Reading across Borders: Storytelling and Knowledges of Resistance

246 Pages·2003·23.18 MB·English

by  Shari Stone-Mediatore (auth.)

COMPARATIVE FEMINIST STUDIES SERIES
Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Series Editor
PUBLISHED BY PALGRAVE MACMILLAN:
Sexuality, Obscenity, Community:
Women, Muslims, and the Hindu Public in Coloniallndia
by Charu Gupta
Twenty-First-Century Feminist Classrooms:
Pedagogies of Identity and Difference
edited by Amie A. Macdonald and Susan Sanchez-Casal
Reading across Borders
Storytelling and Knowledges of Resistance
by Shari Stone-Mediatore
Made in India:
Decolonizations, Queer Sexualities, Trans/national Projects
by Suparna Bhaskaran
Dedicated to the memory of my grandparents,
Ethel and Jack Stone
READING ACROSS BORDERS
Copyright © Shari Stone-Mediatore, 2003.
Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover I st edition 2003 978-0-312-29566-0
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner
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ISBN 978-0-312-29567-7 ISBN 978-1-137-09764-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-137-09764-4
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Reading across Borders
Storytelling and Knowledges of
Resistance
Shari Stone-Mediatore
Contents
Acknowledgements v
Abbreviations VI
Introduction: The Power of Stories 1
Part I: Hannah Arendt and the Revaluing of Storytelling
1. Political Narration after the Poststructuralist Critique 17
2. The Public Role of Storytelling 47
3. Toward a Critical Theory of Stories 67
Part II: Counter-Narratives and Cross-Border Politics
4. The Problem of Experience 97
5. Storytelling and Global Politics 125
6. Stories and Standpoint Theory: Toward a More
Responsible and Defensible Thinking from
Others' Lives 161
Notes 193
References 217
Index 233
Acknowledgments
I owe my first thanks to Mary Rawlinson, Dick Howard, Don Ihde, and
Anthony Weston, each of whom provided invaluable guidance and
support when this work was in its most muddled stages. I am also
grateful to Bernice Bild and David Ranney for helping me to keep my
thinking grounded in practical issues and to Chandra T alpade Mohanty
and Rebecca Steinitz for particularly thoughtful criticism.
Ohio Wesleyan University gave me the space to explore in my classes
many of the ideas that made it into this book, and I thank my students at
Ohio Wesleyan for discussing these ideas with me. I also thank Debbie
Stone Bruell, a sister in the best sense of the word, for copied articles and
nourishing conversation, and my parents, Shirley and Bob Stone, for
homemade soup, expert house repairs, and constant support during the
many years I worked on this book.
Most of all, I thank John Stone-Mediatore for his sound judgment,
his inexhaustible generosity, his keen eye for questions I overlooked as
weil as value I was often at a loss to find, and, sometimes most
importantly, his sense of humor and his music.
This book is dedicated to my grandparents, Jack and Ethel Stone,
whose spirits still fill my world.
Abbreviations
Hannah Arendt
AR A reply. Review of Politics 15 (1953): 76-85.
BPF Between past and future: Eight exercises in political thought. New York:
Penguin, [1954]1968.
DU The difficulty of understanding. In Essays in understanding, ed.
Jerome Kohn.
HC The human condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958.
LK Lectures on Kant's political philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1982.
MDT Men in dark times. New York: Harcourt BraceJovanovich, [1955]1968.
NT On the nature of totalitarianism. In Essays in understanding, ed. Jerome
Kohn. New York: Harcourt Brace & Javonich, 1994.
OT The origins of totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
[1951]1979.
TH Thinking. In The life of the mind. New Yo rk: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
[1971]1978.
TM Thinking and moral considerations. Social Research 38 (1971): 417-46.
UP Understanding and politics. Partisan Review 20 (1953): 377-392.
Paul Ricoeur
AS Action, story and history: On re-reading The Human Condition. Salma
gundi 60 (1983).
MT The model of the text: Meaningful action considered as a text. Social
Research 38 (1971).
TNi Time and narrative. Vol. 1. Trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [1983]1984.
Tnii Time and narrative. Vol. 2. Trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [1984]1985.
TNiii Time and narrative. Vol. 3. Trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [1985]1988.
Introduction
The Power of Stories
From Howard Zinn's das sie A People's History of the United States
to Central American popular-dass testimonies, from "her-story"
historiography to Arundhati Roy's story of families displaced by dams,
historical and autobiographical narratives of experience have raised
awareness of and gained sympathy for little-known social struggles.
Recently, however, stories of experience have met with sharp criticism
from unexpected sourees. Feminists and poststructuralists have argued
that we can no longer trust stories of experience to challenge ruling
worldviews, for such stories are themselves constituted through ideo
logicallenses. Stories that relate the experiences of marginalized groups
may reveal the existence of difference or oppression, the argument goes,
but such stories risk reinforcing the ideologically given categories of
identity, difference, and separate spheres of life that structure narrative
discourse as well as our own "experience."l
This book takes seriously recent critiques of narrative and experi
ence, but it also seeks a way to engage productively narratives of
marginalized people's experiences. I seek to redaim such narratives
because, while scholars have rightly become wary of appeals to such
stories as "truth," our new distrust of experience-oriented narratives
risks a dismissal of such texts that is just as epistemologically limiting
and politically dangerous as the earlier positivism. In fact, despite
