Sujatha Fernandes
** Chapter 2 from my book manuscript, Mobilizing Stories: The Contemporary Uses of
Storytelling. Work in progress. Please do not cite or circulate. **
Storytelling as a Resource:
From Truth Commissions to Camp Obama
In the new millennium, storytelling has become a widely proliferating and closely curated mode
of communication: from the vast array of story-coaching agencies that have sprung up in the
non-profit and business world, to the phenomenon of TED conferences as a showcase for stories
about ordinary people achieving celebrity. On programs such as StoryCorps, This American Life,
and The Moth, millions of people tell or listen to stories. The digital era has facilitated a more
general trend of constantly narrating yourself, whether through social media platforms, the
ubiquitous “selfie,” or in the genre of reality television. With access to smart phones and
platforms such as youtube, facebook and twitter, to mention only a few, people can easily record
themselves, upload and share their stories with large numbers of people instantaneously.
Storytelling has become part of the political culture of late capitalism. In one sense,
narrative activity, as the essence of social bonds in real or imagined pre-literate societies, has
simply been reconstituted in a contemporary digital era. Telling stories is key to human
interaction. But the epochal political and economic shifts over the last several decades have also
resulted in the harnessing of this narrative activity as instrumental for certain socio-political
goals. Non-profits, Non Governmental Organizations (NGOs), and activist organizations use
stories in legislatures, rallies, and courtrooms; they carry out trainings in storytelling for their
members; and they invite people to share stories on their websites. Grantmakers have been
actively funding those groups who use storytelling tactics and they offer storytelling trainings to
their grantees. Governments have also been sponsoring storytelling workshops. While presented
as the “true” and “authentic” voices of ordinary people, these contemporary modes of
storytelling usually require the editing and ordering of events to achieve maximum impact; they
are predicated upon particular desirable outcomes, such as psychological healing or resolving a
social problem; and they are often guided by protocols that seek to fit the story into specific
predetermined guidelines.
How and why did storytelling come to occupy such a prime position in the contemporary
era? Storytelling techniques were deployed by states, bodies such as the United Nations (UN),
and the culture industries in the establishment of free market-oriented neoliberal
orders, following a period of social movement ascendancy that had been repressed, often brutally
in the case of poor and indigenous people in the global south. As elites sought to restore their
class power from the mid-1970s onwards (Harvey 2005), they employed violent means such as
coups, contra wars, counter-intelligence operations, and the torture, killing, and disappearance of
activists. In the wake of this violence, it was storytelling vehicles such as truth commissions,
legal hearings, and talk shows that gave legitimacy to nascent neoliberal orders by promoting
reconciliation and/or catharsis rather than class-based antagonism. Telling your story was used as
a form of individual healing that avoided questions of structural violence and a broader critique
of power relations.
These storytelling vehicles drew on and reshaped the very techniques that had been
pioneered by social movements themselves. One of the key tools was that of
consciousness raising, developed by social movements in the 1960s and 1970s. In Latin
America, consciousness raising was associated with the work of liberation theologists, Paolo
Freire’s literary movement, Christian Base Communities, and popular poetry workshops. As
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George Yúdice (1996:54) recounts, Nicaraguan theologian Ernesto Cardenal held popular Bible
discussions where he would record the peasants’ reinterpretation and application of the Bible to
their own lives. Personal experience as recounted in such groups came to be the basis for the
genre of writing known as testimonio that flourished in Latin America between the 1960s and
1980s. Testimonios such as I Rigoberta Menchú played a crucial role in building international
support for embattled peasant and worker struggles. In the early 1980s, as US-backed counterrevolutionary forces and Central American militaries unleashed violent reprisals against local
populations, the production and dissemination of testimony were centered around the need to
build solidarity abroad (Moreiras 1996:196). And although the stories were personal, they
gestured towards broader collective struggles.
Consciousness raising strategies were also being developed by activists in the feminist
and anti-rape movements in the United States during the 1970s. Women’s rights activists shared
intimate details of their lives in small groups, which led to a critique of both internal and external
forms of oppression (Evans 1979:215). In rallies and street protests, women connected their
stories to structures of patriarchy and their gender-based movements of resistance. Migrant farm
workers in California too pioneered tactics of consciousness raising. The leader of the United
Farm Workers (UFW) Cesar Chavez developed the strategy of “one-on-one” organizing, akin to
the feminist consciousness raising groups, that put the emphasis on small, intimate conversation
and storytelling as opposed to political oratory (Bardacke 2012:74). Workers told and retold
stories of strikes in meetings, skits, and songs, and through cultural projects such as the Teatro
Campesino. Farm workers with their roots in radical organizing traditions in Mexico, along with
feminists such as Margaret Randall who were the transcribers of testimonies in Latin America,
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played a key role in exchanging evolving tactics of consciousness raising as they were
developing in multiple sites.
During the ensuing period of defeat, demobilization, and the redrawing of class power,
these techniques of consciousness raising and testimonio were recruited by dominant groups in
the consolidation of neoliberal orders. But in the vastly different context of the 1980s and 1990s,
storytelling techniques were abstracted from the goals of building mass movements that
confronted power, especially class power, and they were reoriented toward transaction and
negotiation in truth commissions, courtrooms, and legislatures. The method of consciousness
raising groups was retooled as the sharing of personal stories in televised spectacles, but it was
divorced from the political. Individual therapy and the self were seen as the site of solutions to
individual hardships, rather than broader societal transformation. Stories were shorn of their
complexity and nuance to become short texts that would fit on a website, or easily recitable for
the purposes of a legal hearing, daytime talk show, or civil litigation.
As the political culture of neoliberalism was consolidated, unevenly and partially, the
storytelling techniques recalibrated during the 1990s became adapted to the new emphasis on
democratic participation, empowerment, and capacity-building being promoted by non-profits,
development agencies, and states globally. Borrowing from Yúdice’s (2003) formulation of
“culture as a resource,” I argue that in the era of the new millenium, storytelling is likewise
recruited as a resource that can redirect conflict and resolve social problems that are no longer
addressed by downsized states. Non-profits create storytelling campaigns as part of their efforts
to channel mass activism into lobbying and voting. The US State Department funds women’s
writing workshops abroad as a means of humanizing imperial interventions. Development
agencies promote storytelling competitions in order to showcase millennial development goals.
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Banks and business networks fund storytelling programs in underperforming high schools to aid
in students’ educational and emotional development.
Storytelling is one aspect of the broader realm of culture that Yúdice refers to, but it also
contains peculiar affinities with a market-driven culture of late capitalism, given its propensity
toward a focus on the individual, and its valorization of experience and emotions over political
analysis. It also enables the political culture of consensus that has extended from the era of
pacted transitions to democracy in the 1980s to the current moment.
