Africa: Wits University Press. Crites, S. (1986). Storytime: Recollecting the past and projecting the future. In T. Sarbin, (Ed.), Narrative psychology: The storied nature of human conduct (pp. 152–​ 173). New York, NY: Praeger. Davis, A. (2016, September 9). Angela Davis delivers 17th annual Steve Biko lecture. [Video file] ENCA. Retrieved from www.enca.com/​south-​africa/​ catch-​it-​live-​angela-​davis-​delivers-​the-​17th-​annual-​steve-​biko-​lecture Derrida, J. (1998). Monolingualism of the other or the prosthesis of origin (P. Mensah, Trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Eagleton, T. (2000). The idea of culture. London, England: Blackwell. Eco, U. (2003). Mouse or rat? Translation as negotiation. London, England: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Essed, P., and Goldberg, D. (2002). Cloning cultures: The social injustices of sameness. Ethnic Racial Studies 25(6), 1066–​1082. Freeman, M. (1993). Rewriting the self: History, memory, narrative. London, England: Routledge. Freeman, M. (2010). Hindsight: The promise and peril of looking backward. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Freeman, M. (2014). The priority of the other. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Gadamer H. (1975). Truth and method. London, England: Sheed and Ward. Gobodo-​Madikizela, P. (2013). Acting out and working through traumatic memory. In M. Linden & K. Rutowski (Eds.), Hurting memories and beneficial

[ 160 ]  Stories Changing Lives

forgetting: Post-​traumatic stress disorders, biographical developments and social conflicts (pp. 217–​226). London, England: Elsevier. Heffernan, A., and Nieftagodien, N. (Eds.). (2016). Students must rise: Youth struggle in South Africa before and beyond Soweto ’76. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. Hoffman, E. (1990). Lost in translation: Life in a new language. London, England: Penguin. Hoffman, E. (2004). After such knowledge: A meditation on the aftermath of the holocaust. London, England: Secker and Warburg. Hoffman, E. (2009). Time. London, England: Profile Books. Jameson, F. (1975). The prison-​house of language: A critical account of structuralism and Russian formalism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Makhunga, L. (2019). Post-​genocide Rwanda and the discursive construction of legitimacy: Contesting seemingly dichotomous political narratives. Social Dynamics 45(3), 382–​394. Manganyi, C. (1973). Being Black in the world. Johannesburg, South Africa: Ravan Press. Mangcu, X. (2011). Evidentiary genocide: Intersections of race, power and the archive. In X. Mangcu (Ed.), Becoming worthy ancestors: Archive, public deliberation and identity in South Africa (pp. 1–​16). Johannesburg, South Africa: Wits University Press. Mbembe, A. (2016). Decolonizing the university: New directions. Arts & Humanities in Higher Education 15(1), 29–​45. Mignolo, W. (2009). Epistemic disobedience, independent thought and de-​colonial freedom. Theory, Culture & Society 26(7–​8),  1–​23. Miller, R. (2011). Vygotsky in perspective. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Ndebele, N. (2007). Fine lines from inside the box: Further thoughts about our country. Cape Town, South Africa: Umuzi. Nğuği wa Thiong’o. (1986). Decolonising the mind. London, England: James Currey/​ Heinemann. Ntsebeza, D. (2006). Can truth commissions in Africa deliver justice? Konraud Adenauer Siftung. http://​www.kas.de/​upload/​auslandshomepages/​namibia/​ Human_​Rights_​in_​Africa/​12_​Ntsebeza.pdf Plummer, K. (1995). Telling sexual stories: Power, change and social worlds. London, England: Routledge. Ricoeur, P. (1981). Hermeneutics and the human sciences (J. Thompson, Ed. and Trans.). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Said, E. (2003). Freud and the non-​European. London, England: Verso. Said, N. (2013). Looking for Palestine: Growing up confused in an Arab-​American family. New York, NY: Riverhead Books. Sankofa. (n.d.). Wikipedia. https://​en.wikipedia.org/​wiki/​Sankofa Smith, P. (1980). Translator’s introduction. In H-​G. Gadamer (Ed.), Dialogue and dialectic: Eight hermeneutical studies on Plato (pp. ix–​xv). (P. Smith, Trans.). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Spivak, G. (2008, April). More thoughts on cultural translation. European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies. http://​eipcp.net/​transversal/​0608/​spivak/​en Squire, C. (2013). Living with HIV and ARVs: Three letter lives. London, England: Palgrave. Taylor, C. (1992). Sources of the self. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Tutu, D. (1999). No future without forgiveness. London, England: Rider.

N a r r ati v e S u b j e c t s  

[ 161 ]

621

Vygotsky, L. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes (M. Cole and S. Scribner, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Vygotsky, L. (1999). The collected works of L. S. Vygotsky. Vol. 6, Scientific legacy (R. Rieber, Ed.). New York, NY: Plenum Press.

[ 162 ]  Stories Changing Lives

CHAPTER 9

Cultural Identities and Narratives That “Race” Representations and Resistance in the Context of a South African University SHOSE KESSI

INTRODUCTION

A central aspect of stories is their power to communicate persuasive representations of us and others, representations of who belongs and who does not, and representations of the authors and subjects of stories (Howarth, 2011). Projects that attempt to highlight, challenge, and resist dominant representations of authors and subjects within stories carry the potential of social change. In this chapter, I examine such representations using the context of higher education in South Africa. The institutional context of South African higher education is rooted in the history of colonial and apartheid relations (Sheehan, 2009), characterized by racial oppression and segregation. Despite claims to objectivity and neutrality, the scientific endeavors emerging from these centers of knowledge production have been part and parcel of the creation and legitimization of racial myths. The project of scientific racism (Richards, 1997) created the psychological and political conditions for widespread acceptance of racial oppression and segregation, which was instituted in very real terms, through laws and policies, resulting in widespread inequalities Shose Kessi, Cultural Identities and Narratives That “Race” In: Stories Changing Lives. Edited by: Corinne Squire, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190864750.003.0009.

641

and discrimination across South African society. A  key example is the Population Regulation Act (1950) that classified people into separate and hierarchical race categories. This was accompanied by a multitude of other laws to regulate political, social, and spatial segregation, including restrictions on education, through the Bantu Education Act (1953) and the University Education Act (1959). These laws were designed to restrict Black South Africans from access to learning opportunities and intellectual development and, by extension, from participation in the formal structures of public and political spheres of life. All of this rested on the production and dissemination of representations of race. The university as a powerful institution of knowledge production has been at the center of framing and participating in the narratives of racial violence that were part and parcel of the larger project of European colonial expansion and domination (Mazrui, 2005). Other examples are the 18th-​and 19th-​century sciences of phrenology, eugenics, and evolutionary theory (Magubane, 2007), which marked the beginning of race science, followed by more recent research into race and differences in IQ (Howitt and Owusu-​Bempah, 1994; Richards, 1997). Racialized difference re-​emerges in contemporary academic projects in more subtle ways, often disguised behind the widely accepted organizing principles of economic profit as well as the democratic and cultural values of modernization and development (Goudge, 2003; Kothari, 2006). People in colonial contexts are often represented in scholarly texts as poor (Escobar, 1995), lacking in knowledge and capabilities (Jovchelovitch, 2007) or “catching-​up” with the “civilized” White world (Easterley, 2006). They have become the objects of studies on poverty, disease, and ethnic and gendered violence and are represented in other contexts as passive recipients of development assistance rather than active producers of knowledge and social change (Dogra, 2012). This epistemic violence (Spivak, 1998) is at the heart of the modern university and fundamental to how we understand the role of knowledge production in the fight against racism and other systems of oppression. Thus, the historical location of higher education institutions and the philosophical underpinnings that guide them are cause for reflection. It is a background that is central to understanding the individual and collective mind in contemporary contexts and the potential for instituting transformative change. Indeed, notions of White superiority and Black inferiority are also entrenched in how the marginalized have come to see and represent themselves. Critical scholars have shown how “colonial” people, through everyday practices and internalized beliefs, come to participate in their own oppression (Biko, 1978; Fanon, 1986). Despite the important contributions of postcolonial (Bhabha, 1994), decolonial (Mignolo, 2007),

[ 164 ]  Stories Changing Lives

and anticolonial (Cannella and Manuelito, 2008) scholarship, these same perspectives continue to encounter difficulties in dismantling contemporary racializing systems of oppression in academic research where the politics of location, representation, and practice reveal the multilayered architectural trajectories of identity, power, and privilege that both open up and close down possibilities for change (Macleod et al., 2017). In this chapter, I  think through the ways in which hegemonic representations of racialization are reproduced and/​or resisted through stories told by a group of Black students located in a historically White university in South Africa, the University of Cape Town (UCT). I observe how, through the group’s representations of daily life on campus, historical narratives of racialized difference are played out in relation to their identities as Black students, as well as how these narratives position them in a local, national, and global context of racialized oppression. Furthermore, I examine how their narratives, in the context of a transforming institution, shift the terms of engagement in conversations about race and open up spaces for meaningful dialogue and action toward social change.

