{"title":"Colonialism and Enslavement in a Bottle: Guiding People through an Exhibition in the German Historical Museum","authors":"P. Helber","doi":"10.1353/ncu.2022.0013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ncu.2022.0013","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In the exhibition entitled \"Europe and the Sea\" at the German Historical Museum in Berlin, visitors were confronted with a modern bottle of Johannsen-brand rum that served to illuminate the transatlantic \"slave trade\" and the enslavement of Africans. The bottle, with an old map of the Caribbean on its label, was presented as a hands-on object. My contribution focuses on discussions between visitors and tour guides on the past and present effects of colonialism. All these conversations were triggered by the bottle, which created a post-colonial narrative between the other historical objects in that part of the exhibition and the everyday life of the visitors themselves.","PeriodicalId":40483,"journal":{"name":"Narrative Culture","volume":"9 1","pages":"339 - 356"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43962460","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Narratives of Transnational Placemaking: Exploring Migrant Workers’ Hidden Histories through Memory-Guided City Walks: A Migrant Woman’s Narrative","authors":"Monika Palmberger","doi":"10.1353/ncu.2022.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ncu.2022.0004","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Austria’s so-called guest workers (temporary labor migrants), who immigrated from the former Yugoslavia and Turkey in the 1960s and 1970s, have shaped Vienna for more than half a century, but their histories and present social realities remain politically and socially marginalized. This article uncovers these histories and pays attention to the narrativization of space and its performative dimension—as they emerged in narrative interviews and memory-guided city walks—on the basis of one selected case. It analyzes the intertwining of narratives and places in two ways: how narratives constitute and preserve places, but also how places shape and reinforce narratives about the past, acting as mnemonic devices.","PeriodicalId":40483,"journal":{"name":"Narrative Culture","volume":"9 1","pages":"108 - 91"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42127413","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Ways of Understanding Fairy Tales among Teacher Candidates","authors":"Magdalena Kaliszewska-Henczel","doi":"10.1353/ncu.2022.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ncu.2022.0007","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The goal of this article is to discuss the meanings given to fairy tale texts by teacher candidates in preschool and primary education. Identifying meanings allows prediction of future strategies for designing tasks based on texts, the foundation of literary education, and to assign the activities of future teachers to a particular pedagogical discourse. Fairy tales—read in school as typically didactic works—are deprived of their potential effect on the emotions, the development of aesthetic sensitivity, and the imagination. This understanding implies creating tasks for the reader in the form of simple instructions not referring to the deepest value of the text: showing human inner reality. This vision also emerges from analyzing reconstructions of fairy tale stories prepared by 91 students in primary and preschool education programs at the University of Łodź.","PeriodicalId":40483,"journal":{"name":"Narrative Culture","volume":"9 1","pages":"155 - 175"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48157537","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“I Am a Refugee in This Land”: Performative Narration, Recollection, and Resilience in Refugee Narratives of West Bengal, India","authors":"Sumallya Mukhopadhyay","doi":"10.1353/ncu.2022.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ncu.2022.0009","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The article extends the reconstructive agenda of oral history with a view to establishing the idea that it is not merely to reconstruct history but to study the act of recollection as a performative presentation of the narrator’s life story. The performative interview establishes the oral narrative as a “momentous” occasion by following the techniques an individual uses to frame the narrative text. The theoretical arguments are developed by studying the refugee narratives of those displaced by 1947 Bengal Partition. The performative narration interrogates the immediate refugee identity and depicts the refugees as resilient people capable of self-sustaining in adverse situations.","PeriodicalId":40483,"journal":{"name":"Narrative Culture","volume":"9 1","pages":"197 - 216"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42103991","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Storied Answers to Questions about Interethnic Marriage in Multiethnic Qinghai Province, PR of China","authors":"Monika Kołodziej","doi":"10.1353/ncu.2022.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ncu.2022.0001","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The article discusses the use of stories as answers to direct questions. The author encountered this pattern while conducting fieldwork tracing identity contexts among young Chinese Muslims of the Hui ethnicity in the city of Xining, a cultural crossroads in Qinghai Province in northwest China, between 2016 and 2018. Regardless of a respondent’s ethnicity and gender, respondents shared the same pattern of sharing stories from the lives of unnamed friends and relatives. This pattern appeared predominantly when asking about interethnic relations and personal views on interethnic marriage and can thus be understood as a high-context cultural strategy for politely and indirectly expressing personal attitudes. The article analyzes this pattern in terms of Chinese culture and the national image of harmonious coexistence in a multiethnic society.","PeriodicalId":40483,"journal":{"name":"Narrative Culture","volume":"9 1","pages":"23 - 45"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47814167","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Negotiating a Project Request: Narrative and Intersubjective Understanding at Work","authors":"Barbara Götsch","doi":"10.1353/ncu.2022.