The Cultural Politics of Consensus
The era of pacts and agreements, that ended decades of protracted conflict from Central
America to South Africa, inaugurated a new “post-political” society that foregrounded consensus
and common interests. Jacques Ranciére (2003) refers to this post-political moment as based
upon “the idea that the old schemata of politics in terms of conflict, class war, emancipation, and
so on, had collapsed.” The emergent notion of consensus, enshrined in such documents as the
Washington Consensus which declared that conservatives and progressives could reach
agreement based on common interests, means rather, for Ranciére, that which is censored. He
argues that a politics of consensus is about what he calls “the partition of the sensible” –
producing the questions of what is given, the partition of the public and the private, and the very
configuration of the visible. The emergence of a consensual politics is akin to what Chilean
cultural theorist Nelly Richard (2004:65) refers to as a shift from the politics of antagonism,
understood as struggle against dictatorial regimes, to a politics of transaction, marked by
formulas of arranged agreements, or concertación in the Chilean case.
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Truth commissions were one vehicle that enabled the shift from an era of contention
between classes in struggle to a détente brokered by neoliberal elites. Greg Grandin and Thomas
Klublock (2007:1) argue that truth commissions “indexed the shift from the global crisis of the
1970s – where escalating cycles of conflict and polarization often led to either repressive
dictatorships or deadlocked civil wars – to the post-Cold War would-be pax neoliberal.” The
pacification of unions and radical peasant and indigenous organizations facilitated the shift from
state-managed economies to privatized and deregulated neoliberal economies. The emphasis in
truth commissions on reconciliation and forgiveness rather than a true reckoning with the
atrocities visited upon the population by armies and dominant groups was a reflection of the
continued coercive power of the latter. Early truth commissions such as the National
Commission on Disappeared People under President Raúl Alfonsín in Argentina in 1983 sought
to prosecute the junta officers and soldiers responsible for the torture and disappearance of tens
of thousands of Argentine citizens. But following a series of coup attempts by the Argentine
military, Alfonsín was forced to halt these prosecutions, and by the time of his successor Carlos
Menem, military officers were to be pardoned in the name of national reconciliation. The next
major truth commission in Chile in 1990 was the first to be called a Truth and Reconciliation
Commission (TRC), and it did not attempt to make targeted prosecutions a part of its activities.
As Grandin and Klublock (2007:5) state, the prioritization of catharsis and forgiveness over
punishment was a concession to the ongoing strength of the military. The jettisoning of the idea
of legal prosecution was a marker of the weaknesses of the post-Cold War liberal order.
The use of storytelling within truth commissions was crucial in producing the politics of
consensus that underlay nascent neoliberal orders. Although truth commissions have taken varied
forms, from nationally administered bodies to forums convened by international agents such as
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the United Nations, they have generally relied on individual testimonies from those affected by
conflict situations (Grandin and Klublock 2007:2). Truth commissions enabled the shift to a
politics of consensus through a regulation of the testimonies that were told. By presenting
victims as individuals rather than collective political subjects, by leaving out the systemic
dimensions of abuse such as state repression or apartheid, and by emphasizing the importance of
national healing over justice in stories, the truth commissions helped lay the groundwork for new
modes of engagement that sought rapprochement rather than a challenge to dominant classes.
The procedures of gathering testimonies and presenting them in legal hearings
individualized the nature and meanings of suffering, disaggregating the collective social justice
movements that had preceded the commissions. Describing the Argentine truth commission,
Julie Taylor (1994:198) argues that only individual motivation was amenable to the relating of
testimony. The judicial process suppressed collective forms of memory and motivation not only
of the perpetrators, but of the victims as well, “who were defined as individuals whose human
rights had been violated rather than as political activists.” The broader picture of class-based
groups in combat, or state-sponsored terror against specific ethnic or racial groups, was lost in
the presentation of testimonies as the stories of individuals who had suffered specific violations
for which they were seeking redress or compensation.
In general, the narratives in truth commissions left out questions of structural power.
Fiona Ross (2003:11) describes how the Act that established the TRC in South Africa contained
narrow definitions of violence and violation, and “did not address forms of structural violence or
the racial discrimination that characterized apartheid.” The commissions also excised history
from their accounts of why terror happened. Rather than viewing terror as a campaign against
democratic and socialist claims on state power, or as paving the way for neoliberal free market
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orders, truth commissions presented violence as a temporary breakdown in social relations
(Grandin 2011:37). The one exception to this was the Guatemalan Historical Clarification
Commission (CEH), which actually chronicled in detail the social and political context of the
conflict. Facing pressures from an emerging pan-Mayan cultural movement, the commission
showed violence to be integral to the process of state formation, as “the foundation of the
military’s plan of national stabilization through a return to constitutional rule” (Grandin
2011:40). But as the findings of the report were disseminated through school textbooks and
USAID-sponsored radionovelas (radio soap operas), they became watered down from the
original strong indictment of state repression and genocide to a more neutral “culture-of-peace”
framework that reinterprets the causes of the conflict as a “culture-of-violence” (Ogelsby
2007:90). In Guatemala, the task of promoting reconciliation took place less through the
commission itself and more through the circulation of its findings.
The aspect of reconciliation, or national healing, was one of the key aspects of consensual
politics. The spectacle of national unity depended on the performance of opposed groups or
classes that had been reconciled. The orchestration of reconciliation drew on global therapeutic
discourses that presented psychological healing through narrative as one of the key aspects of the
peace-building process.
Therapeutic Discourse as Disciplinary Power
The “therapeutic turn” is generally associated with the feminist movement in the United
States, which used psychotherapy to understand and analyze internalized oppression. One of the
ways they did this was through consciousness raising groups, which, as Jane Shattuc (1997:112)
argues, were “a place where women create community in the absence of authority by drawing on
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their social experiences and morality.” These groups sought to expand consciousness of
oppression through personal testimony, sharing one’s experience, and generalizing individual
stories. Over the period of the 1980s, many of these feminist organizations began merging their
activist work with service provision, gradually giving up their movement ties or focusing on
therapeutic work as the key to social change (Whittier 2009:48). Feminist writing workshops
also became popularized around this time, with the idea that writing one’s story could be an
important way of working through trauma. This gradually morphed into the emerging field of
professional feminist therapy (Whittier 2009:52). The professionalization of social movements
separated psychological healing and personal testimony from the analysis of power that the
feminist movement had insisted upon.
Scholars have argued that therapeutic discourse operates as a form of disciplinary power,
whereby individuals come to blame themselves for their problems and seek solutions by adapting
to rather than challenging the structures that create those problems (Fairclough 1989, Peck
1996). Therapeutic discourse expanded into a whole range of social institutions in the United
States including workplace management, social work, education, and the media (Peck 1996:142).