NARRATIVES AND SOCIAL REPRESENTATIONS

A narrative lens for research into racism allows us to connect everyday experiences, practices, spaces, and cultural products to a broader social and political context (Hammack and Pilecki, 2012). Students’ narratives about university life can reveal the less tangible cultural and institutional dynamics of the social world that they inhabit (Bruner, 1990). A  narrative analysis brings to the fore elements of the historical environment (Bartlett, 1923), through commonly held beliefs, traditions, institutional rituals (Jovchelovitch, 2012), and collective memories (Stephenson and Kippax, 2017; Vincent, 2015)  that we draw upon in our everyday lives, consciously and unconsciously. These cultural products of the past have a bearing on how we make sense of and are positioned in institutions, be it through behavioral patterns and expectations, modes of thinking, or measures of performance and success. Narratives provide an understanding of the technologies of institutional life and its reproduction and how these produce and are produced by the individuals within them. Narratives thus help to provide coherence in our lives (Murray, 2000) by linking mind to society (Hammack and Pilecki, 2012). It is in the disjuncture between mind and society that individuals shape their identities and develop political perspectives. Indeed, narratives are “strategic, functional, and purposeful” (Riessman, 2008, p. 8). The symbols

C u lt u r a l I de n titi e s a n d N a r r ati v e s T h at  “ R ac e ”  

[ 165 ]

61

and rituals of university life are not simple reflections of an institution but are also live instruments and political statements that make claims, justify, legitimize, and support ideas and perspectives most often in the interest of the dominant institutional culture. In a historical context of colonialism and apartheid, a narrative analysis may thus offer possibilities not only to better understand how the oppressed make sense of themselves and construct their identities but also to recognize the politics of knowledge (with academic projects as central) and highlight the narratives that may resist, disrupt, and delegitimize dominant modes of knowing and being. In this chapter, I  make use of research on narratives and social representations to examine students’ experiences at UCT, with a particular focus on racialized exclusion and the possibilities of change to see how social representations and narratives must be understood in relation to the historical past. When students tell stories about their everyday lives, they make use of and contest dominant social representations embedded within the institutional context of universities in South Africa. Moscovici (1984) defined social representations as systems of knowledge that help us to navigate our social and material worlds, share common understandings with others, and assert our own positioning and our own understanding. Research within this field has highlighted the connections between systems of knowledge and identification (Duveen, 2001) and systems of inclusion, exclusion, power, and privilege (Howarth, 2006). Social representations are fluid and changing, offering the possibility of contestation and resistance in contexts of increasingly diverse societies, multiple rationalities, and competition for material and symbolic resources. In the context of school exclusion in the United Kingdom, for example, Howarth (2002, 2004) demonstrates how social representations of blackness serve to construct Black students as deviant, threatening, and underachievers, thus maintaining and reinforcing social inequalities. Post-​1994 UCT is a context where social representations of race, gender, class, nation, community, and culture are contested within an institutional environment that is attempting to transform and decolonize. Hence, social representations are a useful conceptual tool in the context that I explore in the following text. In addition to the symbolic meanings imparted through social representations, a narrative framework can, further, allow us to examine the ways in which social representations are conveyed through stories, what stories individuals and communities choose to tell, and how they tell them (Jovchelovitch, 2012). Indeed, “historical narratives can act as symbolic resources that can mediate the co-​construction of social representations” (Nicholson, 2016, p.  6). The history of colonialism and apartheid has a significant bearing on current experiences of racial oppression in South

[ 166 ]  Stories Changing Lives

African institutions. In this chapter, I reflect on how university students made use of social representations to elaborate on and remember the past (Jovchelovitch, 2012), all the while constructing their own contemporary racial identities and aspirations for the future.

RACE AND HIGHER EDUCATION IN SOUTH AFRICA: A FOCUS ON UCT

Since the transition to democracy in 1994, universities previously reserved for White students have seen positive demographic changes in the racial representation of their undergraduate student bodies. At UCT, statistics for 2011 indicated that Black students for the first time (including African, Colored, and Indian) constituted over 50% of the total student population (Cornell et al., 2016). These advances were facilitated by UCT’s affirmative action policy, which until 2016 used “race” as a proxy for disadvantage. This meant that the entrance requirements for prospective UCT students were favorably skewed toward those who fell under historically determined categories of African, Colored, and Indian. However, as described elsewhere (see Kessi and Cornell, 2015), the success of the affirmative action policy was met with widespread social representations of stereotypical blackness in the media and in daily conversations on campus. The rise in Black student enrollments was referred to as “overcrowding” and was argued to have the effect of lowering academic standards (Kessi and Cornell, 2015). Claims of reverse racism were used to discredit affirmative action initiatives, which were represented as a way of re-​inventing apartheid racism under the supposition that racism no longer existed given South Africa’s status as a democratic country. Furthermore, despite increases in racially diverse enrollment statistics (Petersen et  al., 2009), high levels of drop-​out and failure rates among Black students can have the effect of deepening social representations of Black students as unprepared for academic study (Smit, 2012). I argue here that such victim-​blaming discourses have failed to take into account the historical dimensions of institutional culture that serve to perpetuate exclusion and undermine transformative change (Steyn and Van Zyl, 2001; Tabensky and Matthews; Soudien et al., 2008). It is important to note that much still needs to change in terms of the racial demographics at postgraduate level and among academic staff at UCT and across the country (Govender, 2016). In recent years, student movements across the nation have brought to the fore issues of financial and symbolic access to higher education. Calls for free education through the #FeesMustFall campaign led to a nationwide shutdown of higher education

C u lt u r a l I de n titi e s a n d N a r r ati v e s T h at  “ R ac e ”  

[ 167 ]

6 81

institutions in 2015. This was accompanied by calls to decolonize the curriculum and to remove symbols and artifacts that continue to glorify and reify colonial modes of thinking. At UCT, the #RhodesMustFall movement in 2015, advocating for the removal of the statue of colonialist and mining magnate, Cecil John Rhodes, marked a turning point in how the institution was viewed as unambiguously committed to diversity, inclusion, and transformation. Students and staff came out in numbers to protest against the cultural symbols, systems, and practices that continue to privilege White students and White staff at the institution. These actions and research projects such as the one described in the following text are examples of how people can participate in the co-​construction of institutional change.

PHOTOVOICE

The narratives of student experiences in higher education presented in this chapter were collected through a photovoice project. Photovoice is a participatory action research method involving the collection of stories through photographs and captions (Wang and Burris, 1997). As a method focused on community mobilization and social change (Kessi, 2013; Seedat et  al., 2015), the use of photovoice in this project was to engage participants in representing their experiences of higher education with a view to enacting changes in their environment. Employing narratives in this way prioritizes the participation of the participants in the research project. Students were asked to document through photographs and written texts their experiences of being at UCT. In this process, their identities and subjectivities became the basis upon which understandings of university life could emerge. Furthermore, the work of making sense of their experiences in a historical context was an integral and deliberate part of the project. Drawing on the principles of critical consciousness (Freire, 1970) that suggest that consciousness is a collective process, students were engaged in facilitated conversations around the stories they produced and their views on how to transform the institution. Finally, photography exhibitions were held showcasing the students’ narratives to which members of the institution and the broader public were invited. In this way, the narratives were shared among a wide range of people with the aim of building awareness and forging the type of attitudes needed to enact meaningful transformation and to resist the dominant narratives of racialization. Overall, the project brought together a group of 36 students from five different faculties at UCT over a period of three years, from 2013 to 2015. Students were of diverse racial, classed, and gendered identities, which

[ 168 ]  Stories Changing Lives

made for a rich set of data. In addition to the creation of photo-​stories, other methods were used during the research process including focus groups and short written personal stories by participants about their experiences at UCT. In the following discussion, I have included extracts from the personal stories and photo-​story data. The data are presented using a thematic narrative approach (Riessman, 2008). I  examine how the themes emerging from the photo-​stories produced by students are anchored in social representations of racial difference. I  then highlight how these social representations are conveyed, drawing on the broader institutional environment and the historical meanings attached to their current experiences and identities. The extracts from the personal stories were particularly useful in uncovering how students as both the authors and subjects of their stories made choices about what narratives to tell. In these extracts, they locate their individual experiences and identities firmly within the narrative of racial oppression and present possibilities for change based on their insights. The combination of these data sources presented opportunities for analyzing both the social representations of race circulating broadly in the institution as well as the consciousness and identities of the students who, through their narratives, acted as agents of change in the institution.

