Country of Words Storytelling Between Palestine and Sweden WASSAP (original) (raw)
Related papers
2014
Interdisciplinarity has been the name of the game for quite some time. One of the rich, but also problematic, tools for bridging gaps between disciplines is the concept of “narrative”. This essay will deal with different notions of “narrative”, broader and narrower interpretations of the term, and will then suggest my own view. Narratology and/vs. “the Narrative Turn” The centrality of “narrative ” in current thought and discourse derives mainly from narratology, poststructuralist literary and cultural theory, and constructivist ap-proaches in the social sciences, but its meanings and implications vary according to its provenance. As someone who participated in the development of narratol-ogy, I find the present-day use of “narrative ” across media and disciplines both exciting and somewhat bewildering. I came to this interdisciplinary junction with a fairly narrow definition in mind: “Someone telling someone else that something happened”, Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s definition (1981...
Foreword viii serious scholar looking for insights into the art of story-telling and the manner in which narratives form a connecting link across cultures.
In this article we elaborate on the possibility to combine a social constructivist perspective and oral history within one methodological framework in order to explore how identities are narrated and negotiated in relation to different situations, contexts and interviewers. In oral history, the purpose is often to "give voice" to marginalized or forgotten individuals or groups, to listen to their stories and give them the possibility to speak from their perspectives. We agree with these emancipatory aims of oral history. Simultaneously we deconstruct and analyze interviews in order to investigate identity constructions. We work with the concepts of intersectionality and narrated identity, which allow us to investigate how groups and individuals that are marginalized and discriminated negotiate their own and other identities. At the same time it is unclear if our interviewees understand these kinds of analysis of their narratives. In order to combine a social constructivist perspective and oral history in a fruitful way, we must be aware of this relation of power and explain to the interviewees what we are doing and why we are doing it. In a broader research perspective this deconstructive approach illustrates interesting assumptions about multidimensional identity constructions.
Travelling Tales, a workshop on storytelling, Uppsala, October 4th 2023
A workshop on storytelling across time and languages, Uppsala, Wednesday 4 October, 2023, 9-3042 and in Zoom. With this workshop we wish to address methodological issues related to the study of stories that have come down to us in multiple versions and multiple langauges, travelling through time and space from antiquity onwards. How can we better understand the workings of such processes of transmission, translation, and adaptation? How can we, based on the often rather scarce evidence, get closer to the contexts in which these stories were told, to their authors and audience? Our focus will be in particular on so-called wisdom literature, which we will approach through two examples. First, a collection of stories related to a character known in Byzantine Greek as Syntipas the Philosopher, immensely popular in both the Eastern and the Western medieval traditions. Probably of Indian origin, it has been transmitted in over 30 languages and with various titles, such as Sindbād-nameh (Persian), The Seven Viziers (Arabic), Mishle Sendabar (Hebrew), and The Seven Sages of Rome (Latin). Its frame story contains many embedded stories told by women as well as men. Second, we will look at the Story of Ahiqar, a tale of Sumeric origin less known to a wider audience, but popular throughout centuries and still told in the Middle Ages. For further information, see attachment
The Stories We Tell · Palestine: Between Words and Silences
The Stories We Tell · Palestine: Between Words and Silences, 2024
The stories we tell matter. It matters how we craft them and what they say and don’t say about others and ourselves. In this hour of genocide, as we bear witness to unspeakable horror and the stifling censorship of educational, cultural and political institutions, we foreground Palestinian worlds to nourish learning and cultivate hope. Bringing together a set of exceptional scholars, artists and activists, this program invites us to confront what we cannot longer unsee and to listen to what has been muzzled. Through conversations, poetry, music, and films we aim to unsettle all-too-predictable story lines by repositioning words and silences as historical agents of complex and ongoing transformations.
