Identity, Narrative and Politics argues that political theory has barely begun to develop a notion of narrative identity; instead the book explores the sophisticated ideas which emerge from novels as alternative expressions of political understanding. This title uses a broad international selection of Twentieth Century English language works, by writers such as Nadine Gordimer and Thomas Pynchon. The book considers each novel as a source of political ideas in terms of content, structure, form and technique. The book assumes no prior knowledge of the literature discussed, and will be fascinating reading for students of literature, politics and cultural studies.
Since the late nineteenth century, Jews and Arabs have been locked in an intractable battle for national recognition in a land of tremendous historical and geopolitical significance. While historians and political scientists have long analyzed the dynamics of this bitter conflict, rarely has an archeology of the mind of those who reside within the matrix of conflict been attempted. This book not only offers a psychological analysis of the consequences of conflict for the psyche, it develops an innovative, compelling, and cross-disciplinary argument about the mutual constitution of culture and mind through the process of life-story construction. But the book pushes boundaries further through an analysis of two peace education programs designed to fundamentally alter the nature of young Israeli and Palestinian life stories. Hammack argues that these popular interventions, rooted in the idea of prejudice reduction through contact and the cultivation of 'cosmopolitan' identities, are fundamentally flawed due to their refusal to deal with the actual political reality of young Israeli and Palestinian lives and their attempt to construct an alternative narrative of great hope but little resonance for Israelis and Palestinians. Grounded in over a century of literature that spans the social sciences, Hammack's analysis of young Israeli and Palestinian lives captures the complex, dynamic relationship among politics, history, and identity and offers a provocative and audacious proposal for psychology and peace education.
Annotation This text evolved out of a December 1995 conference at the International Research Center for Cultural Studies (IFK) in Vienna, attended by scholars from psychology, psychiatry, philosophy, social sciences, literary theory, classics, communication, and film theory, and exploring the importance of narrative as an expression of our experience, as a form of communication, and as a form for understanding the world and ourselves. Nine scholars from Canada, the US, and Europe contribute 12 essays on the relationship between narrative and human identity, how we construct what we call our lives and create ourselves in the process. Coverage includes theoretical perspectives on the problem of narrative and self construction, specific life stories in their cultural contexts, and empirical and theoretical issues of autobiographical memory and narrative identity. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).
Geographies of Identity: Narrative Forms, Feminist Futures explores identity and American culture through hybrid, prose work by women, and expands the strategies of cultural poetics practices into the study of innovative narrative writing. Informed by Judith Butler, Homi Bhabha, Harryette Mullen, Julia Kristeva, and others, this project further considers feminist identity politics, race, and ethnicity as cultural content in and through poetic and non/narrative forms. The texts reflected on here explore literal and figurative landscapes, linguistic and cultural geographies, sexual borders, and spatial topographies. Ultimately, they offer non-prescriptive models that go beyond expectations for narrative forms, and create textual webs that reflect the diverse realities of multi-ethnic, multi-oriented, multi-linguistic cultural experiences. Readings of Gertrude Stein's A Geographical History of America, Renee Gladman's Juice, Pamela Lu's Pamela: A Novel, Claudia Rankine's Don't Let Me Be Lonely, Juliana Spahr's The Transformation, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictée, Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera, and Layli Long Soldier's WHEREAS show how alternatively narrative modes of writing can expand access to representation, means of identification, and subjective agency, and point to horizons of possibility for new futures. These texts critique essentializing practices in which subjects are defined by specific identity categories, and offer complicated, contextualized, and historical understandings of identity formation through the textual weaving of form and content.
Since the late nineteenth century, Jews and Arabs have been locked in an intractable battle for national recognition in a land of tremendous historical and geopolitical significance. While historians and political scientists have long analyzed the dynamics of this bitter conflict, rarely has an archeology of the mind of those who reside within the matrix of conflict been attempted. This book not only offers a psychological analysis of the consequences of conflict for the psyche, it develops an innovative, compelling, and cross-disciplinary argument about the mutual constitution of culture and mind through the process of life-story construction. But the book pushes boundaries further through an analysis of two peace education programs designed to fundamentally alter the nature of young Israeli and Palestinian life stories. Hammack argues that these popular interventions, rooted in the idea of prejudice reduction through contact and the cultivation of 'cosmopolitan' identities, are fundamentally flawed due to their refusal to deal with the actual political reality of young Israeli and Palestinian lives and their attempt to construct an alternative narrative of great hope but little resonance for Israelis and Palestinians. Grounded in over a century of literature that spans the social sciences, Hammack's analysis of young Israeli and Palestinian lives captures the complex, dynamic relationship among politics, history, and identity and offers a provocative and audacious proposal for psychology and peace education.
