Narrative Of Redemption Research Articles

Bad girls to good women - women offenders’ narratives of redemption

abstractWhile women account for a proportionately low percentage of violent crime in South Africa, these acts often attract sensationalised media attention. The pathologisation and demonisation of ‘violent women’ obscure their pathways to violence and reinforce stereotypical notions of femininities. These societal discourses also silence the particular meanings which women attach to their life experiences both before and during incarceration. This article explores the life history narratives of women who were incarcerated for crimes including murder, attempted murder, culpable homicide and robbery with aggravating circumstances. The aim of the study was to investigate women's accounts of their crimes and the meanings which they attached to them. This article reports on a subsample of six women who were interviewed with regard to the crimes which had led to their incarceration. Two open-ended narrative interviews were conducted with each participant in a prison in the Western Cape Province of South Africa. A narrative analysis of the data examined both the form and content of the life narratives and illustrated how the participants made sense of their life experiences. In particular, these narratives highlighted the positive meanings which they attached to incarceration. These conversion narratives were typified by the transformation of protagonists from bad girls into good women. The narratives were characterised by the redemptive aspects of incarceration and strongly drew on prison discourses of rehabilitation and change. The accounts also drew on societal discourses of stereotypical femininity thereby relegating aggression and violence to a masculine domain. Thus good women were neither aggressive nor violent and narrators contrasted these protagonists with the bad girl personas which existed prior to incarceration. These transformations were not uncomplicated and were typified by tensions between protagonists who partly used aggression and violence as survival mechanisms and rehabilitated protagonists who were expected to behave in stereotypically feminine ways. The study illustrated how these women's narratives were shaped by prison and broader societal discourses.

Desistance and Identity Repair: Redemption Narratives as Resistance to Stigma: Table 1

Desistance and Identity Repair: Redemption Narratives as Resistance to Stigma: Table 1

From Vice to Virtue

While historians have documented the criminalization process of Blacks during the Jim Crow and Progressive Eras, few scholars include in their analyses the contemporaneous change in attitudes toward poor Whites. This study examines boundary processes and organizational activism in decriminalizing a particularly virulent and hypervisible series of violent events, the Appalachian feuds of the late 19th century. How are criminal acts committed by Whites rendered less criminal? Not only are Whites less likely to be brought before legal adjudication for criminal behavior, even when there is detailed evidence of their crimes, criminal acts can be made legitimate using redemption narratives that depict White violence as justifiable and even, as in the case here, indicative of a deeper moral worth. The decriminalization of Whites hinges on organized efforts by empowered actors to maintain and police racial boundaries. This article draws on independently collected archival materials including organizational records and financial reports, Board of Trustee records, interorganizational and private correspondence, and 727 newspaper articles.

Chris Ware’s Epiphanic Comics

This paper reads Chris Ware’s Building Stories in light of his many references to art and literature, especially to Cornell, Courbet, Duchamp, and James Joyce. The author argues that Building Stories requires intermedial reading, knowledge of both the “high” canon of modernist literature and art and the history and iconology of twentieth and twenty-first century comics. In Building Stories Ware incorporates the work and ideas of canonical art history through an allusive play that is hybrid, layered and subversive. The paper claims that Ware’s citation of Duchamp and Courbet reframes a dissociated and dissociating trope, the dismembered female nude, in a story critical of the objectification of women, the mask of femininity, and the traps of gender. Ware ultimately does so in the service of a sentimental and redemptive narrative frame the paper calls the epiphanic mode. As used by Ware, the epiphanic mode marries one of the most sacred and revered concepts of modernism, the epiphany, to the formal device of the comics capsule as used by Bil Keane, one of the most maligned and popular comics artists of the last fifty years. The turn towards a devalued device — the Bil Keane capsule, or epiphanic circle, and a devalued experience — the domestic, rejects the internal hierarchies not only of the art world but also of the comics world, which is so often associated with masculine and public models of heroism.