Storytelling and the great narration of global communication
2000
Storytelling and the great narration of global communication The aim of this paper is to consider the practice of storytelling present throughout all world cultures whether orally, in writing or through the various nonverbal sign systems at our disposal, and contrast this practice with the great narration of global communication as it characterizes the world today. Telling stories is a practice with traces throughout the whole world interconnecting different peoples in a way that is altogether different from the kind of interconnection achieved through recent forms of global communication. And as emerges from the patrimony of legends, fables, myths, and stories common to humanity, storytelling has acted as a sort of connective tissue throughout the centuries allowing for the circulation of common themes, subjects, values and discourse genres through time as well. However, as much as storytelling is a common practice shared by different peoples it also differentiates them, favouring encounter and mutual understanding. On the contrary, given its subservience to the global market and condition of general commodification, global communication leads to homologation and levelling of the differences unless they are related to competition, conflict and mutual exclusion. Narrativity today unfolds through different discourse genres, including the novel, and through different media which are not only writing and orality, but cinema for example. The common aspect of storytelling is that it is always an end in itself and is founded uniquely in the pleasure of involving and listening to the other. This aspect distinguishes what we intend by storytelling from the type of narrativity that serves power: the power of control and punishment (the story told to the judge or police commissariat), the power of information (journalistic chronicles), the power of healing (the case history, the story that interests the psychoanalyst), the power of redeeming and saving (the story told at confession), the power of registering and of establishing the Sense of History (reconstruction of the facts by the historian, etc.). Global communication is functional to the order of discourse; on the contrary, story-telling suspends the order of discourse offering a space for reflection, critical rethinking, dialogue, encounter, hospitality.
Media and the Global South
This chapter starts from the premise that powerful epistemic and discursive entities have prevailed in the production of knowledge of the world divided between the Global North and the Global South (Resende 2014). In such a configuration, any discussion of the Global South, as an imagined spatiality often defined by its perceived differences from the Global North, must also address how this imagination is interlinked with narrative, as image and discourse, and, as such, ask how narrative plays a role in the emergence and persistence of particular epistemic formations that are also sustained by material and structural conditions of power and resistance. Nowhere is such a proposition more relevant to explore than in debates about the almost 70year-old Palestine-Israel conflict which, this chapter proposes, offers us the possibility to interrogate the role of narrative in the construction (and subversion) of difference, otherness and power relations and allows us to situate localized discursive and power struggles over historic Palestine within a series of global processes and practices that have shaped the way we map and imagine the world. Drawing on this broad proposition, this chapter interrogates how mediated dominant narratives of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians in mainstream media and public discourses in the Global North and elsewhere have taken hold and persisted for almost 70 years. Specifically, it addresses how persistent and recurring visual and discursive narratives (in language and image) of Palestine and the Palestinians have served to support an implicit exceptionalism rooted in the claims of the Zionist movement and, thus, have constructed particular ways of seeing, or not seeing, Palestine, and certainly not from the viewpoint of its people, 'the narrated.' In situating the struggle over the right to narrate and the struggle over narrative with reference to the ongoing Palestinian-Israeli conflict at the centre of the discussion, the chapter elaborates on the assumption proposed at the outset then moves on to address some examples of Palestinian self-narration and self-representation in film, documentary, photography and in digital media. While these self-narrations do not explicitly refer to the conflict, it proposes that it is in the act of telling that self-narration becomes inscribed as a political act, underlining its potential to disrupt dominant discursive and visual fields and to generate new ways of knowing and seeing the 'narrated', or the spoken for. 1 I thank Zuzana Brezhinova for help in researching this chapter. By locating Palestine and its representation as central to the broader narratives and imagined geographies of the 'Global South' and by implicitly implicating media in these processes, this chapter begins with a broad contextualisation of the debates around the emergence of exceptionalist discourses around Palestine rooted in the historical dominance of the Israeli narrative before addressing some of the mediated processes and practices through which Palestine and the Palestinians have been talked about and visualized. The chapter then addresses the ways in which ordinary Palestinians on the margin are creating a broader range of narratives that challenge the status quo and that produce meaningful representations and knowledge about themselves as agents and actors in the construction of alternative spatialities and imaginaries. In conclusion, the chapter suggests that such narratives of everyday lives can question the taken-for-grantedness of powerful epistemic and discursive entities and challenge the constructed divisions between the Global North and the Global South. Exceptionalism and Palestine For decades and until very recently, much of the literature on Palestine/Israel has been dominated by an implicit exceptionalism rooted in the claims and narratives of the Zionist