NARRATIVES THAT “RACE”

The history of apartheid was central to students’ narratives of their experiences at UCT. This narrative was told through anchoring social representations of Black inferiority/​ W hite superiority and social representations of Black people having to “catch up” with their White counterparts. More complex social representations of racial difference included other markers of culture and identity, such as class, gender, language, and nationality. The following stories illustrate how these came about in students’ everyday experiences on campus. In this first photo-​ story, Tumi represents these ideas symbolically through photographs taken at UCT, locating the institution firmly within this historical context. In this three-​part story, Tumi makes use of White as a color that symbolizes whiteness, the first photograph depicting white clouds, the second white footprints and the third, the sketch of a white body in an exit sign. One could infer the imagery of white clouds to indicate the pervasiveness of whiteness in the culture of the institution. This is reinforced by her words “in the beginning, there was White,” marking whiteness as the original reference point for knowledge and existence. The picture of very large white footprints on the roof of a UCT building captures

C u lt u r a l I de n titi e s a n d N a r r ati v e s T h at  “ R ac e ”  

[ 169 ]

701

the affective experience of being oppressed, almost as if stamped upon by the feet of a white giant. Finally, in the third photograph of the white exit sign and arrow, one can feel Tumi’s frustration that White people, despite the dismantling of apartheid, are still paving the way forward whereas Black people are still following in the footsteps of the white giants.

In the beginning there was “White”

Footprints on the land

Where they go, we shall follow

Being white was considered the superior and proper race (Tumi, photo-​story)

The idea that colonialism and even more recently apartheid left marks on the land . . . the actual structure of the country and marks on individuals. It is very hard to look passed those even though some transformation has happened. It’s hard to say that complete transformation has happened.

White people have left a legacy by apartheid. They in the lead in terms of privilege in this Western world. The other races are trying to catch up with them. Even though ones get some success and wealthy Black (including Indian and Colored) especially here at UCT, the gap is still not bridged. Black people are most of the time playing catch-​up. (Tumi, photo-​story)

[ 170 ]  Stories Changing Lives

Her narrative is then enhanced by specific references to how marks were left on the land and on individuals, and the wealth gap between Black and White, alluding to the material and physical legacies of apartheid. The image of “catching up” for Tumi is also a way of speaking back against injustice and inequality. The image is one of resistance when this idea of catching up is read as disrupting the logic of White superiority. Tumi describes Black people as playing catch-​up, giving the impression of a game. This term speaks to the frivolity in which a few Black individuals might become successful within the boundaries of what she refers to as a “Western world”—​a world that doesn’t address the fundamental terms of engagement and relations of racialized power that need to shift. This idea is revisited in Tayla’s photo-​story (see following text), in which she frames catching-​up in social, political, and economic relations. Tayla’s photograph is a representation of the steps outside one of the buildings on UCT’s main campus. UCT’s main campus is located on the slopes of Table Mountain with many steps to navigate when moving between the buildings. Tayla uses the imagery of the steps to reinforce the idea of ascension in spatial terms, indicative of UCT’s position of prominence and status, located high on the slopes of Table Mountain, inaccessible to many lay inhabitants of Cape Town.

STEP BY STEP

C u lt u r a l I de n titi e s a n d N a r r ati v e s T h at  “ R ac e ”  

[ 171 ]

72 1

White privilege is evident not only in South Africa, especially UCT. Apartheid created a social, political and economical chasm between white and black South Africans. However, after 19  years this is slowly changing. Step by step black South Africans and black students are catching up with their white counterparts. (Tayla, photo-​story)

The image of the White student higher up on the steps in relation to the Black student could be read as reinforcing the superiority of Western knowledge and devaluing the contributions of Black students. Such a reinforcement is made possible by an institutional environment that measures success according to particular cultural norms of achievement. Representations of Black students as being less competent are commonplace as evidenced across a wide literature in South Africa (De Beer et al., 2009; Higham, 2012; Vincent, 2008)  and internationally (Codjoe, 2001; Fries-​Britt and Turner, 2001; Harper, 2009, 2012, 2013; Howarth, 2004; Johnson-​Ahorlu, 2012; Smith et al., 2007). Students referred to some of the ways that these ideas were communicated to them directly by others seeking to undermine them: As a Black student here you have to work three times harder just to meet the minimum requirement mark. It’s not that we are not intelligent enough but that’s just the way it is, its like its the nature of this community eyoba xa umnyama utsale nzima (when you black you must struggle). Lento ibonakala ngentlobo ezininintsi kodwa eyona ima phambili kum lihlobo esiphathwa ngalo ngabanfundisi bethu amamhlophe (This is shown in many ways but the one that stands out for me it’s the way we are treated by our lecturers). I remember in one of my political economy class our lecturer told us as black students we should regard ourselves very fortunate we made it to UCT. I mean really, because of our skin colour, I asked myself with a fear of voicing out my opinion. I feared to voice out because he might just recognize my name and that could have impact on my marks. “Some of you your behaviour and attitude will show in your marks.” These were some of his comments. . . . I often feel powerless and hopeless as a black student here, I feel that the way we are treated has impacted negatively on our self-​esteem, well on mine. For many times I questioned my intellect and doubted my capability. (Nolu, extract from personal story)

Nolu resists the discourse of Black underachievement by stating upfront that Black students have to work much harder to get by and refers to the UCT community as the problem: “It’s like it’s the nature of this community.”

[ 172 ]  Stories Changing Lives

Black students work harder because of the identity work of having to prove that they belong in the institution. In the incident she describes, by remaining silent in front of her lecturer, she is alluding to the potential victimization that would ensue if she challenged her position of an outsider. Unlike the idea of Black students playing catch-​up, Nolu’s story describes the deliberate forms of exclusion and discrimination that are taking place in everyday encounters. Nolu thus justifies her silence but is also very conscious of the negative consequences that these experiences have on her self-​identity and academic performance. Experiences of being Black at UCT were not always associated with experiences of direct or blatant forms of racism. Participants described situations of more subtle racisms that occurred across the racial categories of blackness. In his story, Sean speaks about the power of whiteness and the role that Black people play in maintaining racialization through their wish to seek “the White man’s approval”: My experience of being black at UCT is not that of blatant racism or discrimination in any manner or form (although some situations have made me feel that it was indeed the case), but with more subtlety (in language, in behaviour, in commentary, in mobility, in others’ perceptions about me and so forth). But these forms of discrimination are experienced when I  am in contact with different race groups and not only with white individuals. However, privilege and power is still very much associated with whiteness and when the white individual of a source of subtle racism in the most casual form, it becomes apparent that ideas of superiority, entitlement, privilege prestige and dominance over others are inherent to this group and that is what is most intimidating and what triggers the black person’s sense of inferiority and constantly the black individual seeks the white man’s approval. In a historical white context such as UCT, this is especially significant and transformation initiatives at UCT (in my opinion) have failed to conscientize and empower the black individual as it enters the white domain. Of course UCT have improved under the topic of discussion, but more focus and implementation is needed for the black person to become accustomed to “whiteness” without feeling a sense of “non-​belonging” and without feeling as if they are losing who they are in the process of adapting. (Sean, extract from personal story)