Narrative Politics explores two puzzles. The first has long preoccupied social scientists: How do individuals come together to act collectively in their common interest? The second is one that has long been ignored by social scientists: Why is it that those who promote collective action so often turn to stories? Why is it that when activists call for action, candidates solicit votes, organizers seek new members, generals rally their troops, or coaches motivate their players, there is so much story-telling? Frederick W. Mayer argues that answering these questions requires recognizing the power of story to overcome the main obstacles to collective action: to surmount the temptation to free ride, to coordinate group behavior, and to arrive at a common understanding of the collective interest. In this book, Mayer shows that humans are, if nothing else, a story-telling, story-consuming animal. We use stories to make sense of our experience and to imbue it with meaning-our self-narratives define our sense of identity and script our actions. Because we are constituted by narrative, we can be moved by the stories told to us by others. That is why leaders who call a community to action seek to frame their invocations in a story in which tragedy and triumph hang in the balance, in which taking part in the collective action becomes a moral imperative rather than a matter of calculated self-interest. Drawing on insights from neuroscience and behavioral economics, political science and sociology, history and cultural studies, literature and narrative theory, Narrative Politics sheds light on a wide range of political phenomena from social movements to electoral politics to offer lessons for how the power of story fosters collective action.
Andrea Tinnemeyer's book examines the nineteenth-century captivity narrative as a dynamic, complex genre that provided an ample medium for cultural critique, a revision of race relations, and a means of elucidating the U.S.-Mexican War's complex and often contradictory significance in the national imagination. The captivity narrative, as Tinnemeyer shows, addressed questions arising from the incorporation of residents in the newly annexed territory. This genre transformed its heroine from the quintessential white virgin into the Mexican maiden in order to quell anxieties over miscegenation, condone acts furthering Manifest Density, or otherwise romanticize the land-grabbing nature of the war and of the opportunists who traveled to the Southwest after 1848. Some of these narratives condone and even welcome interracial marriages between Mexican women and Anglo-American men. By understanding marriage for love as an expression of free will or as a declaration of independence, texts containing interracial marriages or romanticizing the U.S.-Mexican War could politicize the nuptials and present the Anglo-American husband as a hero and rescuer. This romanticizing of annexation and cross-border marriages tended to feminize Mexico, making the country appear captive and in need of American rescue and influencing the understanding of "foreign" and "domestic" by relocating geographic and racial boundaries. In addition to examining more conventional notions of captivity, Tinnemeyer's book uses war song lyrics and legal cases to argue that "captivity" is a multivalenced term encompassing desire, identity formation, and variable definitions of citizenship. Andrea Tinnemeyer teaches English, Chicano literature, and nineteenth-century American literature at College Preparatory School in Berkeley, California. She received her PhD from Rice University and was recently an assistant professor at Utah State University.
The editors bring together an interdisciplinary and international group of creative researchers and theorists to examine the way the stories we tell create our identities. The contributors to this volume explore how, beginning in adolescence and young adulthood, narrative identities become the stories we live by.
Social psychologists argue that people’s past weighs on their present. Consistent with this view, Historical Tales and National Identity outlines a theory and a methodology which provide tools for better understanding the relation between the present psychological condition of a society and representations of its past. Author Janos Laszlo argues that various kinds of historical texts including historical textbooks, texts derived from public memory (e.g. media or oral history), novels, and folk narratives play a central part in constructing national identity. Consequently, with a proper methodology, it is possible to expose the characteristic features and contours of national identities. In this book Laszlo enhances our understanding of narrative psychology and further elaborates his narrative theory of history and identity. He offers a conceptual model that draws on diverse areas of psychology - social, political, cognitive and psychodynamics - and integrates them into a coherent whole. In addition to this conceptual contribution, he also provides a major methodological innovation: a content analytic framework and software package that can be used to analyse various kinds of historical texts and shed new light on national identity. In the second part of the book, the potential of this approach is empirically illustrated, using Hungarian national identity as the focus. The author also extends his scope to consider the potential generalizations of the approach employed. Historical Tales and National Identity will be of great interest to a broad range of student and academic readers across the social sciences and humanities: in psychology, history, cultural studies, literature, anthropology, political science, media studies, sociology and memory studies.
The story of arts and cultural policy in the twenty-first century is inherently of global concern no matter how local it seems. At the same time, questions of identity have in many ways become more challenging than before. Narrative, Identity, and the Map of Cultural Policy: Once Upon a Time in a Globalized World explores how and why stories and identities sometimes merge and often clash in an arena in which culture and policy may not be able to resolve every difficulty. DeVereaux and Griffin argue that the role of narrative is key to understanding these issues. They offer a wide-ranging history and justification for narrative frameworks as an approach to cultural policy and open up a wider field of discussion about the ways in which cultural politics and cultural identity are being deployed and interpreted in the present, with deep roots in the past. This timely book will be of great interest not just to students of narrative and students of arts and cultural policy, but also to administrators, policy theorists, and cultural management practitioners.
