Identity, Narrative and Politics

Identity, Narrative and Politics PDF

Author: Maureen Whitebrook

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-04-04

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 1136367330

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Identity, Narrative and Politics argues that political theory has barely begun to develop a notion of narrative identity; instead the book explores the sophisticated ideas which emerge from novels as alternative expressions of political understanding. This title uses a broad international selection of Twentieth Century English language works, by writers such as Nadine Gordimer and Thomas Pynchon. The book considers each novel as a source of political ideas in terms of content, structure, form and technique. The book assumes no prior knowledge of the literature discussed, and will be fascinating reading for students of literature, politics and cultural studies.

Narrative Politics

Narrative Politics PDF

Author: Frederick W. Mayer

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 0199324468

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Narrative Politics explores two puzzles. The first has long preoccupied social scientists: How do individuals come together to act collectively in their common interest? The second is one that has long been ignored by social scientists: Why is it that those who promote collective action so often turn to stories? Why is it that when activists call for action, candidates solicit votes, organizers seek new members, generals rally their troops, or coaches motivate their players, there is so much story-telling? Frederick W. Mayer argues that answering these questions requires recognizing the power of story to overcome the main obstacles to collective action: to surmount the temptation to free ride, to coordinate group behavior, and to arrive at a common understanding of the collective interest. In this book, Mayer shows that humans are, if nothing else, a story-telling, story-consuming animal. We use stories to make sense of our experience and to imbue it with meaning-our self-narratives define our sense of identity and script our actions. Because we are constituted by narrative, we can be moved by the stories told to us by others. That is why leaders who call a community to action seek to frame their invocations in a story in which tragedy and triumph hang in the balance, in which taking part in the collective action becomes a moral imperative rather than a matter of calculated self-interest. Drawing on insights from neuroscience and behavioral economics, political science and sociology, history and cultural studies, literature and narrative theory, Narrative Politics sheds light on a wide range of political phenomena from social movements to electoral politics to offer lessons for how the power of story fosters collective action.

Narrative Identity and Personal Responsibility

Narrative Identity and Personal Responsibility PDF

Author: Linda Ethell

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 0739125931

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Narrative Identity and Personal Responsibility is about why and how identifying ourselves by means of narrative makes it possible for us to be responsible, morally and otherwise. The book begins as an investigation into how it is that we can hold people responsible for who they are, despite the fact that we have almost no control over our lives in our formative years. It explains the relation between representation, personal identity, and self-knowledge, demonstrating how awareness of the vulnerability of our identity as persons is the origin of our capacity for the cathartic revision of a self-identifying narrative which is the condition of moral awareness. Innovative in its interdisciplinary juxtaposition of ethics, moral psychology, literary theory and literature, Narrative Identity and Personal Responsibility develops a sophisticated and comprehensive account of human nature. This book offers an intuitively satisfying and humane yet rigorous account of why and how we think of ourselves as simultaneously free and constrained by nature. Its fundamental thesis, the mediation of narrative representation between agent and the world, suggests new answers to old problems in moral psychology, such as the question of free will and responsibility. With a more literary style than many philosophy texts, it works through a series of interconnected problems of as much interest to a thoughtful layperson as to academic philosophers.

Identity Politics of the Captivity Narrative After 1848

Identity Politics of the Captivity Narrative After 1848 PDF

Author: Andrea Tinnemeyer

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2006-01-01

Total Pages: 182

ISBN-13: 0803244002

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Andrea Tinnemeyer's book examines the nineteenth-century captivity narrative as a dynamic, complex genre that provided an ample medium for cultural critique, a revision of race relations, and a means of elucidating the U.S.?Mexican War?s complex and often contradictory significance in the national imagination. The captivity narrative, as Tinnemeyer shows, addressed questions arising from the incorporation of residents in the newly annexed territory. This genre transformed its heroine from the quintessential white virgin into the Mexican maiden in order to quell anxieties over miscegenation, condone acts furthering Manifest Density, or otherwise romanticize the land-grabbing nature of the war and of the opportunists who traveled to the Southwest after 1848. Some of these narratives condone and even welcome interracial marriages between Mexican women and Anglo-American men. By understanding marriage for love as an expression of free will or as a declaration of independence, texts containing interracial marriages or romanticizing the U.S.?Mexican War could politicize the nuptials and present the Anglo-American husband as a hero and rescuer. This romanticizing of annexation and cross-border marriages tended to feminize Mexico, making the country appear captive and in need of American rescue and influencing the understanding of ?foreign? and ?domestic? by relocating geographic and racial boundaries. In addition to examining more conventional notions of captivity, Tinnemeyer?s book uses war song lyrics and legal cases to argue that ?captivity? is a multivalenced term encompassing desire, identity formation, and variable definitions of citizenship.