Commercial television entered the fray to redefine and exploit issues such as rape, drug use, and
sex change through the medium of the issue-oriented daytime talk show, structured around the
moral authority of a host and expert. Talk shows encouraged people to narrate stories about their
traumatic experiences as a means to find psychic resolution. They fashioned guidelines for new
kinds of public storytelling about previously silenced issues, using the frame of therapy as a
means for individualizing broader class-based identities. They encouraged personal testimony
and catharsis as a means for resolving social issues from domestic violence to child abuse and
drug addiction, rather than the political activism that had been at the basis of social movements
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in an earlier decade. Without a discussion of the larger structures that create social inequality,
each person’s individual experience is seen as equally valid. Competing narratives, particularly
those of dominant groups such as white heterosexual males, can trump another story (Grindstaff
2002:226). Talk shows avoided a critique of male power, economic inequality, and patriarchy
(Shattuc 1997:118-119); rather, the therapeutic discourse comes to dominate over broader social
critique.
Therapeutic discourse and the language of trauma were fairly unknown in the global
south nations of Latin America and Africa where they were introduced through the truth
commissions. As Christopher Colvin (2006:173) argues, trauma centers often run parallel to
forms of political intervention, with trauma counsellors operating alongside peacekeeping troops
and conflict resolution experts. As a means of processing troubling instances of violence and
abuse, therapy was applied partially and incompletely during and beyond the TRCs. Yet as a
framework for narrating healing and closure for individual subjects and more broadly the nation,
these discourses became deeply tied up with the relating of testimonies, and the demonstration of
psychic damage in return for compensation.
In various commissions such as the TRC in South Africa, stories were framed using
typical trauma narratives. Colvin (2006:173) describes these narratives as follows: “traumatic
event followed by, in various combinations, numbness, intrusion, denial, anxiety, a narrative
‘working through’ and, finally, acceptance and integration through storytelling.” Within this
discourse, trauma is seen as a singular event that leaves a wound on the individual psyche.
Unless this trauma is exorcised through confronting and reliving the memory, the wound will
continue to fester. It is only by “mastering of a painful past” that the wounds can be cleansed,
and individual as well as national healing can take place (Colvin 2003:156-7). As the result of
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this usage of the language of trauma in truth commission storytelling, the vocabulary of trauma
became widespread in both the TRC and post-TRC South Africa.
In the period after the South African TRC, groups who were disillusioned with the
process began to meet and organize, such as the Khulumani Support Group in Cape Town that
Colvin analyzes in his research. Despite their antipathy towards the TRC process, Khulumani
members often adopted the format of brief stories of harm circulated in search of some form of
redress (Colvin 2004). The language of wounded subjects is akin to what Wendy Brown
(1995:27) has described as “wounded attachments,” or identity politics structured by a
Nietschean politics of ressentiment. It is a critique of power that constitutes sovereign subjects as
responsible for the injury of social subordination. But as Brown argues, this politics structured by
ressentiment legitimizes the law as the guardian of individuals and not capable itself of causing
injury (1995:27) and it reverses the blaming structure rather than critiquing the sovereign subject
of accountability or the economies of liberal universalism (1995:70). Like Brown’s wounded
subject who can only make claims for itself by inscribing its pain in politics (1995:74), the
survivors of violence can only hold out their stories of pain in exchange for a promise of
recognition or reparations. They cannot go beyond this to enunciate alternative visions that see
beyond the pain.
Stories as Scripted Performance
The models of the truth commission and talk show helped to develop a storytelling
template that would be replicated in later contemporary initiatives. The template included the use
of protocols and coaching to elicit specific kinds of stories; the construction of typologies such as
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the “good victim” that resonated with audiences; and the promotion of storylines that
emphasized forgiveness and reconciliation.
Talk shows and truth commissions created the illusion of people spontaneously and freely
telling their own stories, while carefully controlling their narratives. Laura Grindstaff (2002:30),
who carried out a fine grained participant observation of talk shows as an intern and production
assistant on two talk shows, notes that the idea of “real people telling real stories” is actually the
product of intense planning and coordination between producers, guests and others. Similarly,
the commissioners and officials involved in truth commissions often presented the sharing of
testimonies as akin to local oral practices of telling stories. Some even naturalized the process as
grounded in traditional modes of storytelling. Archbishop Desmond Tutu claimed during the
South African TRC: “Storytelling is central, not only to many religious practices in this country
but also to the African tradition of which we are a part.” He quotes the parliamentarian Ellen
Kuzwayo as saying that, “Africa is a place of storytelling” (cited in Ross 2003:78). Yet despite
these attempts to connect the relating of testimonies with oral traditions such as the storytelling
of the African griots, truth commissions carefully proscribed the kinds of stories that could be
told, how they could be told, the dominant tropes to be employed, and the topics that could be
addressed.
The South African TRC did originally begin in early 1996 with few constraints on the
ways that the testimonies were related. Alejandro Castillejo-Cuéllar (2007:17) describes these
initial testimonies as “long, personal and detailed renderings of the context that surrounded
particular incidents;” “there were little practical constraints regarding form and content;” and
they “often constituted complex textures that wove time and space in a not necessarily linear
fashion.” The testimonies did not only focus on the actual violations that occurred, but often
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talked about broader experiences. Castillejo-Cuéllar (2007:17) gives the example of one mother
who described the murder of her son fairly briefly, but then went on to describe in great detail
the results of his death, including the dislocation of the family, financial hardships, loneliness
and so on. By September 1996, investigators were frustrated with the slow pace of data
collection, with statements taking hours to complete and running thirty to forty pages. Data
analysts and lawyers criticized the stories as incomplete, meandering, and poor quality, lacking
in facts (Castillejo-Cuéllar 2007:18). The kinds of knowledge that were produced by open-ended
narratives could not be easily processed by a commission that had defined its mission as factfinding in the service of truth recovery.
By 1997, the statement protocol for soliciting stories had shifted dramatically toward
excavating a “forensic-factual notion of truth.” This emphasis on uncovering the facts of the
violations, with perpetrators confessing fully in exchange for amnesty, was related to the
compromised position of the TRC within the negotiations over the transition to a post-apartheid
order (Castillejo-Cuéllar 2007:19). The protocol went from being a series of open-ended
questions to a highly specific questionnaire that the respondent was expected to answer
concisely. Phillip Bonner and Noor Nieftagodien (2003:177) give an example of some questions
in one version of the protocol: “Briefly describe what happened to you or the person you are
telling us about, please tell us what happened? Who got hurt, killed or kidnapped? When did it
happen? Who did it?” The protocol made available forty lines, or one and a half pages, for
responses to the questions (Andrews 2007:158). At the actual hearings, committee members
were assigned to help the testifiers relate their stories. Along with the protocols, the committee
members helped shape the narratives from personal descriptions about painful experiences into
easily processed data on rights abuses (Ross 2003:14). The stories were stripped of context and
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history, and the contemporary and ongoing effects of the conflict in people’s lives were no
longer seen as important.
