This study looks at how oral histories are constructed and how they should be interpreted, and argues for a deeper understanding of their oral and social characteristics. Oral accounts of past events are also guides to the future, as well as being social activities in which tellers claim authority to speak to particular audiences. Like written history and literature, orality has its shaping genres and aesthetic conventions and, likewise, has to be interpreted through them. The argument is illustrated through a wide range of examples of memory, narration and oral tradition, including many from Europe and the Americas, and with a particular focus on oral histories from the Jlao Kru of Liberia, with whom Elizabeth Tonkin has carried out extensive research. Tonkin also draws on and integrates the insights of a range of other disciplines, such as literary criticism, linguistics, history, psychology, and communication and cultural studies.
In recent years controversy has surrounded the narrative turn in history and the historical turn in fiction. This book clarifies what is at stake, tracing connections between historiography and life-writing, arguing that the challenges posed in representing the past illuminate issues which are central to all literary narrative.
In the 1990's, South Africa surprised the world with a peaceful, negotiated transition from armed conflict to an inclusive democracy. This was followed by the ground-breaking Truth and Reconciliation Commission, established to confront and work through a troubled past. The search for truth and reconciliation in South Africa, however, is far from completed; the country is in many ways still burdened by unresolved individual and collective traumas. In this book, two academics from the University of Cape Town, one a psychologist and the other a literary scholar, explore the importance of narrative as a way of working through trauma. Although written from within a South African context, the work has a much wider relevance. It offers illuminating perspectives on the process of narrating our healing: the sharing of personal narratives, the appropriation of literary narratives, and above all, the re-creating of life narratives shattered by trauma. It is a book about the search for meaning when all meaning seems to have been lost; it deals with the overwhelming nature of traumatic suffering, yet offers some hope of healing.The book is remarkably overarching, tailored to the needs of scientists and practitioners in the fields of psychology, social work, education and literature. It offers a strong message to all individuals and nations who live in an atmosphere of blame, shame and hopelessness. - Yuval Wolf, Professor of Psychology and Dean of Social Sciences, Bar-Ilan University.Narrating Our Healing is a good book in the widest sense of that adjective: it is well constructed, meticulously researched, and likely to deepen understanding of the difficult but profoundly important subject of trauma and how to address it. It is something like a handbook for living with suffering – both one's own and that of others. To have constructed a text that can serve such a purpose is a profoundly admirable achievement. Annie Gagiano, LitNet.It is a timeous and exciting study that should be essential reading for anyone grappling with our present, our past and our future. - Andrè P Brink – South African and international authorThis is one of the best books I have ever read on healing deep wounds.- Vamÿk D. Volkan, M. D. Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia.We need to know the truth about what happened in South Africa during the Apartheid years. Van der Merwe and Gobodo-Madikizela have given us the tools to face that challenge. - Rolf Wolfswinkel, Professor of Modern History, New York University.
Explores British media history as a series of competing narratives. This collection identifies and contrasts the various interrelationships between media histories, and also encourages dialogue between different historical, political, and theoretical perspectives, including: liberalism; feminism; populism; nationalism; and, libertarianism.
The current environmental crises demand that we revisit dominant approaches for understanding nature-society relations. Narrating Nature brings together various ways of knowing nature from differently situated Maasai and conservation practitioners and scientists into lively debate. It speaks to the growing movement within the academy and beyond on decolonizing knowledge about and relationships with nature, and debates within the social sciences on how to work across epistemologies and ontologies. It also speaks to a growing need within conservation studies to find ways to manage nature with people. This book employs different storytelling practices, including a traditional Maasai oral meeting—the enkiguena—to decenter conventional scientific ways of communicating about, knowing, and managing nature. Author Mara J. Goldman draws on more than two decades of deep ethnographic and ecological engagements in the semi-arid rangelands of East Africa—in landscapes inhabited by pastoral and agropastoral Maasai people and heavily utilized by wildlife. These iconic landscapes have continuously been subjected to boundary drawing practices by outsiders, separating out places for people (villages) from places for nature (protected areas). Narrating Nature follows the resulting boundary crossings that regularly occur—of people, wildlife, and knowledge—to expose them not as transgressions but as opportunities to complicate the categories themselves and create ontological openings for knowing and being with nature otherwise. Narrating Nature opens up dialogue that counters traditional conservation narratives by providing space for local Maasai inhabitants to share their ways of knowing and being with nature. It moves beyond standard community conservation narratives that see local people as beneficiaries or contributors to conservation, to demonstrate how they are essential knowledgeable members of the conservation landscape itself.
The relationship between fiction and historiography in Francoist Spain (1939–1975) is a contentious one. The intricacies of this relationship, in which fiction works to subvert the regime’s authority to write the past, are the focus of David K. Herzberger’s book. The narrative and rhetorical strategies of historical discourse figure in both the fiction and historiography of postwar Spain. Herzberger analyzes these strategies, identifying the structures and vocabularies they use to frame the past and endow it with particular meanings. He shows how Francoist historians sought to affirm the historical necessity of Franco by linking the regime to a heroic and Christian past, while several types of postwar fiction—such as social realism, the novel of memory, and postmodern novels—created a voice of opposition to this practice. Focusing on the concept of writing history that these opposing strategies convey, Herzberger discloses the layering of truth and meaning that lies at the heart of postwar Spanish narrative from the early 1940s to the fall of Franco. His study clearly reveals how the novel in postwar Spain became a crucial form of dissent from the past as it was conceived and used by the State. Making a decisive intervention in the debate about the ways in which narration determines both the meaning and truth of history and fiction, Narrating the Past will be of special interest to students and scholars of the politics, history, and literature of twentieth-century Spain.
Countless books and articles have traced the impact of colonialism and public policy on Canada's First Nations, but few have explored the impact of Aboriginal thought on public discourse and policy development in Canada. First Nations, First Thoughts brings together Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal scholars who cut through the prevailing orthodoxy to reveal Indigenous thinkers and activists as a pervasive presence in diverse political, constitutional, and cultural debates and arenas, including urban spaces, historical texts, public policy, and cultural heritage preservation. This innovative, thought-provoking collection contributes to the decolonization process by encouraging us to imagine a stronger, fairer Canada in which Aboriginal self-government and expression can be fully realized.
Any life story, whether a written autobiography or an oral testimony, is shaped not only by the reworkings of experience through memory and re-evaluation, but also art. Any communication has to use shared conventions not only of language itself but also the more complex expectations of 'genre': of the forms expected within a given context and type of communication. This collection of essays by internationl academics draws on a wide range of disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities to examine how far the expectations and forms of genre shape different kinds of autobiography and influence what messages they can convey. After investigating the problem of genre definition, and tracing the evolution of genre as a concept, contributors explore such issues as: * How far can we argue that what people narrate in their autobiographical stories is selected and shaped by the reportoire of genre available to them? * To what extent is oral autobiography shaped by its social and cultural context? * What is the relationship between autobiographical sources and the ethnographer? Narrative and Genre presents exciting new debates in an emerging field and will encourage international and interdisciplinary debate. Its authors and contributors are scholars from the fields of anthropology, cultural studies, literary analysis, psychoanalysis, social history, and sociology.