Sean alludes to a context of White privilege that sets the foundation for racial divisions and hierarchies and the internalization thereof. He speaks to the invisibility of whiteness that overshadows and closes down possibilities for alternative ways of being. Whiteness is so entrenched that either being

C u lt u r a l I de n titi e s a n d N a r r ati v e s T h at  “ R ac e ”  

[ 173 ]

7 41

confronted by or assimilating with whiteness leads to a sense of inferiority and loss of identity. When one understands whiteness as a location of privilege (Frankenberg, 1993), it becomes evident that these cultural narratives are historical and political. Categories of whiteness and blackness are co-​ constructed and co-​dependent, where whiteness is premised on the devaluation of blackness (Fanon, 1986). Interestingly, Sean’s understanding of transformation is thus premised on changing the culture of the institution rather than simply on demographic change. In the previous narratives, an important and re-​emerging theme in the social representations of racial difference are ideas of class and culture and how these intersect with race and with each other in ways that create particular experiences of blackness. In the following story, Karabo alludes to this by emphasizing language (accents) and material wealth: Being black at UCT has revealed to me the ways in which we have underestimated the depth of the apartheid legacy. As students, we all share a heritage of de-​humanization. However, there still exists a real distance between white and black students because of the reality of the past. A  black, poor student from Nyanga I imagine, feels the alienation more than I would when in spaces with upper class white students from Clifton because of the difference in speaking accents and visible material wealth that often exhibits itself in tutorials. . . . At UCT, I firstly began to realize that my own inability to relate to other black people was problematic. That assisted me in understanding that class plays a preponderant role in understanding other forms of segregation. (Karabo, personal story)

Experiences of blackness are thus linked to what is valued in the institutional environment. Students spoke about how racial alienation and dehumanization were manifested on their bodies, through not only skin color but also other visible markers of material and cultural difference. In her photo-​story, Faith captures an artifact that she sees as depicting Black bodies hanging by their necks from a ceiling at UCT, reminiscent of the practice of lynching. Faith’s photograph depicts what appears to be three woman and two man brownish doll-​like figures hanging together in a circle and bound together through their necks. The photograph was taken in the Harry Oppenheimer building, which hosts the Centre for African Studies and the African Gender Institute. The location of the artifact is as questionable as the naming of the building after mining magnate Harry Oppenheimer given the scholarship that happens in between those

[ 174 ]  Stories Changing Lives

walls. These symbolic ambiguities may be a reflection of the historical neoliberal forms of knowledge production in and about Africa in academic institutions (Lewis, 2016). Faith is calling out the historical and essentialist representations of Black bodies as bestial and degenerate (Lewis, 2011) that are anchored in colonial discourses as well as the presumption that the trauma of colonization and apartheid is not felt today:

(DE)VALUING THE BLACK BODY

The image itself brought a great deal of discomfort and confusion. Initially I  thought it was a lamp shade of sorts and was meant to be aesthetically pleasing—​(it isn’t). I  couldn’t understand how this could even be artistic expression. Walking around campus and seeing artworks like this which physically represent the institutional value of the Black body to the university. (Faith, photo-​story)

Representations of degeneracy are also closely tied to ideas about the pathological sexuality of Africans (Lewis, 2011). These ideas have been objectified in very real ways in South Africa through the apartheid laws on immorality that regulated both race and sexuality (Ratele, 2009). In this project, the historical erasure of sexual diversity at UCT was most poignantly told through the stories of Black queer students. The following

C u lt u r a l I de n titi e s a n d N a r r ati v e s T h at  “ R ac e ”  

[ 175 ]

761

photo-​story is an extract from a seven-​part story about what it is like to be Black and queer at UCT and living in a single-​sex residence system. Sine describes how their existence is one of denial that involves either fighting, running, or dying: There is no existing as a queer black body in UCT. There is fighting as a queer black body, there is running as a queer black body there is certainly dying as a queer black body. But existing would be to assume the position of an acknowledged identity and there is none of that. (Sine, photo-​story) This photograph is the first of Sine’s seven-​part series of self-​portraits taken in their bedroom in a UCT single-​sex female student residence. The seven photographs depict Sine getting dressed in the morning. One cannot clearly discern Sine’s presence in this first photograph, presumably depicting the confusion and erasure of being Black, queer, and gender nonconforming in a female residence. In subsequent photographs, Sine’s body becomes more in focus as they put on clothes that hide any biological traces of a gendered identity previously discernible in their nudity. It is a very moving series of photographs that capture what Sine has to do every day to overcome their own internal discomfort in relation to the highly conservative and gender-​conformist external environment that they find themselves in. Samkhelo, a nonbinary and gender nonconforming student speaks further about the everyday experiences of dehumanization by being denied access to basic necessities such as a restroom but also by being erased in the language of everyday talk. Samkhelo took a photograph of the student residence building where they stay on middle campus named after the first former lady of South Africa, Graça Machel. Samkhelo illustrates the sense of alienation through contrasting the idea of home with one of erasure, their home being the student residence, which refers to students as “first ladies.”

[ 176 ]  Stories Changing Lives

HOME?

My ID tells lies about who I am; I’m subhuman so I don’t deserve a restroom; the language to accommodate me does not exist in the vocab of the majority. And even when I come home, this space expects me to be a “first lady.” Home should not be violent. There’s no space in which I  am acknowledged and validated. There are only spaces that tell me who I am. (Samkhelo, photo-​story)

It is interesting that the photograph is taken at night rendering the building less discernible, perhaps further reinforcing the idea of invisibility and erasure. One room is lit in the distance, presumably Samkhelo’s room, symbolizing resistance, the need to be seen and to shed light on issues of gender and sexual diversity at UCT. In all of these narratives, social representations of race have been complicated by racial categories, class, and material inequalities, language, gendered identities, and sexual orientations. Experiences of gender nonconforming students at UCT are particularly poignant examples of the need for an intersectional approach to understanding social representations of race and how the past reproduces itself in everyday life (Boonzaier and Mkhize, 2018; Cornell et al., 2016). What is clear from students’ stories is that their experiences of exclusion and alienation are everyday experiences that have real consequences on their well-​being and ability to perform academically. These insights were manifested as a result of the possibilities

C u lt u r a l I de n titi e s a n d N a r r ati v e s T h at  “ R ac e ”  

[ 177 ]

781

created for students in this project to become the authors of stories about their own lives. As such, they reclaimed the narrative of transformation in higher education, redefining forms of racial oppression as intersecting with multiple axes of identity and imparting meaning to experiences of exclusion that go beyond the institutional imperative of demographic change. As the subjects of their own stories, they were also able to convey the affective dimension of exclusionary practices thus carving out new pathways for tackling the lingering effects of apartheid and colonization.

REPRESENTATIONS AND RESISTANCE

Narratives of racialized belonging and exclusion at UCT exemplify the unfinished logics and registers of a history of apartheid and colonization. Through representational processes, students position themselves within the institution in relation to this past. Their photographs and written stories challenged and resisted social representations of Black underachievement and backwardness through alternative representations of their lived and bodily experiences of dehumanization, which called for a consciousness of blackness as raced, gendered, and classed. These narratives raise questions on what it means to belong in contemporary South African institutions in which a master narrative of academic achievement and success is bound up with dominant representations of whiteness as superior. In the following account, Karabo speaks to the possibilities of departing from dehumanizing narratives toward developing the resources for belonging in a more global context: I am a twenty four year-​old black South African woman who attended a French school from the age of ten until I  was eighteen. My socialisation process involved co-​mingling with classmates who were from countries such as Senegal, Mali, Ivory Coast, and Madagascar. The early exposure to a global-​minded environment nurtured and heightened my sense of belonging to the world at large as opposed to being imprisoned by the fact of my blackness, which was revealed to me a year after I arrived at the University of Cape Town. . . . All in all, my having been educated at world-​class institutions for most of my life did not insulate me against experiencing feelings of alienation and irrelevance at UCT as a black person. It was at UCT that I recognised the fact of my blackness and began to feel unimportant and unseen. Now in my final year, I am most grateful for the RhodesMustFall Movement because it included all kinds of black people who related to what it meant to have to learn in an environment that was largely exclusive and oblivious to black pain. I am excited about the way forward which

