Telling Stories in the Era of Global Communication: Black Writing?Oraliture

Abstract

This article is part of a research project developed during a meeting at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, on 17 July 1998, attended by the present authors from the Department of Linguistic Practices and Text Analysis, Bari University, Italy (where they teach Philosophy of Language, General Linguistics, and Semiotics), by Francesco Loriggio, Professor of Comparative Literature at Carleton University, Canada, and Joseph Pare, Professor of Literary Semiotics at the University of Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. One of the immediate aims of this project is publication of a collective volume, possibly in dual edition, including contributions by authors from different countries and representing different cultures, working from dif? ferent perspectives, according to different interests and competencies. The provisional title of the volume is Le reseau du recit. La critique de la communi? cation mondialisee / Telling Stories. Towards a Critique of Global Comunication. The expression telling refers to the practice of storytelling, of nar? rating stories, as well as to the value of storytelling as a practice, and to the signifying value and import of stories, stories that are telling, significant. Global or world communication is subject to the world market, to the processes of general commodification characteristic of communicationproduction society today. Consequently, one of the distinctive features of world communication is the tendency to homologation, to a leveling process of the differences. However, homologation gives rise to the for? mation of identities, individualisms, separatisms, and egoisms, of both the individual and community order, which are simply illusory. They accompany and are complementary to the mechanisms of competitiveness, con? flict, and mutual exclusion. Paradoxically, the search for identity excludes otherness. In fact, the kind of difference necessary for the assertion of identity, for self-assertion, is difference that is indifferent to other differ? ences. The condition of indifferent difference is achieved by sacrificing otherness to varying degrees. Reference here is to both internal otherness, to what identifies with difference internally, and external otherness, the difference of others, autrui. On the contrary, storytelling is a practice common to all cultures that far from denying differences exalts and relates them according to the prin? ciple of mutual hospitality, wherewith it favors encounter and mutual understanding among different peoples. But even more, this practice is the structural-genetical expression of differences related dialogically across dif? ferent languages and discourse genres on the basis of hospitality and inter? est for the other. Historically, storytelling has acted as a sort of connective