A special issue on narrative resistance, edited by Hart Cohen, Rachel Morley and myself, of the Global Media Journal/Australian Edition is now online. In this collection of papers, book reviews and an essay, the contributing authors critically assess how resistance to dominant narratives of nationalism, history and knowledge formation takes place in fiction and professional and everyday life.
The underlying idea of this special issue is that storytelling and narrative have always served as strategies of resistance, as they open up ethical spaces where dominant and restricting notions of class, gender, region and race can be questioned. Yet anethics of storytelling must also be about the refusal to engage in it. Narrative resistance may, at times, imply a resistance to conventional narrative forms. A story may sometimes best be told in a manner that is beyond the limits of traditional storytelling. After all, telling a story in the conventional sense means working towards an end point and this end point is always "oppressive", as it subordinates all events prior to it (Ricoeur: 1990). This may be inadequate when dealing with human experiences such as extreme forms of violence, institutionalised exclusion of otherness or traumas experienced by both the subjects and authors of stories. Therefore, the storyteller has to carefully choose their genre and narrational strategy and these choices are morally charged.
The Global Media Journal/Australian Edition is an open access journal and the special issue is available online here.
The underlying idea of this special issue is that storytelling and narrative have always served as strategies of resistance, as they open up ethical spaces where dominant and restricting notions of class, gender, region and race can be questioned. Yet anethics of storytelling must also be about the refusal to engage in it. Narrative resistance may, at times, imply a resistance to conventional narrative forms. A story may sometimes best be told in a manner that is beyond the limits of traditional storytelling. After all, telling a story in the conventional sense means working towards an end point and this end point is always "oppressive", as it subordinates all events prior to it (Ricoeur: 1990). This may be inadequate when dealing with human experiences such as extreme forms of violence, institutionalised exclusion of otherness or traumas experienced by both the subjects and authors of stories. Therefore, the storyteller has to carefully choose their genre and narrational strategy and these choices are morally charged.
The Global Media Journal/Australian Edition is an open access journal and the special issue is available online here.