[ 178 ]  Stories Changing Lives

will have us actively engage and envisage new ways of making the past a non-​invasive factor in the present realities of those who have mostly been impacted by apartheid’s violent legacy. (Karabo, personal story)

Karabo contrasts her experience of a global African environment as one of belonging in contrast to being imprisoned by blackness at UCT. The exposure to this environment enabled her to reflect on her identity as an African outside of the constraints of a racially oppressive institution. This points to the global nature of racism and suggests the need for a pan-​ African outlook to provide the resources for identity construction. Recent drives to decolonize and Africanise (Ndlovu-​Gatsheni, 2013) institutions of higher learning in South Africa are positive attempts in that direction. Pan-​African and transnational feminisms in particular provide a clear framework for challenging the globalized systems of difference and exploitation in moving toward a consciousness of shared interests, solidarity and change (Abbas and Mama, 2014; Davies, 2014). Karabo leaves us with a positive note on the need to challenge historical narratives in ways that they do not invade our present realities. A most powerful aspect of the project was the use of photovoice methods, which allowed students’ narratives (in the form of the photo-​stories) to reach a broad audience through the public exhibitions, thus opening up spaces for dialogue with others while shifting the terms of engagement toward a deeper understanding of institutional change. Interactions among students in facilitated dialogues during the project also raised awareness of common challenges that they faced. Their narratives often converged in ways that built solidarity amongst them and led many participants to become actively involved in the student movement of 2015 and related protests (see Cornell et al., 2016), often providing leadership and insights into the less visible dimensions of the transformation agenda. Social representations of blackness and racial difference informed the debates on the racially skewed statistics and experiences of financial and academic exclusions through a heightened consciousness of how institutional racism impacts on the self-​esteem and sense of belonging of students. This affects academic performance (Kessi and Cornell, 2015) and raises broader issues of epistemic justice and the need for curriculum change (Kessi, 2017).

CONCLUSION

Following the transition to democracy in 1994, affirmative action policies were effective in making demographic changes to some of South Africa’s

C u lt u r a l I de n titi e s a n d N a r r ati v e s T h at  “ R ac e ”  

[ 179 ]

8 01

largest higher education institutions. However, the discourses of race, gender, and class are still framed and experienced by many students as alienating and dehumanizing. Widespread negative and stereotypical social representations of blackness were disrupted and challenged by the students participating in this project through powerful photographs and written stories depicting the resourcefulness with which they were able to speak back and negotiate their cultural identities in spaces of historical exclusion. The narratives of Black students at UCT have much to contribute to our understanding of how racial myths continue to frame academic discourses and everyday experiences in the interests of those who continue to benefit from historical hierarchies. Their narratives not only construct alternative frames of reference that provide positive resources for identity construction, but also conscientize and empower the marginalized to influence the direction of the academic project.

REFERENCES Abbas, H., and Mama, A. (2014). Editorial: Feminism and pan-​Africanism. Feminist Africa 19, 1–​6. Bartlett, F. (1923) Psychology and primitive culture. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Bhabha, H. (1994). The location of culture. London, England: Routledge. Biko, S. (1978). I write what I like. London, England: Bowerdean. Boonzaier, F., and Mkhize, L. (2018). Bodies out of place: Black queer students negotiating identity at the University of Cape Town. South African Journal of Higher Education 32(3), 81–​100. Bruner, J. (1990) Acts of meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cannella, G., and Manuelito, K. (2008). Feminisms from unthought locations. Indigenous worldviews, marginalized feminisms and revisioning anticolonial social science. In N. Denzin, Y. Lincoln, and L. Smith (Eds.), Handbook of critical and Indigenous methodologies (pp. 45–​59). Los Angeles, CA: SAGE. Codjoe, H. (2001). Fighting a “public enemy” of Black academic achievement: The persistence of racism and the schooling experiences of Black students in Canada. Race, Ethnicity and Education 4(4), 343–​375. doi:10.1080/​ 13613320120096652 Cornell, J., Ratele, K., and Kessi, S. (2016). Race, gender and sexuality in student experiences of violence and resistances on a university campus. Perspectives in Education 34(2), 97–​119. Davies, C. (2014). Pan-​Africanism, transnational Black feminism and the limits of culturalist analyses in African gender discourses. Feminist Africa 19, 78–​93. De Beer, J., Smith, U., and Jansen, C. (2009). “Situated” in a separated campus—​ students’ sense of belonging and academic performance: A case study of experiences of students during a higher education merger. Education as Change, 13(1), 167–​94. doi:10.1080/​16823200902944922

[ 180 ]  Stories Changing Lives

Dogra, N. (2012). Representations of global poverty: Aid, development and international NGOs. New York, NY: I. B. Taurus. Duveen, G. (2001). Representations, identities, resistance. In K. Deaux and G. Philogène (Eds.), Representations of the social: Bridging theoretical tradition (pp. 257–​270). Oxford, England: Blackwell. Easterley, W. (2006). The White man’s burden. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Escobar, A. (1995). Encountering development: The making and unmaking of the Third World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Fanon, F. (1986). Black skin, white masks. London, England: Pluto Press. Frankenberg, R. (1993). Growing up White: Feminism, racism and the social geography of childhood. Feminist Review 45, 51–​84. Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. London, England: Penguin. Fries-​Britt, S., and Turner, B. (2001). Facing stereotypes: A case study of Black students on a White campus. Journal of College Student Development 42(5), 420–​429. Goudge, P. (2003). The whiteness of power: Racism in Third World development aid. London, England: Lawrence and Wishart. Govender, P. (2016, July 12). There still aren’t enough Black professors, despite university transformation attempts. MailandGuardian. Retrieved from https://​ mg.co.za/​article/​2016-​07-​11-​there-​still-​arent-​enough-​black-​professors-​despite-​ university-​transformation-​attempts/​ Hammack, P., and Pilecki, A. (2012). Narrative as a root metaphor for political psychology. Political Psychology 33(1), 75–​103. Harper, S. (2009). Niggers no more: A critical race counternarrative on Black male student achievement at predominantly White colleges and universities. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 22(6), 697–​712. doi:10.1080/​09518390903333889 Harper, S. (2012). Black male student success in higher education: A report from the National Black Male College Achievement Study. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania, Centre for the Study of Race and Equity in Education. Harper, S. (2013). Am I my brother’s teacher? Black undergraduates, racial socialization, and peer pedagogies in predominantly White postsecondary contexts. Review of Research in Education 37(1), 183–​211. doi:10.3102/​ 0091732X12471300 Higham, R. (2012). Place, race and exclusion: University student voices in post-​ apartheid South Africa. International Journal of Inclusive Education 16, 485–​501. doi:10.1080/​13603116.2012.655498 Howarth, C. (2002). “So you’re from Brixton?” The struggle for recognition and esteem in a multicultural community. Ethnicities 2(2), 237–​260. Howarth, C. (2004). Re-​presentation and resistance in the context of school exclusion: Reasons to be critical. Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology 14(5), 356–​377. Howarth, C. (2006). A social representation is not a quiet thing: Exploring the critical potential of social representations theory. British Journal of Social Psychology 45(1),  65–​86. Howarth, C. (2011). Representations, identity and resistance in communication. In D. Hook, B. Franks, and M. Bauer (Eds.), The social psychology of communication (pp. 153–​168). London, England: Palgrave Macmillan.