In their shaping of stories, truth commissions constructed victim typologies. In the
Peruvian truth commission, Kimberly Theidon (2007:455) argues that certain victim categories
such as “innocent victims” and “sexually vulnerable women” became what she calls “narrative
capital.” Male-directed communal authorities in Peru developed “memory projects” to prepare
for the arrival of TRC mobile teams. Communal authorities decided to discuss only the deaths
that occurred at the hands of the armed forces, and not those committed by the Sendero
Luminoso guerrilla organization. According to Theidon (2007:463), women were often told to be
quiet, leaving the narration of battles up to the men. Although some women were armed and
active combatants in the struggles, they were instructed to play the role of innocent victims, to
reduce the suspicion that the community might have been guerrilla sympathizers. Similarly, in
the Tribunal of Conscience in Guatemala, there was a desire for stories about “good victims”
with whom spectators could empathize (Crosby and Lykes 2011:474). Women who collaborated
with guerrillas or took up arms did not fit the profile of the good or innocent victim in the
context of truth commissions.
Peruvian and Guatemalan women were asked to speak about sexual abuse and rape,
rather than focusing on other aspects of gender discrimination or their protagonism in resistance
movements. Bravery for women is defined solely on the basis of their willingness to speak
openly about rape, and not the range of other ways that they defended themselves and their
families during the armed conflict (Theidon 2007:464). Women were often reluctant to retell
stories of harm because they represented only one aspect of their lives, as was made apparent in
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the early narratives told in the South African TRC. But these victim categories were seen as the
kinds of capital needed to receive possible compensation or potential redress.
The truth commissions encouraged storylines that emphasized forgiveness and
reconciliation. Colvin (2002:10) describes how in South Africa, the categories of “healed
victims” and “repentant perpetrators” were created through the process of the commissions. The
effort to create these kinds of new subjects as emblematic of the hope for reconciliation and
forgiveness is well illustrated by the case of the Gugulethu Seven. As Castillejo-Cuéllar (2007)
recounts, seven young activists were ambushed and killed by South African security forces in the
Gugulethu township in March 1986. The 2000 film Long Night’s Journey into Day: South
Africa’s Search for Truth and Reconciliation, directed by Frances Reid and Deborah Hoffmann,
shows an encounter organized by the TRC between the amnesty applicant Taphelo Mbelo, one of
those responsible for the killings, and the mothers of the victims. Mbelo asked the mothers for
forgiveness, stating that “I know that I have done wrong, that I have done evil things.” The
mothers react negatively, one saying that she did not forgive him. Then, just before the meeting
is about to be adjourned, one of the mothers offers a complex statement of forgiveness, invoking
principles of Christianity, morality, and kinship (Castillejo-Cuéllar 2007: 24 – 29). Yet as
Castillejo-Cuéllar (2007:29) argues, in the film the scenario is abstracted from historical context
and social conditions and condensed into a representation of remorse from the perpetrator and
forgiveness from the victim’s family; it becomes an icon of reconciliation to be circulated and
replicated as evidence of the foundations for a new “rainbow nation.”
Storylines and victim typologies on talk shows are strongly shaped by the format of the
programs. The choice of topics affects who is solicited for the show and what they are able to
talk about. Guests are labeled according to their location within the topic. Tags such as “cheating
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parents” and “mama’s boy” make the guest into his or her problem, and nothing more. As Janice
Peck (1996:144) argues: “The effect is to abstract these people and their troubles from the larger
social world in which their everyday lives, their struggles, and the structural determinants of
these problems exist.” The host is responsible for policing the boundaries of the topic by guiding
the guests and audience back to certain points. They cut off some speakers while giving the
platform to others, whether through humor in the case of Oprah Winfrey or overt guidance and
restatement in the case of Sally Jessy Raphael (Peck 1996:141). The use of the topic frame
effectively silences an awareness of deeper structures such as class. Peck gives the example of a
Winfrey episode entitled “Couples Who Fight About Money.” The two white couples, one
wealthy and the other working class, and one black couple are set up to discuss the topic. Guided
by Winfrey and the guest expert, the audience comments address the gender differences between
the couples, but by relying on racialized stereotypes of black men as deviant and black women as
strong they are prevented from an understanding of how class and race may affect the conflicts at
play. Peck (1996:146) notes that “The problem perpetually ‘unproblematized’ in these talk
shows is that of social class.” Although the shows give the illusion of addressing social issues in
a collective audience-driven setting, in reality they work to individualize problems by blaming
particular individuals with certain stereotyped traits for creating these issues.
The talk show format is not always able to contain the kinds of conflicts that it unleashes.
Laura Grindstaff (2002:30) observes that the shows reflect a struggle between producers and talk
show guests, who have their own agendas and desires. This is particularly the case with activists,
who may sometimes appear on talk shows to promote their own campaigns. Sometimes, once
they have made it through the initial coaching by producers and taping is underway, activists
may simply deviate from the scripted performance expected of them and assert their own views
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(Grindstaff 2002:221). The limitation is that producers can edit the final version, cutting out
these alternative views or simply making the activists look foolish, which is why some activists
refuse to go on talk shows (Grindstaff 2002:224). But attempts by hosts and producers to control
and script talk show discourse are not always entirely successful.
Closely related to truth commissions and talk shows, in the 1980s, courtrooms became
another venue for storytelling as domestic violence, anti-rape, and child abuse survivor
movements used personal stories as a way of engaging legislators and lawmakers. Like the
victim typologies of the truth commissions and talk shows, legal advocacy also relied on and
reproduced certain tropes. Feminist activists had won for survivors of domestic violence the right
to claim self-defense in cases of homicide. But Francesca Polletta (2006:124) argues that in the
courtroom, women who killed their abusers were often limited to stock characters – being either
powerless and incapacitated victims, or conversely, unapologetic and provocative. Lawyers
tended to emphasize these women as “good victims” and if they departed too much from this
stereotype by being angry or aggressive, then they would be penalized for it. But adopting the
stereotype of the helpless female may have hampered them from defending their rights in other
areas, like retaining custody of their children.
Similarly, child sexual abuse advocacy groups won the rights for adult survivors to bring
civil suits against offenders, in cases where the statutes of limitations prevented criminal cases.
But Nancy Whittier (2009:195) argues that in contrast to the empowering identity of “survivor”
that the movement had championed, in civil litigation, survivors had to present themselves as
“damaged victims.” While the movement produced survivors who spoke without shame and
were in control of their own life, in court, he or she would have to show that they needed therapy
and suffered lasting effects from the abuse. Whittier (2009:195) argues that, “the requirements of
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civil litigation make it almost impossible to maintain an oppositional identity as survivor, but
rather require participants to display a pathologized identity.” Following Brown’s logic of
“wounded attachments,” victims had to rely on medical discourses of pain and suffering in order
to qualify for compensation, rather than as survivors of patriarchal violence. Through the legal
process, domestic abuse and child abuse survivors often lost their ability to define themselves on
their own terms.
