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Social Narratives/New Genres: Who Gets to Tell the Story? - Coggle Diagram
Social Narratives/New Genres: Who Gets to Tell the Story?
Constructing History: Who Gets to Tell the Story
THEME: These works show that history is not just what happened, it is a story told by whoever holds power. The writers here fight back by telling their own version, using their own lives as evidence.
Jamaica Kincaid, "On Seeing England for the First Time" (memoir essay)
THE MAP AS MYTH: England arrives as a map her teacher pins up, announcing "This is England" with "authority, seriousness, and adoration." She learns England's history before her own.
NOSE TO THE GLASS: "The world was theirs, not mine; everything told me so." She is taught to love a world that never included her.
NOT WHITE: When she finally sees the white cliffs of Dover, "they were cliffs, but they were not white." In her words, "The space between the idea of something and its reality is always wide and deep and dark."
Comment: Kincaid takes the story England told her and rewrites it in her own angry voice. That is why she starts this branch.
Raoul Peck, Exterminate All the Brutes (video essay)
COUNTERHISTORY: Peck traces 600 years of "civilization, colonization, extermination" and argues it all connects to white supremacy. Scholar Ana Cristina Mendes calls his film "a form of counterhistory."
BUNDLE OF SILENCES: Borrowing from Trouillot, he argues "any historical narrative is a particular bundle of silences." He cuts his own home movies into the archival footage to fill those silences.
A FOOTNOTE: In Europe's story, and in Hollywood, he was "assigned the role of a footnote." His answer: "Neutrality is not an option."
Comment: Kincaid does this with words and Peck does it with images. Both put their own lives on the record.
"The Power of Public Narratives" (essay PDF)
ARENA OF POWER: Public narratives are the stories societies use to decide what is right and who matters. "Worldviews and narratives are an arena of power."
DIVIDE AND RULE: Dominant narratives protect the people in charge: "The number one job of those invested in the status quo is to divide us."
A NEW WE: Movements can answer with their own stories and build a shared sense of "we."
Comment: This essay is basically the theory behind this whole branch.
Being Watched: The Colonial Gaze
THEME: These works are about looking: who gets to look, who gets looked at, and how being watched turns people into objects. Each one turns the gaze back on the viewer.
Guillermo Gomez-Pena and Coco Fusco, "The Couple in the Cage" (film)
ON DISPLAY: In 1992, the 500th anniversary of Columbus, the two artists posed in a cage as "undiscovered" natives from an invented island, like the people once shown in human zoos.
THE AUDIENCE IS THE SUBJECT: Many visitors believed it was real. The piece is really about the people watching.
Comment: The scariest part is that it worked. The colonial gaze never really left.
Caryl Churchill, Cloud Nine (drama selection)
ROLES ASSIGNED: Act 1 is a Victorian family in colonial Africa in 1880. Cross casting (a man plays the wife Betty, a white actor plays the Black servant Joshua) shows gender and race as roles society assigns.
A LOOSER WORLD: Act 2 jumps to London in 1979, though the characters have aged only 25 years, and they start exploring freer ways to live and love.
Comment: Like The Couple in the Cage, Churchill makes us watch people perform the roles empire gave them, and that is how she exposes them.
Pico Iyer, "The Photographer and the Philosopher" (genre defining)
TWO WAYS OF SEEING: Iyer compares two travel writers. Jan Morris is the "photographer" who captures places with "imperial confidence," and V.S. Naipaul is the "philosopher," head down, searching for answers.
THE TITLES SAY IT: Morris's collection is "The Writer's World" and Naipaul's is "The Writer and the World." One owns the world, the other stands apart from it.
GENRE: Iyer's essay helps define the postcolonial travel essay.
Comment: The travel writer is always the one looking. Iyer shows that where you come from changes what you see.