Cultural Identities and Narratives That “Race”

This chapter explores how 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). The stories were collected through a photovoice project with 36 students from five different faculties at UCT over a period of three years, from 2013 to 2015.The photographs and written stories produced by the participants challenged and resisted the common social representations of Black underachievement and backwardness that prevail in higher education discourse. The students’ narratives, in the context of a transforming institution, shifted the terms of engagement in conversations about race and opened up spaces for meaningful dialogue and action toward social change. Their narratives not only constructed alternative frames of reference that provided positive resources for identity construction, but also conscientized and empowered them to influence the direction of the academic project.

Narrative Subjects

This chapter explores an inversion of the feminist slogan “the personal is political” to think about the ways in which the political 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, telling a national narrative of resistance and overcoming despite the perpetuation of deeply intransigent inequalities in the present. This repertoire of stories has limited power for social change and exists alongside an injunction to forget or erase the past. The chapter explores this tension between remembering and forgetting in shaping our collective narrative unconscious and how this historical legacy may be reworked in the projection of future (hopeful) narratives of young people. The chapter explores the implications of this particular context of intergenerational tension and change for questions of personal and political transformation across the global terrain.

Hidden From View

Community 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 that 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 various actions. The aim of this chapter is to explore the work of these community activists through their written accounts and to consider the role of narrative in providing an organizing frame for local change.

Using Narrative Analysis to Inform About Female and Male Sexual Victimization

Personal stories often occupy an ambivalent place between social hegemony and social change. In personal stories of sexual assault, this ambivalent place can be particularly charged when the narrator’s story is contested or resisted by the listener. Stories of sexual assault can reflect dominant victim discourses, while simultaneously resisting the role of victim as a survivor works to organize and frame a trauma experience. Dominant cultural narratives of victimhood often reflect hegemonic discourses, which restrict coping by providing a narrow victim framework for a survivor of sexual assault. However, this ambivalent place between a narrowly defined victimhood and social change can also provide opportunity for survivors to resist these narrow narrative confines and progress through the trauma. This chapter will analyze personal stories of sexual assault and focus on how survivors’ constructions of self are challenged and fractious as a result of sexual assault. Examples of how the narrators resist the dominant victim narrative to move toward personal and social change in their coping will be considered.

The Power of Bearing Wit(h)ness

This chapter describes a grassroots effort to engage youth and elders in an intergenerational oral history project that uses personal testimony to share stories of resilience and suffering from everyday racism in the United States. Using a truth and reconciliation model, these stories are used as vehicles for persona healing and community activism. Given the present moment of #SAYTHEIRNAME in solidarity with the Movement for Black Lives, our documentation of this powerful racial justice, truth-telling testimonies project joins a growing archive of wounds and resistance that define Black life in the United States, since 1619.

Changing Lives in Unanticipated Ways?

This chapter analyzes two interviews that come from a study concerned with the ways in which adults from three different family backgrounds re-evaluate their earlier experiences of growing up in visibly ethnically different households. Both examples are from adults who are of mixed black-white parentage. The chapter considers the ways in which the two accounts are inextricably linked with the participants’ racialized, gendered positioning and commitments, which are ethically entangled in their narratives. The “small stories” that both participants produced in their narrative construction of their identities as well as their “bigger” life stories produced tensions amongst the research team that were irreconcilable because the researchers were positioned differently and orienting to different aspects of the narratives. The narratives were powerful and produced different possibilities for social change in the researchers, sometimes in ways that posed difficult challenges to their worldviews.

Living Lives of Resistance in Multiple Registers

This chapter explores one Maya Ixil woman’s stories of resistance in the context of genocidal violence, exile, and postconflict transitional justice processes. Through the analysis and re-analysis of narratives from in-depth interviews in 1992 and 2015 that bookend nearly three decades of a dialogic relationship between the author and this Maya Ixil woman, the author explores her shifting understandings of Maria Izabel’s silence about her past upon her return from exile. Through repositioning herself vis-à-vis multiple possible meanings of silence in contexts of genocidal violence, human rights activism, and transitional justice processes, the author discusses how Maria Izabel’s co-constructed stories crafted through their decades-long dialogic relationship in diverse historical contexts, narrated changes in both of their lives. The chapter further documents processes through which the author sought to “stand under” Maria Izabel’s diverse narratives at these distinctly different historical moments of social change and Mayan struggle in Guatemala.

The Mystery of the Dangerous Book

What stories are told, and ultimately tellable, has consequences for our ability to imagine the world otherwise. This chapter examines in-depth a particular story told 25 years in retrospect by an East German dissident about a book that he had hidden from the Stasi and that ultimately disappeared. After the wall opened, the narrator reads his Stasi file. Most remarkable to him was what was not there: there was no mention of the stolen book. The narrator 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. The story conveys much about the dissident, even while it offers insight into a world beyond any one individual

The Personal Is Political

This chapter examines social justice as an exemplar of progressive social change in its relations to narrative. Social justice can be seen as the limit case of social change, the condition to which all efforts at social change aspire. Alternatively, it can be seen as a condition tangential to social change, a state rather than a process. Perhaps it can be seen 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.