Legal storytelling not only promoted certain stock characters, but it also encouraged
specific stories. James Nolan (2002) describes the case of drug courts, where drug offenders
were offered the option of court-monitored treatment as an alternative to traditional adjudication.
Defendants submit to therapeutic treatments and frequent meetings with a judge, who may
dismiss the criminal charges or expunge the defendant’s drug arrests if they can demonstrate
through their stories to the court that they have successfully completed the treatments. Nolan
argues that stories with “happy endings,” where the drug court has helped the defendant to turn
her or his life around, are the most encouraged storylines. The stories follow a particular script,
drawing on therapeutic symbols such as self-esteem, ownership of treatment, and assessment of
feelings. Not telling the right story means that the person is in denial (Nolan 2002:170).
Successful legal storytelling is about learning the right tropes and storylines through which to
frame one’s narrative – tropes and storylines that resonate with lawmakers, judges, and
policymakers.
The rise of the new approaches to storytelling as pioneered in truth commissions, talk
shows, and legal advocacy took place in the context of defeated social movements, the global
turn towards neoliberal economies, and the growth of NGOs as a privatized form of service
delivery and professionalized social action. In the new millenium, these refashioned storytelling
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approaches were to find expression in various kinds of instrumental projects and campaigns
designed by governments, strategists, and foundations.
Storytelling as a Resource
Social movement storytelling was retooled in the context of post-conflict societies and
emergent neoliberal orders. But in a contemporary era of accelerated and contested
neoliberalism, this revised model of storytelling comes to play a different kind of function, one
that, drawing on George Yúdice (2003), I call, “storytelling as a resource.” Yúdice (2003:1)
makes the argument that in a global era, “culture-as-resource is much more than commodity; it
is the lynchpin of a new epistemic framework in which ideology and much of what Foucault
called disciplinary society…are absorbed into an economic or ecological rationality.” Investment
in culture is seen as a way of strengthening civil society, building capacity, and enhancing social
capital, serving as a host for economic and political development. Culture is recruited to improve
social conditions, spur economic growth, enhance education, resolve racial strife, and reverse
urban blight (Yúdice 2003:1-13). Applying Yúdice’s argument, I suggest that storytelling
strategies employed by NGOs, development agencies and non-profits also function in this
utilitarian way. It is the case that earlier forms of social movement storytelling such as Menchú’s
testimonio or women’s narratives in feminist rallies also served an instrumental role, that is, they
attempted to use stories as a way to attract supporters and build their movement. The difference
is that the concept of “storytelling as a resource” is linked to the 1990s and beyond when social
and political life are increasingly oriented to the market, and culture is conceived of in terms of
the direct and indirect returns it provides.
19
The storytelling strategies of agencies and non-profits are often shaped by
communications consulting firms, which present it in terms of a market-driven language of
demand and returns. A strategy guide for grantmakers, published by the Working Narratives
group in 2013, contains an article by the director of a communications consulting firm who
speaks about having “buy-in” at the top and creating “demand for stories,” by including stories
on a regular basis at staff meetings, in newsletters and on websites.1 The Rappaport Family
Foundation which funded Public Narrative trainings by the National Organizing Institute (NOI)
for community-college students in California states in the strategy guide that they are looking for
“a high return on our investment.”2 In lieu of stories told and shaped by individuals themselves,
organizations require consultations with “narrative strategists,” who will coach them in how to
best tell their stories to certain “target audiences.”
Ironically, storytelling as a practice associated with oral narrative and qualitative
expression has been touted by grantmakers as an efficient tool for evaluation and measurement
of impact. John Gledhill (2004: 340) refers to the continuous assessment and demands for
evidence of goals being met among development agencies and NGOs as part of an “audit
culture.” He traces this audit culture to the disciplinary effects of neoliberal regimes that are
more concerned with inculcating in people a need to maximize labor market performance
through systems of project evaluation than measuring their actual impact on the lives of human
beings. In a section of the strategy guide called “The Uses of Story,” the authors argue that story
“helps communities assess needs and strengths and evaluate a program throughout its life.”3 The
managing director of evaluation for the Rockefeller Foundation says in the guide that storytelling
1
Ibid., p 8.
Ibid., p 16.
3
Ibid., p 9.
2
20
can provide small organizations with a cheap way of managing typical monitoring and
evaluation functions required of them by foundations.4 In line with the mass surveillance and
analysis of communications data by the National Security Agency and private corporations,
storytelling is also promoted as a way to access people’s private information and build databases
that can be used for targeting people in campaigns.5 Grantmakers are pushing toward a situation
where storytelling does not just assist with evaluation metrics and outcomes, but comprises them.
As grantmaker Gara LaMarche states in the Afterword to the strategy guide, “Demonstrated
impact is not a substitute for storytelling – it is the story.”6 The call to shape stories into
“demonstrated impact” is further evidence of the ways that storytelling has become drawn into
utilitarian strategies.
The Paradox of Participation
Over the period of the 1990s, “telling one’s story” became linked to the discourses of
participation, empowerment, and social capital being touted by NGOs, development agencies,
and non-profits. Neoliberal policies had confronted numerous challenges for implementation
globally, including hyperinflation, zero net growth and widening inequalities that led to massive
protests and the election of anti-neoliberal candidates. Leading development institutions began
moving away from aggressive structural adjustment policies toward more “inclusive” goals of
poverty reduction and good governance (Craig and Porter 2006). Tania Murray Li (2007:234)
argues that by the turn of the century, the World Bank was pursuing a strategy of what Nikolas
Rose (1996) calls “governing through community”: “communities of poor people were
4
Ibid., p 11.
Ibid., p 15.
6
Ibid., p 43.
5
21
encouraged to take on responsibility for their own improvement by engaging with markets,
learning how to conduct themselves in competitive arenas, and making appropriate choices.” In
2000, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) proposed the Millennial Development
Goals (MDGs) that included eradicating hunger, promoting gender equality, and improving
education for people worldwide by the year 2015.
The recounting of personal stories fit well with the goals of development agencies at this
point in time. Good governance was about giving a “human face” to structural adjustment
policies (Craig and Porter 2006:6), and stories did that well. The strategy of Participatory Rural
Appraisal (PRA), one of the key tools of governing through community that directed people to
develop the resources in their community to solve their own problems, emphasized “hearing the
voices of the most marginal, representing poor communities in globally legible ways” (Craig and
Porter 2006:15). Again, this emphasis on the voices of the marginal, expressing themselves in
soundbites and frames that could be easily featured on glossy development brochures and
program reports, lent itself to a storytelling approach. Storytelling was presented by the UNDP as
one way of promoting the MDGs in local communities, through storytelling initiatives such as
the Tapestry Project. According to the website, the Tapestry project is “designed to give young
leaders a way of describing their activities in support of the MDGs.”7 The digital stories featured
on the website are brief clips that contain motivational language by young people from across the
globe who have overcome various obstacles to participate and empower themselves and their
communities.