C u lt u r a l I de n titi e s a n d N a r r ati v e s T h at  “ R ac e ”  

[ 181 ]

821

Howitt, D., and Owusu-​Bempah, J. (1994). The racism of psychology: Time for change. New York, NY: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Johnson-​Ahorlu, R. (2012). The academic opportunity gap: How racism and stereotypes disrupt the education of African American undergraduates. Race, Ethnicity and Education 15(5), 633–​652. doi:10.1080/​13613324.2011.645566 Jovchelovitch, S (2007). Knowledge in context: Representation, community and culture. London, England: Routledge. Jovchelovitch, S. (2012). Narrative, memory and social representations: A conversation between history and social psychology. Integrative Psychological and Behavioural Science 46, 440–​456. Kessi, S. (2013). Re-​politicizing race in community development: Using postcolonial psychology and Photovoice methods for social change. PINS 45, 17–​35. Kessi, S. (2017). Community social psychologies for decoloniality: An African perspective on epistemic justice in higher education. South African Journal of Psychology 47(4), 506–​516. Kessi, S., and Cornell, J. (2015). Coming to UCT: Black students, transformation, and discourses of race. Journal of Student Affairs in Africa 3(2), 1–​16. Kothari, U. (2006). An agenda for thinking about ‘race’ in development. Progress in Development Studies 6, 9–​23. Lewis, D. (2011). Representing African sexualities. In S. Tamale (Ed.) African Sexualities (pp. 199–​216). Oxford, England: Pambuka Press. Lewis, D. (2016, March). Neo-​liberalism, the humanities, and the feminist intellectuals in South Africa. Paper presentation to JIAS Seminar, Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study, Johannesburg, South Africa. Retrieved from http://​jias. joburg/​wp-​content/​uploads/​2016/​03/​neoliberalism-​and-​feminism.pdf Macleod, C., Bhatia, S., and Kessi, S. (2017). Postcolonialism and psychology: Growing interest and promising potential. In C. Willig and W. Stainton-​Rogers (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of qualitative research in psychology (2nd ed., pp. 306–​317). Los Angeles, CA: SAGE. Magubane, B. (2007). Race and the construction of the dispensable other. Pretoria, South Africa: UNISA Press. Mazrui, A. (2005). Pan-​africanism and the intellectuals. In T. Mkandawire (Ed.), African intellectuals: Rethinking politics, language, gender, and development (pp. 56–​77). New York, NY: Zed Books. Mignolo, W. (2007). Epistemic disobedience: The de-​colonial option and the meaning of identity in politics. Niteroi 22,  11–​41. Moscovici, S. (1984). The phenomenon of social representations. In R. Farr and S. Moscovici (Eds.), Social representations (pp. 3–​69). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Murray, M. (2000). Levels of narrative analysis in health psychology. Journal of Health Psychology 5(2), 337–​347. Ndlovu-​Gatsheni, S. (2013). Decolonising the university in Africa. The Thinker 51,  46–​51. Nicholson, C. (2016). The role of historical representations in Israeli-​Palestinian relations: Narratives from abroad. Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology 22(1),  5–​11. Petersen, I., Louw, J., and Dumont, K. (2009). Adjustment to university and academic performance among disadvantaged students in South Africa. Educational Psychology: An International Journal of Experimental Educational Psychology 29(1), 99–​115.

[ 182 ]  Stories Changing Lives

Ratele, K. (2009). Apartheid, anti-​apartheid and post-​apartheid sexualities. In M. Steyn and M. van Zyl (Eds), The prize and the price: Shaping sexualities in South Africa (pp. 290–​305). Cape Town, South Africa: HSRC Press. Richards, G. (1997). Race, racism, and psychology: Towards a reflexive history. London, England: Routledge. Riessman, C. (2008). Narrative methods for the human sciences. Los Angeles, CA: SAGE. Seedat, M., Suffla, S., and Bawa, U. (2015). Photovoice as emancipatory praxis: A visual methodology toward critical consciousness and social action. In D. Bretherton and S. Law (Eds.), Methodologies in peace psychology: Peace research by peaceful means (pp. 309–​324). Cham, Switzerland: Springer. Sheehan, H. (2009). Contradictory transformations: Observations on the intellectual dynamics of South African universities. Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies 7(1), 67–​105. Smit, R. (2012). Towards a clearer understanding of student disadvantage in higher education: Problematising deficit thinking. Higher Education Research and Development 31(3), 369–​380. Smith, W., Allen, W., and Danley, L. (2007). “Assume the position . . . you fit the description”: Campus racial climate and the psychoeducational experiences and racial battle fatigue among African American male college students. American Behavioral Scientist 51(4), 551–​578. doi:10.1177/​0002764207307742 Soudien, C., Michaels, W., Mthembi-​Mahanyele, S., Nkomo, N., Nyanda, G., Nyoka, N., . . . Villa-​Vincecio, C. (2008). Report of the Ministerial Committee on transformation and social cohesion and the elimination of discrimination in public higher education institutions. Pretoria, South Africa: Department of Education. Spivak, G. C. (1988). Can the subaltern speak. In N. Cary and L. Grossbierg (Eds.), Marxism And the interpretation of culture (pp. 71–​313). Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Stephenson, N., and Kippax, S. (2017). Memory work. In C. Willig and W. Stainton-​ Rogers (Eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research in Psychology (2nd ed., pp. 141–​156). Los Angeles, CA: SAGE. Steyn, M., and Van Zyl, M. (2001). “Like that statue at Jammie stairs”: Some student perceptions and experiences of institutional culture at the University of Cape Town in 1999. Cape Town, South Africa: Institute for Intercultural and Diversity Studies of Southern Africa. Retrieved from https://​open.uct.ac.za/​bitstream/​ handle/​11427/​7569/​Like+that+statue+at+Jammie+stairs.pdf?sequence=1 Vincent, L. (2008). The limitations of ‘inter-​racial contact’: Stories from young South Africa. Ethnic and Racial Studies 31(8), 1426–​1451. doi: 10.1080/​ 01419870701711839. Wang, C., and Burris, M. (1997). Photovoice: Concept, methodology, and use for participatory needs assessment. Health Education and Behavior 24(3), 369–​387.

C u lt u r a l I de n titi e s a n d N a r r ati v e s T h at  “ R ac e ”  

[ 183 ]

INDEX

Notes are indicated by an italic n following the page/​paragraph number. For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. Abelson, R., 33–​34 activist narratives. See also community activism activists as reluctant narrators, 75–​76 Cathy McCormack, 88–​95 Helen Crummy, 82–​88 Adair, John, 12–​13 affirmations of difference, 127 affirmative action initiatives, 167, 179–​80 Agreement on Identity and Rights of Indigenous Peoples, 138n Alarcón, Hernández, 131 Anderson, Irina, xix–​xx Andrews, M., xviii–​xix, 75–​76 Angelou, Maya, 99 Arab Spring, xiv–​xv Arendt, Hannah, 26–​27 Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary,  100–​1 autobiographies, community activism Cathy McCormack, 88–​95 Emma Goldman, 81 Helen Crummy, 82–​88 political context, 80–​81 purpose of, 77–​78 social context, 78–​80 testimonio,  79–​80 Ayala, Jen, 102–​3    Baldwin, James, 112–​13 Bantu Education Act of 1953 (South Africa), 163–​64

Barthes, R., 3 Basile, K., 32 Bateson, Gregory, 12–​13 Baylor University, 100–​1, 102 Benmayor, Rina, 102–​3 “bewitching” narratives, 58–​59 Bhabha, H., xi–​xii, xviii, 14–​15 Bhattacharya, H., 123 Black Lives Matter movement, xiv–​xv, 117,  157–​58 Bradbury, Jill, xxiii, 107 Brockmeier, J., 152 Brown, Lucy, 81–​82 Burgos, M., 64–​65 Burgos-​Debray, Elizabeth, 139n Burke, Kenneth, 77 Burris, Mary Ann, 13 Bury, Michael, 3–​4 Butler, Judith, 149–​50    Catholic Action movement, 128, 130 CEH (Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico), 123, 137–​38n Centre for Narrative Research (CNR), xi–​xii, 4, 6 change narratives. See also community activism; social change narratives Cathy McCormack, 93–​95 Helen Crummy, 85–​86 City University of New York (CUNY), 100 civil rights movement, 11–​12 Cixous, H., 3

CNR (Centre for Narrative Research), xi–​xii, 4, 6 Coetzee, Carli, 156 cognitive scripts defined,  33–​34 linguistic script and, 34 collective identity, 76, 95 collective solidarity. See also community activism Cathy McCormack, 92–​93 Helen Crummy, 86–​88 Colliers, John, 12–​13 Colliers, Malcolm, 12–​13 “colonizing space” strategy, 11 Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico (CEH), 123, 137–​38n Committee of Peasant Unity (CUC), 139n Communities of Populations in Resistance (CPR), 125–​26 community activism activists as reluctant narrators, 75–​76 autobiographies Emma Goldman, 81 political context, 80–​81 purpose of, 77–​78 social context, 78–​80 testimonio,  79–​80 Cathy McCormack, 88–​95 collective solidarity, 92–​93 historical context, 91 overview,  88–​89 vision of change, 93–​95 writing autobiography, 90 collective identity, 95 commitment to, 96–​97 counternarratives,  96–​97 defined, 75 Helen Crummy, 82–​88 change narrative, 85–​86 collective endeavor, 86–​88 historical context, 83–​85 overview, 82 writing autobiography, 82–​83 “outsider” social representation, 95 overview, xxi shared identity, 92–​93 vision of change, 95–​96 conversion narratives, 159n