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ncu.2022.0002","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article engages with an extended ethnographic vignette that centers on negotiations between a Moroccan educational association and a UN agency over a possible future project collaboration. After a phase of meandering in the conversation, a “polished” story told by the NGO team leader marks a turning point in negotiations and manages to convince agency representatives. The article discusses the use of such polished stories in relation to other, less polished and arguably more authentic narrative practices, that is, stories that gradually emerge when collaborators make sense of the past or coconstruct visions of the future. It adopts the concept of the community of practice with its focus on social learning and the constant negotiation of meaning among participants in combination with recent approaches in the interdisciplinary study of narrative practices that argue for the productive coexistence of different narrative activities in the same event. In the case at hand, different narrative practices in concert served the sharing of knowledge and ultimately persuasion, while increasing intersubjective understanding between participants in the meeting.","PeriodicalId":40483,"journal":{"name":"Narrative Culture","volume":"9 1","pages":"46 - 71"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47562946","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"City of Rebels: Considering Migrant History-Telling in an Ethnographic Inquiry of a Neighborhood’s Past","authors":"Duygu Doğru","doi":"10.1353/ncu.2022.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ncu.2022.0006","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article deals with the question of how perceptions of history adhere to space and focuses on one of many neighborhoods in Istanbul being haunted by the legacy of informal land tenure. The hills of the megacity have borne witness to industrialization, mass migration, and socialist anarchy, all of which have contributed to land squatting and the iconic gecekondu (squat) architecture. However, what had served as a signifier of the tradition of local organization among domestic migrants from the 1950s is now being destroyed by so-called urban renewal projects leading to either displacement or a vicious circle of poverty. As a result, the current housing problem in Istanbul illuminates the residents’ coping strategies that are paradoxically intertwined with memories of past events in the area. To grasp the temporal experience of the neighborhood in question, I argue for the importance of narrativity, and the practice of history-telling in particular, in undertaking an ethnography of history.","PeriodicalId":40483,"journal":{"name":"Narrative Culture","volume":"9 1","pages":"129 - 154"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48602102","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Afghan Refugees’ Iconic Stories","authors":"Benjamin Gatling","doi":"10.1353/ncu.2022.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ncu.2022.0008","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article considers the stories Afghan refugees tell about their displacement from Afghanistan and emplacement in the United States. Drawing on scholarship about reportability, tellability, and storyability, this article argues that narrators foreground the noteworthiness of their experiences through specific sign relationships, foremost among them iconicity. Specifically, this article discusses two narrative strategies—parallelism and co-narration—Afghan refugee narrators use that heighten the evaluative functions of their most storyable personal narratives and create an iconic relationship between story and interview event.","PeriodicalId":40483,"journal":{"name":"Narrative Culture","volume":"9 1","pages":"176 - 196"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45380970","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Verbal Art as a Route into Local Knowledge in Yemen: The Work of ‘Abd Allāh al-Baraddūnī on ‘Alī bin Zāyid","authors":"Noura Kamal","doi":"10.1353/ncu.2022.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ncu.2022.0003","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article focuses on the importance of verbal art, especially proverbs, and its contribution to a more profound understanding of Yemeni society, particularly key historical figures such as ‘Alī bin Zāyid. The Yemeni scholar and poet ‘Abd Allāh al-Baraddūnī (1929–1999), who compiled a large corpus of folk sayings and proverbs over his lifetime, played a significant role in this regard. In particular, al-Baraddūnī scrutinizes the folk sayings and proverbs of ‘Alī bin Zāyid as a source of narratives. As highlighted by al-Baraddūnī, to obtain a more nuanced understanding of a society, it is crucial to look beyond the formal production of history and official literature. Proverbs are an important source here. They often derive from longer stories or refer to real events and provide local, culturally appropriate interpretations in highly condensed form. In turn, proverbs are often extended into longer narratives. The study of popular fables, songs, folk poems, and proverbs can provide an insight into local, culturally transmitted knowledge that is usually obscured, neglected, and undocumented.","PeriodicalId":40483,"journal":{"name":"Narrative Culture","volume":"9 1","pages":"72 - 90"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44926581","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}