How are we to understand this contemporary focus on storytelling based in democratic
discourses of participation and empowerment? Wendy Brown (2003) argues that neoliberalism
7
http://www.curriki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Demo/Tapestry Accessed 3/24/2014.
22
has eviscerated democracy of its content, and that discourses of democracy and participation
function as a legitimating mechanism for neoliberal regimes. However, if we reduce concepts
such as democracy and participation to a rhetorical shell, we miss the crucial role that they play
in giving life to contemporary political culture. We cannot deny that the empowerment or sense
of participation people feel when telling their stories may be real, even as we recognize that these
discourses are acting as a form of governmentality, encouraging people to devote their time and
energy in limited arenas that do not confront the status quo, but often just subsidize a pared-back
welfare state. Julia Paley (2001:146) refers to this as the “paradox of participation” in her study
of grassroots organizations in post-Pinochet Chile: “participation offered a sense of meaning to
citizens at the same time as it limited avenues through which citizens could act.” The reason that
these discourses are so effective as legitimating mechanisms is precisely because they are not
seen as such.
In their storytelling campaigns, development agencies use discourses of participation and
empowerment to motivate people while proposing limited solutions to the problems raised. In
January 2013, the UNDP held a storytelling contest, featuring the twelve winners in a publication
called The Development Advocate.8 The winning reports feature individual stories recounting the
hardships faced by poor people in situations of environmental degradation, war, and conflictzones. Although the stories all feature positive outcomes for those who have suffered, the
solutions proposed by UNDP are circumscribed within the field of a narrow range of social
action that cannot address the deeper causes. The problems are often presented as originating in
traditional cultural practices themselves: the use of non-eco-friendly wood stoves in Brazil, large
family sizes leading to poverty in Bangladesh, and girls in Egypt lacking an education due to “a
8
http://www.mdgfund.org/sites/default/files/The%20Development%20Advocate%20UNDP.pdf Accessed
3/24/2014.
23
community tradition biased against girls’ education.”9 There are no calls for a developmental
state to provide welfare and meet the basic needs of its citizens. There is no discussion of
patriarchy, the gendered division of labor, rape as power, or the domination of powerful nations
over the agendas of poorer countries. There is no mention of the need for broader international
policy changes to reverse climate change, the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories, the
genocide in Darfur, or the role of transnational mining corporations in the Congo.
Rather, it is assumed that the market can be harnessed to resolve people’s problems. As
Gledhill (2004:341) argues, “in a world in which the triumph of the market economy is taken for
granted, it seems increasingly difficult to specify ‘realistic’ strategies for those at the bottom of
global society that do not entail enhancing their capacity to function in market society.” The
UNDP report emphasizes investment in social capital as one means to end poverty. The
buzzword “social capital” borrows from political scientist Robert Putnam’s work on the
networks within society that provide a basis for coordination and governance. Efforts to govern
through community are premised on building social capital, as a way to develop the kinds of
local-level networks that can promote economic growth and alleviate poverty. Social capital was
seen as a resource that communities lacked, and that required some intervention to restore it
(Murray Li 2007:244). Development agencies commonly invoke this idea of social capital, along
with notions of “empowering women,” “participation,” and “self-reliance.” A story entitled
“Empowering Women to Fight Poverty” in Bangladesh has the following pull quote from the
country director: “Investing in women yields dividends for the entire family, specifically for
children’s education and nutrition.”10 The language of financial markets is applied to the social
problem of poverty alleviation.
9
Ibid., p 6.
Ibid., p 3.
10
24
More generally, storytelling strategies have come to play a key role in campaigns by
development agencies to promote MDGs, with UN agencies sponsoring writing workshops,
using “micronarratives” or brief personal narratives in their campaigns, and featuring stories on
their websites. NGOs have also taken up this strategy of using storytelling to advance the MDGs.
The organization Story Workshop in Malawi uses stories to address issues of HIV-AIDS, food
security, gender, and the environment. In 2008, Story Workshop launched a campaign of village
festivals in support of food security. The campaign used the instrumental language of
development agencies in outlining its goals – storytelling festivals would be utilized to “increase
capacity,” promote a “spirit of self-reliance,” and “improve health.”11 What all of these different
initiatives share is the use of stories to resolve chronic and deeply rooted problems of poverty,
climate change, and inequality.
Non-profits and foundations in the United States also harnessed storytelling for the task
of governing through community. The strategy guide for grantmakers describes the advocacy
role of storytelling as to “engage[s] diverse civic actors for large-scale constituency building,
fundraising, and policy advocacy.”12 Using the language of empowerment and participation,
people are directed to tell their stories in order to bolster election campaigns, mobilize voters,
raise money for organizations and engage in legislative advocacy – confining their range of
action within a narrow set of alternatives. Some grantmaking bodies place pressure on non-profit
organizations to adopt storytelling practices, as evidenced by a statement from the Compton
Foundation in the guide, who say that those grantees who don’t fit with their new focus on
storytelling must simply be let go.13
11
http://www.storyworkshop.org/our_archive/spotlight/topics/mwanaalirenji.html Accessed 3/25/2014.
http://workingnarratives.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Story-Guide.pdf Accessed 9/19/2014.
13
Ibid., p 39.
12
25
Storytelling campaigns in the United States were spearheaded by strategists like Marshall
Ganz. Ganz was a Harvard lecturer who had spent many decades as an organizer in the civil
rights movement in the south and the farm workers struggle in California. After Barack Obama
declared his candidacy, Ganz used his Kennedy School connections to broker a meeting with
Obama and his political consultant David Axelrod in April 2007, and he was invited to the
campaign headquarters in Chicago the next month. In June, Ganz was given the task of setting up
a series of workshops known as Camp Obama, where young people would be coached in various
election campaign strategies, including how to tell their story of conversion to Obama’s message
(Abramsky 2011). In his recapitulation of the campaign, Ganz argues that he wanted to move
away from the conventional approach to campaigns which was based on marketing. Rather than
employ political marketers who sell candidates by appealing to people as consumers, Ganz
(2009:2) proposed “the development of volunteer leaders, rooted in communities they are trying
to organize and on whom the vitality of the movement rests.” At the core of Ganz’s approach
was the idea that stories appeal much more effectively to people than “traditional scripts, talking
points, or messaging” (Ganz 2009:7). Ganz’s emphasis on organizing people, building their
capacity, and encouraging them to participate was similar to that of development agencies.