[ 186 ] Index

counternarratives community activism, 96–​97 resistance narratives, 123, 135–​36 CPR (Communities of Populations in Resistance),  125–​26 Craigmillar Festival Society, 82, 85–​88 Crosby, A., 124–​25 Crummy, Helen, xxi, 82–​88 change narrative, 85–​86 collective identity, 86–​88 historical context, 83–​85 overview, 82 writing autobiography, 82–​83 CUC (Committee of Peasant Unity), 139n cultural identities and narratives, 163–​65. See also social representations of race bad subjects, 149–​50 decolonization project, 107, 147, 148–​50, 158, 160n displacement and translation, 153–​56 egocentric speech, 150 inner dialogues, 150–​52 monolingualism,  147–​48 CUNY (City University of New York), 100    Davis, Angela, 157–​58 Day, Dorothy, 96–​97 Debray, Elisabeth Burgos, 79–​80 De Chungara, Domitila, 79 decolonization project, 107, 147, 148–​50, 158, 160n deep listening, 107–​9 Del Tufo, Alisa, xxii Derrida, J., 147–​49 dialogic co-​constructions affirmations of difference, 127 armed resistance, 127–​33 resistance narratives, 126–​33 solidarity, 126    Eco, U., 156 education Fallist Student Movement, 147,  157–​58 #FeesMustFall campaign, 167–​68 University of Cape Town affirmative action initiatives, 167,  179–​80 photovoice project, 168–​78

resistance to social representations,  178–​79 #RhodesMustFall movement,  167–​68 EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission), 110 egocentric speech, 150 EGP (Guerrilla Army of the Poor), 128, 130, 131, 138n, 139n Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), 110 Escuela para todos (School for All), 128 Esteva, G., 121, 130 ethics in joint analysis of narrative positioning, 57–​60. See also racialized positioning Ewick, Patricia, 10–​11    Falla, Ricardo, 132 Fallist Student Movement, 147, 157–​58 Farlam (Marikana) Commission of Inquiry,  115–​16 #FeesMustFall campaign, 167–​68 Fivush, R., 123 Foster, Roy, 78 Fraser, Nancy, 113 Freedom Dreams (Kelley), 112 Freeman, M., 23–​24, 78, 159n    Genette, G., 3 genocidal violence, 121–​22. See also resistance narratives; TRCs German citizen's movement, 19–​26 context, 23 overview,  19–​21 plot, 23 protagonists,  21–​22 social significance of personal story about,  23–​25 Gilkes, Cheryl, 114 Gobodo-​Madikizela, Pumla, 103 González, Elián, 25 Guatemala Agreement on Identity and Rights of Indigenous Peoples, 138n Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico (CEH), 123–​24 Guerrilla Army of the Poor, 128, 130, 131, 138n, 139n judicial spring, 122–​23, 136–​37, 138n

nongovernmental organizations, 123–​24,  139n photoPAR process, 121–​22 testimonia, 139n Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG), 121–​22 Gubrium, A., 65–​66 Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP), 128, 130, 131, 138n, 139n    HBCU TRC Oral History Project background,  100–​1 as decolonizing practice, 107 deep listening, 107–​9 goals of, 101–​2 healing power of speaking truth,  117–​19 intergenerational storytelling, 107–​9 limits of, 116–​17 power of stories, 102–​6 practicing "withness," 107 preparation for, 106–​7 Quin Richardson, 109–​12 historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), 99–​100. See also HBCU TRC Oral History Project Hoffman, E., 151–​52, 154–​56 Howarth, C., 166 Human Being Died That Night, A (Gobodo-​Madikizela),  103 human rights culture, 125. See also transitional justice Hurston, Zora Neale, 114 Huston-​Tillotson University,  100–​1    identity. See also racialized positioning; sexual violence narratives Agreement on Identity and Rights of Indigenous Peoples, 138n collective identity, 76, 95 narrative identity, 27 shared identity, 92–​93 inner dialogues, 150–​52, 157 intergenerational dialogues. See also narrative subjects tension,  156–​58 translation and multilingualism in, 153 intergenerational storytelling, 107–​9. See also HBCU TRC Oral History Project

Index  [ 187 ]

interviewing procedure, narrative studies, 9 Irish revolutionary movement (1916), 78    Jackson, S., 33–​34 Jarvis Christian College, 100–​1 joint analysis of narrative stories, 57–​60. See also racialized positioning judicial spring, Guatemala, 122–​23, 136–​37,  138n Jungle refugee camp, xi–​xii    Kelley, Robin, 112 Kessi, Shose, xxiii–​xxiv King, Martin Luther, Jr., 101, 110–​11 King, Rodney, 25 Klandermans, B., 95 Koss, M., 34 Kros, Cynthia, 115–​16    Labov, William, 2–​3 Lamb, S., 40, 43–​44, 49 language and culture bad subjects, 149–​50 decolonization project, 107, 147, 148–​50, 158, 160n displacement and translation, 153–​56 egocentric speech, 150 inner dialogues, 150–​52 intergenerational dialogues, 156–​58 monolingualism,  147–​48 Language in the Inner City (Labov), 2–​3 Leitner, L., 49 LGBTQ community, 116 linguistic script, 34 Lives of Others, The (film), 23 Lorenz, Laura, 13–​14 Lost in Translation (Hoffman), 154–​55 Lykes, M. B., xxii–​xxiii, 124–​25    MacGregor, Frances, 12–​13 Major, John, 82–​83 Mangcu, Xolela, 157 Marikana (Farlam) Commission of Inquiry,  115–​16 Martinez, Benny, 114–​15 Mayan women participation in EGP, 139n photoPAR process, 121–​22 TRCs, 137–​38n

[ 188 ] Index

McCormack, Cathy, xxi, 88–​95 collective solidarity, 92–​93 historical context, 91 overview,  88–​89 vision of change, 93–​95 writing autobiography, 90 McGrath, John, 88 Mead, Margaret, 12–​13 Memoscopio,  102–​3 Menchú, Rigoberta, 79–​80, 139n Menchú, Vicente, 139n Meretoja, H., 57–​58 #MeToo movement, xiv–​xv micro-​social justice, 4 Miller, R., 151 Miller, Steve, 100–​1, 106, 117 Mills, Charles, 113 Mishler, Elliot, xi–​xii, xvii–​xviii, 1–​2 monolingualism,  147–​48 Morales, Evo, 79 Moscovici, S., 77–​78, 166 Munoz-​Proto, Caro,  102–​3 Murray, Michael, xxi    NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), 110 narrative analysis joint analysis of narrative positioning,  57–​60 micro and macro levels of, 61–​71 sexual victimization narratives identity and, 35–​39 overview,  31–​32 victim and survivor labels, 39–​50 victim trope, 32–​35 narrative articulation, 27 Narrative Enquiry for Social Transformation (NEST) project,  xi–​xii narrative identity, 27 narrative mobilization and community making,  27–​28 “Narrative Possibilities of the Past for the Future:" essay (Bradbury), 107 narrative psychological research impact on future social change, xxiv–​xxv progressive social change and, xiii–​xvii narrative silence, 27

narrative studies. See also social change narratives; social justice narratives photovoice,  12–​14 stories of protest and politics, 11–​12 stories of resistance to legal authority,  10–​11 narrative subjects decolonization project, 107, 147, 158 language and culture bad subjects, 149–​50 decolonization project, 148–​50, 160n displacement and translation,  153–​56 egocentric speech, 150 inner dialogue, 150–​52 monolingualism,  147–​48 overview,  145–​46 tension intergenerational dialogues, 156–​58 post-​apartheid South Africa,  146–​47 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 110 Ndebele, Njabulo, 156, 158 NEST (Narrative Enquiry for Social Transformation) project, xi–​xii Ngũgĩwa Thiongo, 156 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), 123–​24,  139n    Obama, Barack, 6 Occupy movement, xiv–​xv Ochs, E., 45–​46, 50–​51 O’Mahoney, Jennifer, xix–​xx Oppenheimer, Harry, 174–​75 “outsider” social representation, 95    Palach, Jan, 25 Pallister, Marian, 88–​89 Panikkar, Raimón, 125 Payeras, Mario, 138n personal narratives. See also specific types of narratives narrative articulation, 27 narrative identity, 27 narrative mobilization and community making,  27–​28 narrative silence, 27 social change and, 25–​26