Still blaming the victim of intimate partner violence? Women’s narratives of victim desistance and redemption when seeking support

This article presents a theoretical examination of victims’ ( N = 28) experiences when trying to rebuild a victimization-free identity after having experienced multiple years of severe intimate partner violence (IPV). Narratives reveal experiences of victim-blaming attitudes when seeking help from informal and general formal support sources, which suggest that victims of IPV do not meet the criteria of the ‘ideal’, innocent victim worthy of ongoing formal and informal support. Drawing on criminological theories of redemption and desistance, in combination with victimological theories around social stigma and construction of the ‘ideal victim’, the study finds that victims often feel they have to redeem themselves as worthy of empathy in order to access ongoing support. These misplaced expectations of ‘desistance’ with the victim rather than the perpetrator highlight that the social stigma associated with IPV goes beyond the private nature of this type of violence and extends to victim behavior and decision making.

Celebrities and spiritual gurus: Comparing two biographical accounts of kidney transplantation and recovery.

BackgroundAs a kidney transplant recipient I have long been exposed to a shortage of renal narratives and to a dominant theme in those that exist: transplant as restitution or redemption. My lived experience has, however, shown me that post-transplant life is more complex. Even after transplantation, chronic kidney disease requires lifelong health care with varying degrees of impairment, resulting in ongoing liminality for those who experience it. Nonetheless, as a transplant recipient I find the restitution or redemptive narrative pervasive and difficult to escape. ObjectiveI examined two seemingly very dissimilar insider renal biographies, Janet Hermans's Perfect match: A kidney transplant reveals the ultimate second chance, and Steven Cojocaru's Glamour, interrupted: How I became the best-dressed patient in Hollywood, to explore how the narrators treat chronic kidney disease and transplantation. MethodsIn addition to a close textual reading of the biographies, I used my own experience of meaning-making to problematize concepts around restitution or redemptive narratives. ResultsI found that the two biographies are, despite appearances and despite the attempts of one author to escape the redemptive form, very much the same type of narrative. The accounts end with the transplant, as is common, but the recipients’ lives continue after this, as they learn to live with their transplants, and this is not addressed. ConclusionsEmphasising restitution or redemption might prevent an understanding of post-transplant liminality that has unique characteristics. The narrator evading this narrative form must come to terms with a changed identity and, sometimes, fight to evade the pervasive narratives others impose.

To look like men of war: visual transformation narratives of African American Union Soldiers

This article examines clothing’s role in the transformation of African American slaves into Union soldiers during the American Civil War (1861-1865), exploring how and why military uniforms bore narrative weight in visual depictions of these men. Text, images, material objects, prints and photographs are examined within the context of nineteenth-century American conceptions of bodily management, posture, and developing theories on physical anthropology and phrenology. The article highlights the role of these images in constructing both a coherent narrative of redemption from slavery and a more inclusive, universal category of “men” that was linked to military service.

A Christian Ontology of Genetic Disease and Disorder

This article will present an ontology of the human person that is predicated upon a Christian understanding of God the Creator. It argues that defining ontological personhood in relation to God is essential for determining how Christians should understand personhood and human nature and their relation to genetic disease and disorder within human life. To show how a theological account of ontology can influence genetic debates, the article first explores why it is necessary to define personhood as an ontological reality granted by God in creation. Next, the article discusses how we ought to understand human nature in relation to fallenness and sin. Finally, the article explores how our vision of resurrected bodies within the Kingdom of God can inform our treatment of those living with genetic diseases and disorders in our present communities. Within the classic Creation–Fall–Redemption narrative, the article focuses on the status of individuals whose bodies are often deemed subhuman by our contemporary definitions of personhood.

Groups’ search for meaning: Redemption on the path to intergroup reconciliation

Four studies investigated the utility of finding meaning in past wrongdoing to promote intergroup reconciliation. Studies 1a, 1b, and 2 demonstrated that prompting members of perpetrator groups to engage in redemption narratives increases collective guilt and willingness to make reparations—both important in obtaining victims’ forgiveness. Further, Study 2 suggests that redemption narratives (but not sense-making) increase willingness to reconcile and reduce perceived justification. Study 3 suggests that perpetrators’ redemption, but not simply sense-making, narratives led victims to perceive greater change in the perpetrator group and increased victims’ willingness to reconcile, but not forgive. Taken together, the present work highlights the potential for redemption narratives to serve as an intervention for past intergroup conflict, increasing the chance for intergroup reconciliation.

