Narrative Inheritance Research Articles

Because You Can’t

This autoethnographic project explores my familial context regarding the concepts of covering and narrative inheritance. According to Yoshino, “to cover is to tone down a disfavored identity to fit into the mainstream.”1 On the other hand, narrative inheritance refers to stories given to children by and about family members. The stories we inherit within the family provide us with a framework to understand our identities through our forebears. In talking about what we inherit narratively, we achieve a sense of completion and fulfillment.2 All the narratives included in this article render pivotal moments in my family history of truth omission and distortion, which, in hindsight, began to predominate my family’s communication style in the wake of my mother’s death in October 2003. Utilizing creative autoethnographic narratives to investigate covering in the context of my narrative inheritance, I attempt to fill in the holes that I have come across examining my family history and unpacking my identity, and to piece together family silences and secrets. In doing so, I aim to fulfill my narrative inheritance and illuminate ways that secrets can breed tension in family relationships, disorient our identities, and disrupt our lives. I hope that providing this evocative account can foster better understanding of how members of a family present values, restrain identity, constitute communication styles, and negotiate family culture by engaging in patterns of covering.

Voices from the Shadows: Intergenerational Conflict Memory and Second-Generation Northern Irish Identity in England

Recent scholarship has highlighted the heterogeneity of second-generation Irish identities in Great Britain, yet the varieties of self-identification espoused by the English-raised children of Northern Irish parents remain almost wholly unexplored. This article redresses this neglect by examining the relationship between parentally transmitted memories of the Northern Ireland Troubles (c.1969–1998) and the forms of identity and self-understanding that such children develop during their lives in England. Drawing on original oral history testimony and using the concepts of narrative inheritance and postmemory as interpretive tools, it demonstrates the complex correlation that exists between parents’ diverse approaches to memory-sharing and their children’s negotiation of inherited conflict memory as they position themselves discursively within contemporary English society. Based on a close reading of five oral history interviews, the analysis reveals a spectrum of creative postmemory practices and identity enactments, whereby narrators agentively define themselves in relation to the meanings they attribute to inherited memories, or the dearth thereof, as they navigate their tangled transnational affinities and allegiances. The article also explores how these practices and enactments are subtly responsive to narrators’ changing relationships to their narrative inheritances as their experience and awareness of their own and their parents’ lives deepen over the life course.

The Life-Course Perspectives of Mexican American Men With Mobility Limitation.

The life-history narratives of 10 Mexican American men with mobility limitations, age 55-77years (mean = 63.8, SD = 5.8), were explored using a qualitatively driven, life-history mixed-methods study to understand perceptions of mobility limitations over the life course. Within that methodological and paradigmatic framework, conceptualizations of alterity and masculinity guided interpretation of data. Through an iterative, thematic analysis, we detail the way the men's lives were influenced by growing familial responsibility with age. Quantitative data were integrated into themes of narrative inheritance, family, and masculinity. It was posited that masculinity with mobility limitations shaped and was shaped by ethnic identity and responsibility. This has implications for understanding the experience of Mexican American men over the life course.

The Role of Counter-narratives in Resisting the Deficit Model of Families for BIPOC Families

Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) face discrimination institutionally and interpersonally in the United States. BIPOC parents and family members are placed in a position wherein they have to prepare children and other family members to face these issues while countering a deficit model of family that characterizes BIPOC families as inherently problematic and inferior to White families. This study uses Critical Race Theory to explore how BIPOC families use counternarratives to resist dominant narratives about ethnicity and race. Results indicate that BIPOC families engage in storying to create counternarratives. These counternarratives serve three functions: (1) creating narrative inheritance, (2) co-laboring moments of racial difficulty and discrimination, and (3) situating race and ethnicity historically and ancestrally.

Narrative Inheritance

Narrative Inheritance

Disconnect-Connect

This narrative is a work of disconnect and connect during the morning of September 20, 2018. Around 10:04 a.m. my sister, Abby, told me that my mother had died that morning and was found by our brother, Andy. My narrative chronicles that morning from 10:04 a.m. through 10:35 a.m., and then summarizes most of the rest of the day. I ground this autoethnography in relational ethics, detailing how I grapple with writing about Dolly, my mother, my siblings, and others. I also detail how Dolly’s death affects my narrative inheritance. Using emotional recall, I use the terms “disconnect” and “connect” to demonstrate the modality of telling the news and how I slowly disconnected from reality, through the use of cellphones, trance-like states, changing scenery, and television watching, so that I could connect to the news and to others. I conclude with offering a mother-daughter canon.

Family Bonds that Ensnare and Empower: Dementia as Identity Formation in Elvira Lindo's Una palabra tuya

Elvira Lindo's novel Una palabra tuya (2005) explores the ways in which shifting familial roles affect the identity of individual family members, highlighted by Encarnacion and Rosario's changing mother/daughter relationship, which is impacted by dementia. This debilitating illness converts the roles of parent and child to those of patient and caregiver, testing and refining both women's senses of identity and place within the family. As the sociological theory of narrative inheritance suggests, Rosario finds herself indelibly marked by her mother's past and present life. The demands placed upon Rosario by her mother's dementia alter power dynamics between the two, often infantilizing Encarnacion while empowering Rosario, whose increased agency is complicated by feelings of guilt and entrapment. Mother and daughter's experience of the life/death cycle compels Rosario to seek out a deeper understanding of her sexuality and desire to procreate. Una palabra tuya reveals how the intricacies of a mother/daughter relationship is affected by dementia, reiterating the family's ability to either ensnare or empower its members.