Phoenix, Ann, xx photoPAR process, 121–​22 photovoice project, 12–​14, 168–​78 Plummer, Ken, 19, 27–​28 political narratives, 80–​81 German citizen's movement, 19–​26 personal narratives and, 26–​28 protest and politics, 11–​12 Pollack, Michael, 134–​35 Polletta, Francesca, 11–​12 power of political stories, 25–​26 space of possibilities, 58 Population Regulation Act of 1950 (South Africa), 163–​64 Prairie View A&M University, 100–​1 Prakash, M., 121, 130 progressive narratives, 58–​59 Public Science Project, xi–​xii    race science (scientific racism), 163–​65 racialized positioning growing up in mixed household, 61–​71 micro and macro levels of analyses,  61–​71 space of possibilities, 57–​58, 60 tellability of narratives, 61 racial violence narratives, 99–​100. See also HBCU TRC Oral History Project biography of racial wounds, 113–​14 continuities of resistance, 113 cross-​ethnic dialogues, 115 healing power of speaking truth,  117–​19 historic continuities of structural violence and dispossession, 113 intimate betrayals in White institutions,  114–​15 learning from, 112–​15 microaggressions,  113–​14 pain of misrecognition, 113 rape myths, 34, 38 Razack, S., 124–​25 refugee and migration rights movements,  xiv–​xv regressive narratives, 58–​59 Reich, Jens, 19–​21, 22, 23–​25, 28, 29–​30 re-​interpretation narratives,  42–​46 resilience and positive adaptation to trauma,  46–​50

Index  [ 189 ]

resistance narratives affirmations of difference, 127 armed resistance, 127–​33 complex victims, 125–​26 counternarratives, 123, 135–​36 dialogic co-​constructions,  126–​33 to legal authority, 10–​11 overview,  121–​23 social representations of race, 178–​79 solidarity, 126 transitional justice critically engaging, 123–​26 resisting,  133–​37 #RhodesMustFall movement, 167–​68,  178–​79 Rice, J., 33 Richardson, Quin, 109–​12 Ricoeur, P., 148–​49 Riessman, C., 45–​46 Riis, Jacob, 12–​13    Said, Edward, 153 Said, Najla, 153–​54, 155 Saltzman, L., 32 Santos, Boaventura de Sousa, 117 Schank, R., 33–​34 School for All (Escuela para todos), 128 scientific racism (race science), 163–​65 Selbin, E., 28, 83 Sewell, K., 45–​46, 49 sexual script theory, 33–​34 sexual violence narratives cognitive scripts, 33–​34 identity and, 35–​39 linguistic script, 34 overview,  31–​32 rape myths, 34, 38 sexual script theory, 33–​34 sexual violence, defined, 52n victim and survivor labels, 39–​50 defined,  33–​34 overview,  32–​35 re-​interpretation narrative,  42–​46 resilience and positive adaptation,  46–​50 Sharp, L., 131 Silbey, Susan, 10–​11 sit-​in protest,  11–​12 slow scholarship, xii–​xiii

[ 190 ] Index

social change narratives. See also community activism; sexual violence narratives consequences of storytelling, 28–​30 German citizen's movement, 19–​26 context, 23 overview,  19–​21 plot, 23 protagonists,  21–​22 social significance of personal story about,  23–​25 overview, xvii–​xix personal narratives and, 25–​26 political narratives, 11–​12, 19–​28 social justice narratives characteristics of, 2 cultural prioritization of stories, 6–​7 micro-​social justice, 4 narrative studies, 2–​5 civil disobedience, 11–​12 photographic narratives, 12–​14 photovoice,  13–​14 stories of resistance to legal authority,  10–​11 narrative turn, 8–​10 overview, xix–​xxi personal narratives and, 7–​8 racialized positioning growing up in mixed-​race household,  61–​71 micro and macro levels of analyses,  61–​71 space of possibilities, 57–​58, 60 tellability of narratives, 61 United Nations’ International Forum for Social Development, 2 social representations of race, 163–​65. See also racialized positioning affirmative action initiatives, 167,  179–​80 class distinctions and, 174 dehumanization,  175–​76 global African environment, 178–​79 overview,  163–​65 photovoice project, 168–​78 resistance to, 178–​79 White privilege, 173–​74 solidarity collective solidarity Cathy McCormack, 92–​93

Helen Crummy, 86–​88 dialogic co-​constructions, 126 South Africa. See also University of Cape Town Bantu Education Act of 1953, 163–​64 Fallist Student Movement, 147,  157–​58 Population Regulation Act of 1950,  163–​64 post-​apartheid,  146–​47 race and higher education, 167 affirmative action initiatives, 167,  179–​80 photovoice project, 168–​78 resistance and, 178–​79 University Education Act of 1959,  163–​64 Southwestern Christian University,  100–​1 space of possibilities, 57–​58, 60 Spivak, G., 155 Squire, C., xvii–​xviii, 58 Stiller, Werner, 21 Stoll, David, 79–​80 Story Corps, 6 St. Philip’s College, 100–​1 Strength to Love (King), 110–​11 survivor label (sexual violence), 39–​50 characterization of, 51–​52 defined,  32–​33 re-​interpretation narrative,  42–​46 resilience and positive adaptation,  46–​50    tellability of narratives, 61 tension intergenerational dialogues, 156–​58 post-​apartheid South Africa, 146–​47 testimonio,  xv–​xvi community activism, 79–​80 defined, 79 Domitila De Chungara, 79 Rigoberta Menchu, 79–​80 Texas Southern University, 100–​1 Thatcherism,  82–​83 Threshold Collaborative, 100–​1 Todorov, T., 3 transitional justice critically engaging, 123–​26 resisting,  133–​37

TRCs (truth and reconciliation commissions). See also HBCU TRC Oral History Project Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico,  123–​24 complex victims, 125–​26 HBCU TRC versus international TRCs,  104–​5 learning from narratives of racial violence,  112–​15 limits of narratives, 116–​17 narrative reception, 115–​16 overview,  99–​100 South Africa, 115–​16 True Story Theatre, 7 truth and reconciliation commissions. See TRCs Tyranny of Story, The (radio series),  58–​59 “tyranny of story” concept, 58–​59    ubuntu,  xv–​xvi UCT. See University of Cape Town United Nations’ International Forum for Social Development, 2 University Education Act of 1959 (South Africa),  163–​64 University of Cape Town (UCT), 165 affirmative action initiatives, 167,  179–​80 photovoice project, 168–​78 resistance to social representations,  178–​79 #RhodesMustFall movement, 167–​68 URNG (Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity), 121–​22 US Christian Leadership Organization (USCLO), 100–​1. See also HBCU TRC Oral History Project    Vanthuyne, K., 124–​25, 134–​35 verbal deprivation, 2–​3 Viaene, Lieselotte, 139–​40n victim label (sexual violence), 32–​35,  39–​50 characterization of, 51–​52 defined,  32–​33 re-​interpretation narrative,  42–​46 resilience and positive adaptation,  46–​50

Index  [ 191 ]

victim narratives, 125–​26. See also TRCs Viezzer, Moema, 79 violence, 121–​22. See also racial violence narratives; sexual violence narratives; TRCs vision of change Cathy McCormack, 93–​95 Helen Crummy, 95–​96 Visual Anthropology (Colliers and Colliers),  12–​13 Vygotsky, L., 151   

[ 192 ] Index

Waletzky, Joshua, 2–​3 Wang, Caroline, 13 Ward, Janie, 102–​3 Watson, Martha, 77 Wetherell, M., 61 Wiley College, 100–​1 Williams, A., 45–​46, 49 Williams, Gareth, 3–​4 Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, 84–​85 Woodiwiss, J., 29 Worth, Sol, 12–​13