We can see the paradox of participation in the Camp Obama experience. Volunteers did
not come up with a collective agenda based on the expectations of their members – the candidate
is the one who comes up with the agenda. They do not form relationships with voters. Given the
scale of the operation, they are just required to bring people out to vote. These narrow goals are
reflected in the kinds of organizing strategies that Ganz focused on in the Camp Obama
workshops. While civil rights and farm worker organizing relied on a range of strategies, the
Camp Obama trainings focus mostly on storytelling, while dropping most of the other organizing
26
skills. According to Aaron Schutz and Marie Sandy (2012), the Obama election campaign
resembled more an evangelical effort of conversion than an organizing campaign. The social
networks and infrastructure created through the campaign, referred to by Ganz as “civic capital,”
were the basis of the Organizing for Action (OFA) group. On the barackobama.com website,
OFA is described as “the grassroots movement built by millions of Americans to pass the agenda
we voted for in 2012.”14 But OFA was not an independent, mass-based movement equipped with
the ability to put pressure on the administration. It was rather a self-regulating network of
volunteers – some reoriented away from other, more community-based independent organizing –
who followed directives from a mostly white leadership in implementing various policies. For
the most part, this group has demobilized, its urgent task of voter conversion completed. Yet
what has endured beyond the immediate elections is the model of public narrative that Ganz
devised. His worksheets and workbooks are widely circulated through trainings by the NOI, the
websites of prominent journalists like Bill Moyers, and many other organizations who use his
materials in trainings.
The use of stories as a means of empowerment is common to much of the language used
globally by development agencies, states, and business-community partnerships. A storytelling
partnership between the Commonwealth Bank and disadvantaged immigrant public schools in
Sydney’s inner west makes the claim in its project summary that, “students have been
empowered to tell their own stories.”15 Communications consultants employed by the bank
worked with the students to coach them how to tell their stories. The aims of the program were
described as helping students to “achieve their full potential,” “giving them the courage to share
14
15
http://www.barackobama.com/about/ Accessed 9/22/2014.
http://www.pria.com.au/documents/version/5354 p 3, Accessed 9/18/2014.
27
their unique stories,” and to “build the children’s skills and self-confidence.”16 The project draws
on motivational discourses of empowerment, encouraging the children to tell their stories as a
means to overcome their often traumatic experiences of migration and displacement and to adjust
to Australian society.
Emotions and Values in a Post-Political Era
The utilitarian deployment of stories and storytelling in campaigns and development
projects has also enabled a valorization of the individual, an emphasis on values over ideas, and
feelings over political analysis that is in keeping with the post-political juncture. What is most
compelling about stories is the emotional connections they can make with the audience. Stories
convince not through logical arguments but rather through the visceral power of personal
experience. That emotional bond can be usefully harnessed in order to couch political critique;
feeling and thinking can be parallel and mutually interactive processes (Jasper 2011). But the
contemporary approach to storytelling by development agencies and non-profits is one that
privileges feeling and emotions, tying them to an amorphous notion of values that usually
discounts a critique of macro structures and political analysis.
During the Camp Obama trainings, Ganz argued that the strength of storytelling lies in its
ability to promote “values” rather “ideas.” He contrasted the typical approach by Democratic
party candidates of focusing on the “means” of public action that include policies or programs,
with Obama’s strategy of focusing on the “ends” of public action – these being values and moral
reform (Ganz 2009:3). Ganz contrasted what he refers to as “values based organizing” with
“issue based organizing,” arguing that because values are experienced emotionally, they can be a
16
Op. cit.
28
source of moral energy (Ganz 2009:6). Camp Obama volunteers were explicitly instructed to
resist from engaging voters in questions of policy, instead they were asked to refer people to
Obama’s website (Schutz and Sandy 2012:119). The result was a campaign that created a binary
of emotions/analysis, where values and emotions were valorized over the practical policy
decisions and political discussions about key issues.
In a Camp Obama training excerpted on youtube, the trainer Joy Cushman emphasized to
volunteers the importance of reaching out to voters through the concept of values rather than
strategy or analysis.17 She said to them, “Stories connect to our values, and we don’t think our
values, we feel our values.” The values that were promoted through the Camp Obama trainings
were often those of the nation, the family, and faith. The nationalist narrative is embodied in
Obama’s speech to the Democratic National Convention in 2004, which is a staple of the Camp
Obama toolkit and Ganz’s Harvard course in Public Narrative. During the Cushman training, a
group of young, racially diverse organizers watches an excerpt from the speech. The excerpt
begins with Obama’s story of his parents: “My father was a foreign student, born and raised in a
small village in Kenya. He grew up herding goats and went to school in a tin roof shack.” Obama
immediately ties the personal story of his father to a nationalist discourse about America, as “a
beacon of freedom and opportunity” where his father got a scholarship. Weaving in the story of
his mother who was born in Kansas City, he frequently connects his own story as part of a
“larger American story.” His vision of a tolerant and generous America is embodied in his own
experiences as the child of an African immigrant who could one day run for president, although
there is a constant slippage between the ideal meritocratic America that Obama envisions, and
the one that already exists, the one that he argues has made his story possible.
17
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0wq5VVxAFk Accessed 3/21/2014.
29
After playing the excerpt, Cushman directs the volunteers to comment on the choices that
Obama and others made in this story. The training materials emphasize that the choice made by
individuals at a key moment is both a crucial element of plot in storytelling and a model for the
kinds of conversion stories that these volunteers will tell about why they decided to follow
Obama. One African-American male volunteer says, “One story that I heard is that he refused to
be a victim of circumstance despite the cards that life dealt them.” Cushman agrees that Obama’s
parents chose not to be victims, and one way they did this was by naming him Barack. She ends
by saying that, “The story of self is all about choice.” The conversation valorizes the neoliberal
discourse of individual choice over the macro structures that shape people’s life chances.
The campaign organizers needed a simple way to convince people to vote for Obama,
and this is what Ganz gave them. The actual complexity of people’s life histories and stories was
not necessary for the campaign. In all of his materials, Ganz emphasizes the idea of the “two
minute story.” Volunteers should practice telling their story in two minutes or less. The story
crafting sessions actually began with an extended discussion and sharing of personal
experiences. One participant in the August 2007 Camp Obama training in Atlanta recounts how
the seven volunteers in his group shared meaningful and rich stories: Ben, who grew up on an
Alabama farm as one of fifteen children, lost his father at age ten. Lavell lost his mother to breast
cancer as a child growing up in a poor neighborhood of Queens, and Tryshanda came from a
failing school system and was told that black girls couldn’t enter the field of astrophysics where
she wanted to study (Exley 2007). But having shared these intensely personal stories, the
volunteers were asked to rewrite their stories to emphasize how they made the decision to work
for the election of Obama. One of these stories was that of volunteer Susan Christopher, from the
Camp Obama training session held in Burbank, California in July 2007. The story was uploaded
30
to youtube where it has over 5,000 views.18 In two minutes and twenty seconds, Christopher
relates how she felt when she hesitantly attended a training session and she heard Ganz talking
about how Obama was a return of the hope embodied by the Mississippi marches and Cesar
Chavez. She describes her reaction in emotive terms: “I felt my heart softening again, I felt
myself able to give a little bit more of me to this process.” Christopher doesn’t talk about her
intellectual reaction to Obama’s policies but her visceral and bodily reaction to hearing the
public narrative of Obama as framed by Ganz. There is an evangelical sense of rebirth that drives
these kinds of narratives, which is not surprising given the religious underpinnings of Ganz’s
approach.