Making meaningful worlds: role-playing subcultures and the autism spectrum.

Every summer, a group of role-playing gamers gathers in an American town. Dressed up as moon goddesses, mad scientists, and other fantastical characters, they act out elaborate, improvised narratives of transformation, destruction, and redemption. For several summers, this group, who I call the Journeyfolk, ran a camp for teenagers on the autism spectrum, engaging campers in therapeutic reconfigurations of self and social role. Through this folk healing practice, the meaning of autism was itself transformed; what had been a source of isolation became a source of commonality and community. This paper takes the camp as a case study for examining the co-productive relationship between culture and neurodiversity. Cognitive tendencies often found in autism are often thought to preclude socio-cultural participation. However, such tendencies can also facilitate the co-creation of innovative cultural spaces, through processes of affinity and affiliation. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork at the camp, I identify three sites of congruity between the culture of the camp and the cognitive and phenomenological experiences associated with autism, at which this "work of culture" (Obeysekere in The Work of Culture: Symbolic Transformation in Psychoanalysis and Anthropology, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1990) took place: the structure of social interactions within roleplaying games, the narratives enacted within these games, and the interpersonal relationships within which the games were embedded.

Narrating the Generative Life

Generativity is an adult’s concern for and commitment to promoting the well-being of future generations. Analyzing lengthy life-narrative interviews of late-midlife adults, we examined the extent to which a particular kind of life story is empirically linked to self-report measures of generativity and other indices of psychosocial adaptation in midlife. The results showed that highly generative adults are significantly more likely than their less-generative counterparts to construe their lives as variations on a prototypical redemption narrative, wherein the story’s protagonist (a) enjoys an early advantage in life, (b) exhibits sensitivity to the suffering of other people, (c) develops a clear moral framework, (d) repeatedly transforms negative scenes into positive outcomes, and (e) pursues prosocial goals for the future. The psychological and cultural features of redemptive life stories are considered, as are the problems and potentialities of life-narrative research in psychological science.

Photographing “the Nucleus of the Native Church” at Poonindie Mission, South Australia

The Anglican Church in Australia actively commissioned photographic portraits of its indigenous congregation as part of a program of documenting and promoting its work. Poonindie mission, the Anglican Church's “Christian village,” established in 1850 on the Spencer Gulf in South Australia, represented an idealistic experiment. Its first few years were seemingly crowned with success when eleven young indigenous residents were baptized by Bishop Short and Archdeacon Hale in February 1853. For their supporters, the gentlemanly demeanor of the converts revealed their essential humanity and capacity, demonstrated by photographic portraits commissioned during this period that are structured by a distinctive vision of Aboriginal converts: unlike other Australian missions and reserves, at Poonindie “the nucleus of the native Church” was defined in distinctively classed terms that showed them as equals. A narrative of redemption was expressed through an exceptionally high-quality series of images. During the late nineteenth century, Poonindie's increasingly disputed existence was defended by missionaries who continued to assert its worth through visual evidence. These remarkable photographic portraits remain a testament to a generation of indigenous people struggling to survive the first decades of colonization and dispossession and are now valued by descendants as family portraits.

The Motherless Child in the Novels of Pauline Hopkins by Jill Bergman (review)