movement (Collins 2011), serving to limit our understanding of and knowledge about Palestine and the Palestinians and their protracted conflict with Israel. Recent critical inter-disciplinary scholarship (see for example, Swedenburg and Stein, 2005; Khalili 2010) has shown that this state of affairs is partly the outcome of structural inequalities and conditions imposed by the settler-colonial practices of Zionism since the creation of the Israeli state in 1948 and partly a result of the Zionist movement's narrative about itself. As some scholars have suggested, this narrative has been normalized and taken for granted in mainstream Western public and media discourses to the extent that it provides a restricted, if not biased, vision of the conflict. For example, Matar suggests that normalization is achieved through the "establishment of patterned processes of thinking aimed at exacting disciplinary power that are then normalized in public and media discourses, making them sound natural and unproblematic" (Matar, 2016:176), while Gil Z. Hochberg claims that a partitioned vision is evident in the inequalities inherent in the visual narratives, produced in film, photographs and images, of the conflict. As she notes, this vision "isn't only an outcome of different national, ethnic, and historical epistemes produced as 'the visible', but further relies on two distinct configurations or politics of the visual representation. Central to this regard is the question of the parameters placed on the legitimacy of displaying and circulating certain images in public" (Hochberg 2015: 9). Israel's settler-colonial project, as several studies have shown, incorporates a set of political, economic and social structures and practices that form the basis of the current relationship between Israeli Jews and the Palestinians (Makdisi 2010). Indeed, as Salamanca et al. write in their special issue on Israeli settler-colonial practices, "from the earliest Palestinian accounts to the vast majority of contemporary research, the crimes committed against Palestinian society by the Zionist movement and the state it built have been well recorded. Zionism is an ideology and a political movement that subjects Palestine and Palestinians to structural and violent forms of dispossession, land appropriation, and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish state and society. As for other settler colonial movements, for Zionism, the control of land is a zero-sum contest fought against the indigenous population. The drive to control the maximum amount of land is at its centre" (Salamanca et al., 2013: 1). Such practices are central to what post-colonial critic Achille Mbembe (2013) has called a state of permanent war, or the sustenance of necropower, where the technologies of destruction have become more tactile, more Tripp. C.
Political Storytelling: From Fact to Fiction (Global Dialogues Special Issue)
Facts don’t speak for themselves they need to be told. And how and who tells them has significant implications. Recent political events such as the global refugee crisis, the Greek-EU bailout negotiations and the Russia-Ukraine crisis are apt examples of the malleability of facts, showing that truth itself is contested. Since these political events lack an ‘ultimate source of evidence’ (Rorty 1999: 151), the only way to transform vague descriptions into meaningful, coherent interpretations of ‘reality’ is to utilize the persuasive power of storytelling with all its intended and unintended consequences. [...] Cooperation always requires understanding and appreciating each other’s realities. In the context of international relations, this also entails a certain degree of agreement upon facts. In order to achieve global cooperation on any given subject, the parties must first agree on the definition and problematization of the solution to the issue at hand. Making sense of common problems requires a shared view not only on arguments and interests, but also on shared forms of narration. Even though this agreement is not a complete consensus, a policy area with a relatively concordant, intersubjectively constructed number of facts is needed to begin cooperation. Such concordance is possible when registers are shared, similar to what Hannah Arendt calls ‘common world’: A shared and public world of human artifacts, institutions and settings that provide a relatively permanent context for our activities. Understanding politics as a practice of collective storytelling, in which the role of fiction and narrative is a constitutive element instead of being ‘mere rhetoric’, is still under-theorized. From a narrative point of view, the boundaries between reality and fiction are always blurry. Thus, an important but largely ignored part of this common world is shared imageries, which are expressed or represented in stories, myths, legends, and literatures. Complex realities need complex ways of representation. A theoretical engagement with the importance of meaning-giving practices as constitutive elements of politics should not halt at the analysis and the critique of simplifying and simplified versions of the ‘real’. The equally important question is: How and from which sources do we develop alternative and inclusive modes of narration? Against this background, this Global Dialogue focuses on narrative and fiction as a critical, albeit under-researched, element in the social sciences. Despite increasing interest, and the linguistic turn in the social sciences, the role of fiction and narrative in explaining, representing and inventing identities and frames as well as giving meaning to political practices has been largely absent. In order to begin to change this, this publication brings together different disciplines from the social sciences and development studies to literature and cultural studies to reflect on these various matters. This multi-disciplinary publication is the result of a workshop that took place in Duisburg in May 2015, which also sought to expand on how academic work in the social sciences is analyzed, written, and presented. The contributions are inspired and expand on this spirit and the various issues discussed at this event. For the sake of coherence, the texts are ordered in terms of the medium they analyze and the audiences they address.