Despite references to Mississippi marches and civil rights during the training sessions,
the use of emotion in the Obama campaign was vastly different to its use in earlier campaigns. In
their book Passionate Politics, Francesca Polletta, James Jasper and Jeff Goodwin (2001)
describe how contentious movements like the black power movement and the women’s
movement in the 1960s and 1970s drew on a “politics of rage” and “outlaw emotions” as the
basis of powerful political challenges. According to the authors, “emotions can be strategically
used by activists and be the basis for strategic thought” (2001:9). By contrast, the separation of
feeling from thought and values from politics by the Obama campaign was related to the narrow
goals of what was being construed by strategists like Ganz as a movement: the goals of the
Obama campaign were not to challenge broader structures of patriarchy and racism, but rather to
elect a president.
The shift away from political analysis and toward an amorphous notion of values is often
framed in terms of collectivities, envisaged as natural and organic. In his “Telling Your Public
18
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-WEM-taoG8 Accessed 3/21/2014.
31
Story” worksheet, Ganz states that personal stories should be linked to a Story of Us, that refers
to shared identities based on family, faith, communities, and nations in which we participate. He
says, “Your challenge will be to define an ‘us’ upon whom you will call to join you in action
motivated by shared values, values you bring alive through storytelling.” On the basis of shared
values such as religion, or more vaguely, hope, individuals come together in a culture of
consensus to support a candidate or heal a nation. The Camp Obama participant Christopher
finishes her two minute story by alluding to Obama as a candidate who can heal the racial
divisions of the country: “It’s the beginning of a healing for our nation, and a healing of
generations.” Rather than connecting the Story of Us to a particular class or race-based group
struggling for its rights, the Camp Obama trainings present the “Us” as the family, professional
association or religious group who needs to be mobilized to vote, or the divided nation that must
be reconciled.
Conclusion
The social movements of the 1960s and 1970s used confrontational tactics such as
strikes, marches, boycotts, guerrilla warfare, and occupations to create a new terrain of the
possible. Radical social change required a willingness to confront and even take up arms against
one’s oppressor. It was in this context of revolutionary mobilization that social movements
developed inter-relational models of storytelling, based in consciousness raising, one-on-one
organizing, and testimonio, as a way of working through more deeply their analysis of power
relations, communicating to wider audiences, and building their organizations. But alongside a
period of repression and professionalization of social movements globally, there was the
establishment of neoliberal orders in need of legitimation. It was these very storytelling tactics
32
pioneered by social movements themselves that – stripped of history and context, divorced from
political analysis, and employed in isolation from more adversarial methods – were adopted and
refashioned by truth commissions, talk shows, and legal advocacy groups to lay the groundwork
for more transactional modes of political engagement that promoted reconciliation over classbased antagonism.
What is it about stories that made them such an ideal candidate for this juncture? My
answer is that precisely without the necessary political analysis and confrontational tactics,
stories on their own, as the relating of personal experiences, led to an individualizing of
collective struggles. Stories valorized experience above structure, falling prey to a relativist
dogma that each person’s truth is as valid as another. They promoted emotional response and
feeling over thinking, creating a binary that was never present in earlier iterations. And
storytelling encouraged the idea that individual redress or compensation, from court judgments
in favor of battered women to eco-friendly wood stoves in UNDP programs, would provide the
solution to deeply entrenched problems of poverty and patriarchy. Throughout the process, the
illusion that highly curated and scripted stories were real and authentic was necessary to their
success. Talk shows emphasized “real people telling real stories,” and truth commission officials
insisted on the mythic origins of storytelling practices in traditional cultures. The spectacle of
stories as cathartic for individuals and for deeply divided post-war nations was crucial in giving
legitimacy to those orders.
The change that occurs in the late 1990s and new millenium, at a time when
neoliberalism as a political-economic order seems to be in some crisis, is the shift to the uses of
storytelling as a resource. As the “community” becomes the new object of interest for strategies
of governance, storytelling again seems the perfect candidate for development agencies and
33
liberal policymakers trying to decentralize governance to the local level, give a human face and
voice to neoliberal reforms, and resolve deep social issues with stop-gap solutions. The social
movement discourses of empowerment, participation, and the collective, enter into this redefined
notion of storytelling-as-a-resource, however, they are harnessed toward incorporating people
into developmental and civic projects.
At the same time, we must take seriously the stories themselves – as representations of a
life and as the public utterance of previously silenced experiences, which also involve certain
self-conscious strategies of narration on the part of the author. Stories can exceed the framings
and protocols that try to contain them and direct them toward certain utilitarian goals. Some
organizations who receive grant money to do storytelling find innovative ways to make use of it.
For example, the Cornerstone Theater in LA received money from the Ford Foundation and
together with the National Day Laborer Organizing Network they involved Latino day laborers
in the process of writing and performing a play called Los Illegals. The Ford Foundation
program officer Roberta Uno herself spoke of the need for patronizing art for arts sake – a
subversive idea in the current climate: “It can be unnerving for grantmakers to experiment with
funding socially engaged art, especially if they don’t have specific impact measures. But we
should also be investing in these artists for what they do – and that is the experiment.”19 The play
was not intended to influence lawmakers, or build the capacity of immigrant workers, or any
other outcome that could be showcased in a foundation report. Rather, its end goal was creating
art, while providing a forum for day laborers to share their stories.
It is the tension between the guided processes of storytelling and the stories themselves,
between a global phenomenon and its local iterations, that lies at the heart of this book. On this
19
http://workingnarratives.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Story-Guide.pdf p 19.
34
point I diverge from Yúdice’s theory of culture-as-a-resource, in that it ends up being too
reductive for understanding stories. For Yúdice, achieving some degree of agency within culture
must be done from within the confines of state and market that seek to control it. But I think that
this formulation gives short shrift to storytellers, who sometimes, even if briefly, manage to
break out of the utilitarian binds of state and market to create alternative spaces of collective
imagining that offer a path toward transformative futures.
This book raise crucial questions for those interested in social justice movements today.
Does the problem lie with the way that storytelling strategies are being applied or rather with the
movements themselves, in their exchange of confrontation on the streets for a more transactional
and foundation-driven politics of consensus in the courtrooms and legislatures? Could more
radical contemporary movements like Occupy Wall Street and the Oaxaca teachers’ strikes
(Stephen 2013) provide models for a different kind of storytelling, ones that may even go beyond
the dependency on intermediaries or charismatic leaders as in earlier movements? Do individual
writers and movements have any control over the kinds of representations that may resonate in
the public sphere, or are they bound by the narrow openings that exist in a contemporary era of
globalized neoliberalism?
35
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