Reviewed by: The Motherless Child in the Novels of Pauline Hopkins by Jill Bergman Colleen C. O’Brien Jill Bergman. The Motherless Child in the Novels of Pauline Hopkins. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2012. xiii + 206pp. The lucid introduction to Jill Bergman’s Motherless Child in the Novels of Pauline Hopkins defines a fairly straightforward project: by undertaking “the identification and analysis of motherlessness as a significant trope in stories of the African diaspora’s experience in the United States,” Bergman explores a “literary pattern that has psychoanalytic and postcolonial, personal, and political relevance” (2). She treats “the African American community as a collective subject in Freud’s oedipal model” (17), identifying the National Mother with Africa, a source of plenitude whom African Americans are forced to reject in favor of the National Father, white America. In the racial economy of post-Reconstruction America, Bergman argues, the collective African American subject was compelled to become “motherless” in order to enter into the social order, or what Freud would call civilization. Bergman turns to postcolonial and feminist psychoanalytic theory to emphasize how African descent, the symbolic African mother, occupies an abject position, one that the imperial character of United States nationalism devalues. In a collective sense, the forced repression of the African mother results in a sense of longing or melancholia based on the permanent sense of loss resulting from the Middle Passage and the history of slavery (22). In terms of Hopkins’s four novels and in other examples from the African American literary tradition [End Page 192] (from Countee Cullen’s “Heritage” to Nella Larsen’s Quicksand to Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, all discussed in the coda), literal motherlessness signifies a traumatic detachment from the figurative Mother Africa. Yet this study is also in essence a redemptive narrative because Bergman maps the way Hopkins’s four novels rehearse a pattern in which “reclaiming the mother—or the Mother, as this figure takes on collective and national resonance—becomes a means for the African American community to construct a cultural identity by celebrating its heritage and forging a unified frame of reference for national belonging and recognition” (4). Referring to Hopkins as an ideal case study in what she sees as a central feature of the African American literary tradition, Bergman identifies the “mother, the Mother writ large, the collective ideal representing the potential unity and community of the African diaspora, the National Mother” (28). By claiming the National Mother, one claims “African heritage—’black blood’—attributed to that mother and denigrated by dominant American society” (28), but the payoff is more than cultural: “full citizenship would accompany the claiming of that maternal heritage, bringing an end to the civic alienation suffered under the influence of the National Father” (28). Precisely how claiming Mother Africa enacts civic transformation has never been entirely clear, nor is it clear how white male characters like the historical figure John Brown connect to that heritage. The dichotomies between black and white, male and female that this Oedipal drama invokes make it difficult to explain cross-racial collaboration or processes of identity formation that transcend what has been called the specter of nationalism. For example, Bergman discusses, but does not interrogate, the frequency with which Hopkins’s Anglo American male characters defy the law of the father and demonstrate what might be called more feminine characteristics, sometimes for reasons that have more to do with their transnational or cosmopolitan affiliations. In her chapter on Contending Forces, Bergman reiterates her thesis: “in the context of motherlessness . . . the prevailing ethos of the African American population in the Post-Reconstruction United States,” the possibility for subject formation (and by extension citizenship) can be actualized by “recovering the pre-Oedipal mother, as feminist psychoanalytic scholars have called for” (63). But she does not account for why Hopkins’s white male characters play such an integral part in the challenge to the white male law of the father. Remaining so faithful to an Oedipal model of reading runs the risk of romanticizing “Mother Africa” but becomes perhaps even more odd when a character like Winona’s White Eagle, a man of aristocratic British lineage, “functions as a...

The Redemptive Story: A Requisite for Sustaining Prosocial Behavioral Patterns Following Traumatic Experiences

Trauma exposure has been associated with a host of negative outcomes (e.g., diminished social functioning). Recently, however, trauma has been found to correspond with a small number of positive outcomes, including an increase in prosocial behavior. In this article, we consider how this heightened prosociality is maintained following the initial trauma. We argue that a redemptive narrative, wherein the tragedy experienced is framed as leading to the prosocial behavior in question, is necessary to sustain this prosocial shift. Constructing such a narrative infuses the resulting behavioral pattern with a sense of meaning and purpose. This process is illustrated through examination of a life narrative generated by a highly prosocial individual who, earlier in her life, had suffered the death of her daughter. Discussion concerns the social and personal antecedents of the redemptive story, the applicability of this story to various types of traumas, and the relation between the construction of this story and well being.

The lived experience of homeless youth: A narrative approach.