Weaving a larger web: Cuban American writing in the Latin@ narrative

This essay explores the underrepresentation of Cuban American literature in Latin@ literary studies, probing into possible explanations for its marginalization in the field. I call attention to scholarship that has tended to portray Cuban American writing as fundamentally different from other Latin@ literatures with respect to politics, ideology, and historical trajectory. I then challenge such critical approaches by foregrounding the expansion and diversity of the Cuban American corpus, which can no longer be viewed as primarily exile-oriented, politically conservative, or racially homogeneous. I highlight the importance of scholarly work across latinidades that includes Cuban American writing in conversations about transnational and diasporic identity, the rewriting of American literary history, and intersections of race, gender, and sexuality. I propose that the study of postmemory and narrative inheritance in Cuban American and other Latin@ literatures offers compelling evidence of the significant interconnections that link these diverse works.

Corporal Hauntings

This narrative focuses on the use of fiction in conjunction with autoethnography in order to possibly change narrative inheritance. I use speculative autoethnography to seek out alternate outcomes of past life events. In this writing, fictionalized conversations take place with the hauntings of my child self during fragments of past experiences that I consider contributors to a failed familial relationship. I use this method to offer an alternative to the assumed social constructs of needing to “repair” such relationships. Through this account, I suggest ways to redirect the narrative momentum that pushes narrative inheritance into the future.

An Autoethnographic Journey of Intercountry Adoption

In this autoethnographic essay, the author explores her struggles and desires to learn about her life prior to adoption. She portrays her journey to search for her beginning pieces of her adoption narrative by an assessment of “narrative inheritance” (Goodall, 2006), attempts to reframe her adoption narrative, and reflects on how her adoption narrative changed over a period of time. The author highlights major events of her search and provides meaning and understanding to her experience. The author concludes by providing her reflections of her search and attempts to redefine her adoption journey and what it means to be an adoptee.

A Mother’s Son

In this autoethnographic essay, the author explores the possibility of healing, understanding, and moving toward a more comprehensive and honest assessment of self through an examination of “narrative inheritance” and “hindsight.” Motivated by an unexpected correspondence, the author asks questions intended to assist in this examination. In particular, the author confronts deep family issues and secrets that have shaped the stories he tells about himself and his family, stories initially dictated by his mother but through recollection and subsequent investigation, become called into question. The author concludes by attempting to reframe the narrative about himself and his family.

Autoethnographic Layering

This article uses a tripartite layered text to explore narrative inheritance, the storied experience of self and family. The author produces an autoethnography that places together partial memories, the stories told by parents, and half-remembered dreams. She queries taken-for-granted meanings by positioning uncertain scripts of and for the self in ways that leave invitational lacunae within and between the textual layers. In honoring the interplay between what is kept secret and what is shared the author seeks to explore the ways in which narrative inheritance fashions how people create stories of self and others by accommodating their forebears’ incomplete tales and living with mystery.

From Narrative Inheritance to Narrative Momentum: Past, Present, and Future Stories in an International Adoptive Family

This autoethnographic work of an international adoptive family tells a series of stories situated in the past, present, and future of the family's experience as it relates to how international adoption has influenced their family identity. Through the concepts of narrative inheritance, joint storytelling as a family, interactional sense-making, and family culture as local model, the series of stories reveal an underlying “narrative momentum,” which orients toward a future storytelling experience. Through this imagined future, the authors speculate on how the past and present are already writing a future that is still unfolding, yet exert tremendous influence on the way the family makes sense of their unique identity and culture. The work also situates international adoptive families as a category of the broader international family form and offers autoethnography as one way to study family storytelling.

Inheriting the Narratives of Dementia: A Collaborative Tale of a Daughter and Mother

This collaborative tale of a daughter and mother offers multiple stories of the two matriarchs in our family, our relationships with them, and the lessons we take from our narrative lives about how we are to be as family members, and how we are to be as family aging with dementia. Our narrative inheritance of dementia leaves us to uncover and interpret family narratives as we author our own future with dementia as caregivers to one another. The stories we tell provide us insight into the manner in which themes of loss, denial, anxiety, appearance, and care complexly weave through our experiences with dementia in the family offering both theoretical and practical implications for the study of family narratives of illness.

Absent Memory, Family Secrets, Narrative Inheritance

Narratives are essential to the construction of personal identity, relationships, and fully actualized lives. Narrative inheritance consists of the stories and family lore that parents and other relatives pass on to children about the family. The article describes two belatedly acquired narratives of inheritance: the author’s own and that of Harold Goodall. The author applies the notion of “absent memory” to the family secrets that underlie these narratives and reflect on questions raised by such secrets—and by incomplete narrative inheritances—for the children burdened with them.

From My Narrative Inheritance to Their Own Narratives

These comments provide a brief introduction to and framework for this special issue honoring and commenting on the author's memoir: A Need to Know: The Clandestine History of a CIA Family. By locating his narrative within scholarship dedicated to family secrecy and to cultural histories of the cold war and war on terror, the author connects the long term consequences of growing up in a family marked by secrecy and fear to the long term consequences of a people living under conditions of an enduring war marked by a culture of secrecy and fear.

Narrative Inheritance: A Nuclear Family With Toxic Secrets

A narrative inheritance refers to stories given to children by and about family members. Using the case of his own “nuclear family,” the author explores the power of these stories in our lives, particularly when they are later shown to have been constructed out of serious omissions, distortions, secrets, and lies. The implications of this personal ethnographic account speak to issues of family communication, narrative inquiry, and the relationship of work and home life in families whose everyday lives are defined by codes of secrecy.