academic critiques of experience, many social struggles, from welfare
rights campaigns to fair trade coalitions, from the students against
sweatshops movement to environmenta l justice advocacy, continue to
rely on stories of experience to bring public attention to their
concerns.2
Many Third World women, in particular, have found received
theoretical discourses inadequate and have turned to experience-oriented
writing to communicate their struggles against an array of patriarchal
and neocolonialist institutions.3 When scholars focus on criticizing
"experience," we alienate our work from these practical struggles. We
may address others' stories as sites for our deconstructive analysis, but
we forfeit learning from them and building theories responsive to them.
2 Shari Stone-Mediatore
Worse still, when we treat experience-based narratives as mere ideo
logical artifacts, we reinforce the disempowerment of people who have
been excluded from official knowledge production, for we deny epistemic
value from a central means by which such people can take control over
their own representation.4
When we dismiss stories of experience as ideological constructions,
we not only undermine the authority of many marginalized voices but
also overlook the importance of experience to critical social theory. As
feminist standpoint theorists such as Sandra Harding (1991,270-82),
Nancy Hartsock (1983,288-303), Chandra Talpade Mohanty (1991a,
33-38) and Dorothy Smith (1987, 49-55) have argued, people's daily
experiences can inform and empower critical theory because such
experiences are only partly determined by ideological processes. Every
day experiences also can react against, register the contradictions of,
and ultimately constitute the motivation for intervening in ideological
processes.
In affirming the epistemological value of stories of experience, I do
not deny the dangers of positivism found in some appeals to experience
by Michel Foucault ([1976] 1990), Judith Butler (1990, 324-25,
336-39), Judith Grant (1987), Gayatri Spivak (1988,274-75; 1990,
19-20), andJoan Scott (1988, 4-7; 1991). Nonetheless, I argue that not
all stories of experience lapse into positivism or allow for only a
positivist reading. When, as is often the case with stories of marginalized
experience, the stories reckon with contradictions or obscurities within
experience or with aspects of experience that confound the logic of
ruling discourses, such stories do not naively reinscribe received dis
courses; on the contrary, such texts can problematize the institutions
and ideologies that shape all of our lives.s
Neither empirieist nor poststructuralist theories of experience can
account for the subversive force of many marginal experience narra
tives. Empirieist and poststructuralist theories clearly differ: The former
regard experience as indubitable evidence of reality whereas the latter
emphasize the discursive construction of such "evidence." Despite their
obvious differences, however, both schools presume that stories of
experience are mere unreflective reports of spontaneous awareness. As
a result, both ob sc ure the capacity of writers to grapple with muted,
contradictory, or even traumatized experiences. Moreover, both over
look the capacity of readers to attend to phenomena that are only
intimated by metaphors or tensions within texts, phenomena that are
not directly articulated because they defy our categories for represent-
. .
mg expenence.
Introduction 3
Feminist standpointtheorists including Harding (1991, 270-95) and
Smith (1987, 49-58) are more attentive to the complexity of experience
and the critical force of thinking that starts out from experienced
contradictions. Nevertheless, these theorists say little about the reading
and writing practices by which we can transform obscure experience
into critical knowledge.6 Consequently, even feminist critics have been
unsatisfied with the justifications for the marginalized standpoint that
are offered by feminist standpoint theory.7
Given the limitations and confusions that burden even feminist and
progressive understandings of marginal experience narratives, this
book endeavors to present a more effective account of such narratives,
one that can help scholars, teachers, and activists to realize the full value
of such texts
Reclaiming Stories of Experience as Stories
My approach to rethinking the value of experience-oriented narratives
is rooted in my own life experiences, in particular, my experiences of
collecting, interpreting, and debating the relevance of experiential data.
My activities have led me to treat experience specifically as narrated
experience, for I have found that experience is meaningful to us largely
by virtue of the way it is articulated in a narrative, that is, a pattern of
identifiable actors and action-units that are qualified through metaphor
and other poetic devices and that are related together within a coherent
structure of beginnings and endings.8 When, for instance, as a me mb er
of the Nicaragua Network, I tried to communicate the dangers of
providing military aid to the Nicaraguan Contra, I found that data on
Contra-related violence, which I found abhorrent, was not a cause for
concern to people who presupposed a narrative framework in which the
Contra were protecting freedom in a long-standing struggle of "Com
munisrn" versus "the free world." At the same time, when my own
beliefs shifted-for instance, when I began to see multiple victims and
oppressors in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or more recently, in the
attack on the World Trade Center-my reorientation was due not only
to new information that I had acquired but to my encounter with a new
narrative pattern that enabled me to see the same set of affairs with
greater clarity and subtlety.9
Likewise, when I collected data on the health problems afflicting
video display terminal (VDT) workers, I saw that experience gains