Homeless youth are an understudied and stigmatized group. In their daily lives, these youth confront negative social perceptions and harrowing circumstances related to survival, which may present challenges to the construction of a meaningful, coherent identity. Using the theoretical notion of narrative engagement (Hammack & Cohler, 2009), this study explores how youth experiencing homelessness make meaning of their lived experiences and engage with dominant discourses about homelessness that stigmatize and devalue them. A narrative analysis of 4 case studies, drawn from in-depth life story interviews with 11 unhoused youth in the United States, suggests that despite experience of struggle and loss, participants demonstrated the ability to (a) resist contamination through the construction of redemptive narratives, grounded in agency and resilience; and (b) resist dominant narratives about homelessness by attributing their circumstances to external causes and by critiquing institutions and figures perceived as holding power. In doing so, participants refused to adopt a “criminal” or “client” master narrative of homeless identity, instead affirming the value and worth of their knowledge, experiences, and identities. This study reveals the active agency of homeless youth to construct counternarratives in which they may restory their identities to find resilience in the margins.

REMEMBERING THE MODOC WAR: Redemptive Violence and the Making of American Innocence by Boyd Cothran (review)

Reviewed by: REMEMBERING THE MODOC WAR: Redemptive Violence and the Making of American Innocence by Boyd Cothran Robert E. Walls REMEMBERING THE MODOC WAR: Redemptive Violence and the Making of American Innocence. By Boyd Cothran. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2014. There has been much written lately about past Indian wars, massacres, mass executions, and vigilante justice—from Sand Creek to Camp Grant to the Mankato hangings to the lynching of Louie Sam in the Pacific Northwest. Indeed, it is about time we sought a more critical understanding of these injustices on our landscapes of violence, and how these past events have been distilled through collective memory and the rewritings of Native and settler history. To this body of recent work—conducted in the shadow of 9/11, our own national trauma—we now add Boyd Cothran’s examination of the Modoc War of 1872–73 in the volcanic-contoured terrain of the Klamath Basin. The author’s objective, in large part, is to dissect a violent episode in Indian-White relations and “interrogate the nature of innocence and its uses as well as its persistence and prevalence in American history” (7). Grounded in Judeo-Christian symbolism, and manifested early in the Puritan City on the Hill, innocence has been repeatedly invoked in nationalistic narratives and claims to destiny, exceptionalism, and the need for aggressive militancy. When Captain Jack and his Modoc followers resisted containment on a reservation and subsequently engaged U.S. troops, killing General Edward Canby during peace negotiations, he and three other Native men [End Page 166] were captured and executed, initiating a century-long process of historical knowledge production about the war in “marketplaces of remembering.” The author analyzes these marketplaces—newspapers, dramatic Indian show performances, books, reenactments, museums, local resource economies, petitions, tourism—as sites in which historical remembrances are made and remade, circulating in networks of exchange and commodification, “part of the commercialization of everyday life” (14). Non-Native dominance of these networks ensured that most Americans consumed remembrances of Modoc savagery and newcomer victimhood that justified violence in westward expansion, but obscured its underlying political and economic roots. The result has been a thickly mediated transformation of a single incident of “ethnic cleansing” into an enduring redemptive narrative of American innocence. Even recent remembrances—such as National Park Service commemorations—in which multiculturalism serves as vehicle for reconciliation, cannot escape perpetuating the theme of settler innocence, as the process of reparations obligates living Modoc to forgive those in the past and assume a shared blame for the historical violence, while continuing inequities are forgotten. Cothran demonstrates an impressive command of sources, helping him to illustrate his argument persuasively, and he is bold in his critique of historians’ own role in selectively remembering the war. Perhaps most valuable is the author’s use of personal interviews, archival research, and close readings of Native-authored written records to emphasize the agency of individual Modocs in shaping marketplace remembrances past and present. His descriptions of Toby Riddle and her stage appearances in public lectures soon after the war as a type of “Pocahontas of the Lava Beds” and Jeff Riddle’s often ignored historical narrative on the war’s origin, published in 1914, provide wonderful insights to indigenous people’s intellectual engagement with the making of historical knowledge to challenge settler colonialism. These culturally complex discussions help make this book an excellent contribution to Native American Studies, as well as to any deliberations on the market value of memory and the rhetorical regeneration of American innocence. Robert E. Walls University of Notre Dame Copyright © 2015 Mid-America American Studies Association