Geographies of Identity

Geographies of Identity PDF

Author: Jill Darling

Publisher: punctum books

Published: 2021-11-04

Total Pages: 221

ISBN-13: 1685710123

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Geographies of Identity: Narrative Forms, Feminist Futures explores identity and American culture through hybrid, prose work by women, and expands the strategies of cultural poetics practices into the study of innovative narrative writing. Informed by Judith Butler, Homi Bhabha, Harryette Mullen, Julia Kristeva, and others, this project further considers feminist identity politics, race, and ethnicity as cultural content in and through poetic and non/narrative forms. The texts reflected on here explore literal and figurative landscapes, linguistic and cultural geographies, sexual borders, and spatial topographies. Ultimately, they offer non-prescriptive models that go beyond expectations for narrative forms, and create textual webs that reflect the diverse realities of multi-ethnic, multi-oriented, multi-linguistic cultural experiences. Readings of Gertrude Stein's A Geographical History of America, Renee Gladman's Juice, Pamela Lu's Pamela: A Novel, Claudia Rankine's Don't Let Me Be Lonely, Juliana Spahr's The Transformation, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictée, Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera, and Layli Long Soldier's WHEREAS show how alternatively narrative modes of writing can expand access to representation, means of identification, and subjective agency, and point to horizons of possibility for new futures. These texts critique essentializing practices in which subjects are defined by specific identity categories, and offer complicated, contextualized, and historical understandings of identity formation through the textual weaving of form and content.

Becoming a Movement

Becoming a Movement PDF

Author: Priska Daphi

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2017-08-04

Total Pages: 165

ISBN-13: 1786603810

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Social movement scholars have become increasingly interested in the role of stories in contentious politics. Stories may facilitate the mobilization of activists and strengthen the resonance of their claims within public discourse and institutional politics. This book explores the role of narratives in building collective identity – a vital element in activists’ continued commitment. While often claimed important, the connection between narratives and movement identity remains understudied. Drawing on a rich pool of original data, the book’s analysis focusses on the Global Justice Movement (GJM), a movement known for its diversity of political perspectives. Based on a comparison of different national constellations of the GJM in Europe, the book demonstrates the centrality of activists’ narratives in forming and maintaining movement identity and in making the GJM more enduring.

Narrative, Identity, and the Map of Cultural Policy

Narrative, Identity, and the Map of Cultural Policy PDF

Author: Dr Constance DeVereaux

Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published: 2013-11-28

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 1409474178

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The story of arts and cultural policy in the twenty-first century is inherently of global concern no matter how local it seems. At the same time, questions of identity have in many ways become more challenging than before. Narrative, Identity, and the Map of Cultural Policy: Once Upon a Time in a Globalized World explores how and why stories and identities sometimes merge and often clash in an arena in which culture and policy may not be able to resolve every difficulty. DeVereaux and Griffin argue that the role of narrative is key to understanding these issues. They offer a wide-ranging history and justification for narrative frameworks as an approach to cultural policy and open up a wider field of discussion about the ways in which cultural politics and cultural identity are being deployed and interpreted in the present, with deep roots in the past. This timely book will be of great interest not just to students of narrative and students of arts and cultural policy, but also to administrators, policy theorists, and cultural management practitioners.

Narrative and Identity

Narrative and Identity PDF

Author: Jens Brockmeier

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2001-01-01

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 9027226415

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Annotation This text evolved out of a December 1995 conference at the International Research Center for Cultural Studies (IFK) in Vienna, attended by scholars from psychology, psychiatry, philosophy, social sciences, literary theory, classics, communication, and film theory, and exploring the importance of narrative as an expression of our experience, as a form of communication, and as a form for understanding the world and ourselves. Nine scholars from Canada, the US, and Europe contribute 12 essays on the relationship between narrative and human identity, how we construct what we call our lives and create ourselves in the process. Coverage includes theoretical perspectives on the problem of narrative and self construction, specific life stories in their cultural contexts, and empirical and theoretical issues of autobiographical memory and narrative identity. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

Damaged Identities, Narrative Repair

Damaged Identities, Narrative Repair PDF

Author: Hilde Lindemann

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 9780801487408

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Hilde Lindemann Nelson focuses on the stories of groups of people--including Gypsies, mothers, nurses, and transsexuals--whose identities have been defined by those with the power to speak for them and to constrain the scope of their actions. By placing their stories side by side with narratives about the groups in question, Nelson arrives at some important insights regarding the nature of identity. She regards personal identity as consisting not only of how people view themselves but also of how others view them. These perceptions combine to shape the person's field of action. If a dominant group constructs the identities of certain people through socially shared narratives that mark them as morally subnormal, those who bear the damaged identity cannot exercise their moral agency freely.Nelson identifies two kinds of damage inflicted on identities by abusive group relations: one kind deprives individuals of important social goods, and the other deprives them of self-respect. To intervene in the production of either kind of damage, Nelson develops the counterstory, a strategy of resistance that allows the identity to be narratively repaired and so restores the person to full membership in the social and moral community. By attending to the power dynamics that constrict agency, Damaged Identities, Narrative Repair augments the narrative approaches of ethicists such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Martha Nussbaum, Richard Rorty, and Charles Taylor.

Memory, Identity, Community

Memory, Identity, Community PDF

Author: Lewis P. Hinchman

Publisher: SUNY Press

Published: 1997-01-01

Total Pages: 430

ISBN-13: 9780791433232

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This multidisciplinary volume documents the resurrection of the importance of narrative to the study of individuals and groups and argues that narrative may become a lingua franca of future debates in the human sciences.