Reading Victorian Rags: Recycling, Redemption, and Dickens's Ragged Children

In Victorian Britain rags were not only associated with the inadequate clothing of the poor, they were also viewed as a valuable commodity, widely collected for recycling into paper. This essay examines rags as simultaneously despised and precious objects, tracing the connections between Victorian accounts of poverty, the industrial recycling of rags into paper, and the redemption narratives created by Charles Dickens about rescued children. A supporter of Ragged Schools and champion of rags recycling, Dickens drew on the idea of the transformation of dirty rags into clean paper in his representations of ragged children. To him, the recycling of rags indicated the civilizing forces of modernity, and reading Dickens's representations of ragged children in this context reveals how cloth recycling became a paradigm for society's duties towards destitute children. This essay explains Dickens's juxtaposition of ragged children with references to rag-dealing in his novels; by this means he suggested that street children, like their ragged clothing, were capable of being purified and transformed into social usefulness.

Empathy, Sympathy, Simulation? Resisting a Holocaust Pedagogy of Identification

Most colleges and universities in the United States today offer one or more undergraduate courses on the Holocaust in History, Sociology, Literature, or other Humanities disciplines. Enrollments are strong, and many faculty members find themselves teaching such courses at the request of their chair or dean. However, most faculty will not have been formally trained in the subject during their own undergraduate or graduate education, especially if they are not historians, because full degree programs in Holocaust Studies have only emerged over the last fifteen years and are still uncommon. Moreover, they may find that teaching the subject differs in many respects from their other kinds of instruction. Although a variety of teaching manuals, websites, and summer institutes offer guidance (Airton 2009; Goldenberg and Millen 2007), the unprecedented scale and the severity of the Holocaust, both in terms of the violence and the resulting trauma, and the way it puts into question the ''limits of representation'' (Friedlander 1992), challenges faculty in several ways. How does one teach a history or literature of the Holocaust when the extreme events push the limits of what can be represented and understood about it? How does one convey the horror of these crimes and the severity of the trauma endured by its victims without causing students to experience a kind of ''crisis'' that may resemble secondary trauma (Felman 1992)? What pedagogical methods are most effective? How does one make the Holocaust culturally and politically relevant today without making facile comparisons, and without enabling an over simplistic identification with the victims? Throughout this article, the author argues that a broader awareness is needed of how the teaching of the Holocaust in the United States is strongly indebted to particular kinds of cultural perspectives that need to be challenged. Language: en

On the ‘Emotionality’ of Environmental Restoration: Narratives of Guilt, Restitution, Redemption and Hope

This paper presents a moral–emotional critique of environmental restoration, through discussion of narratives of redemption. The importance of ‘redemption’ vis-à-vis other environmental discourses rests with its capacity to unpack how, why and in what circumstances the idea of ‘putting something back’ for nature exerts a hold on the popular imagination. This paper thus examines the ethical and emotional experiences bound up in restoration discourses, to identify the motives deployed to confront shame and an associated guilt, and achieve restitution. In turn, the paper also offers new insights into the value (and appreciation) of restored nature.

The life narrative at midlife.

In a remarkably prescient chapter, Bertram Cohler (1982) reimagined the problems and the potentialities of psychological development across the life course as a distinctively human challenge in life narration. This chapter situates Cohler's original vision within the intellectual and scientific matrix of the late 1970s, wherein psychologists expressed grave doubts about the extent to which human lives may demonstrate consistency and coherence. By focusing attention on human beings as autobiographical authors rather than as mere social actors or motivated agents, Cohler moved the conversation away from dispositional personality traits and developmental stages and toward the emerging concept of narrative identity. Over the past 30 years, research on narrative identity has shown how people use stories to integrate the reconstructed past and imagined future, providing their lives with some semblance of unity, purpose, and meaning. At midlife, many adults struggle to solve the problem of generativity, aiming to leave a positive legacy for the next generation. Inspired by Cohler's original chapter, contemporary research reveals that the most generative adults in American society tend to construe their lives as narratives of personal redemption. As such, life stories may serve as valuable psychological resources for midlife adults, even as they reflect and refract prevailing cultural themes.