Strong Narrative Research Articles

The Monks of Tiron: A Monastic Community and Religious Reform in the Twelfth Century, by Kathleen Thompson

The group of monastic houses founded from Tiron in the county of Perche, west of Chartres, has, until now, been given only a footnote in medieval history. It is the achievement of Kathleen Thompson to provide this monastic network with a treatment that is careful, thoughtful and illuminating. She speaks of ‘an affiliation of houses’ that was found not only in northern France and England, but also in Scotland. The successors of Bernard of Tiron maintained their monastic identity and did not become absorbed into the new monastic orders, as the congregation of Savigny did with the Cistercians. Thanks to the Vita beati Bernardi Tironensis, we have one of the most detailed examples of medieval monastic hagiography and can get a good idea of the early years of the movement. Thompson succeeds in placing this Vita in its historical context, especially in considering the fact that its abbreviated version, the so-called Brevis description, casts fresh light on Bernard of Tiron and his world. A careful appendix goes through the contents of the Vita, while a second appendix lists the possessions of Tiron. The first chapter, ‘Developing the Tiron narrative’, provides an analysis of the Vita, which is ‘indeed a good story’ with ‘a very strong narrative drive’ (p. 11). The author looks at other sources from later in the twelfth century, including William of Newburgh’s narrative from the 1190s, which sees Bernard and his companions as preachers, thus in harmony with the perceived needs of a more pastoral church. A number of pages are devoted to a comparison of the Vita Bernardi and the Brevis descriptio. Thompson concludes that the Vita cannot be ‘what it purports to be—a near eyewitness account of events’ (p. 33). The source can be seen rather as contributing to the history of Tiron by providing an indication of how the monks understood and interpreted their history.

The Logics of Transit: The Anticipation of Onward Mobility and its Consequences for Social and Economic Relations in Istanbul

This article departs from Istanbul as a transit location experiencing a constant inflow and outflow of (African) migrants, and the strong narrative among African migrants that Istanbul has nothing to offer and should be transited as fast as possible. As a consequence of this, the article identifies migrants' constant anticipation of each other's potential leaving - the logic of transit - as a useful concept to understand social and economic migrant relations in a situation of transit. Thus it offers an analysis of how this logic permeates the formation and maintenance of social networks and, consequently, impacts on trajectories of mobility. Developed through in-depth analysis of the migrants' lived experiences, it offers a new angle on transit movements and the condition of transit in general.

The Senecan Aesthetic: A Performance History by Helen Slaney

Reviewed by: The Senecan Aesthetic: A Performance History by Helen Slaney Gordon Braden Helen Slaney. The Senecan Aesthetic: A Performance History. Classical Presences. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pp. xi, 320. $120.00. ISBN 978-0-19-873676-9. A “performance history” of plays for which the first chapter of that history is unknowable seems like a perverse proposition, but Slaney brings it off, at times brilliantly. She clearly favors the suggestion that Seneca’s scripts were originally performed as tragoedia saltata, declamatory recitation or singing accompanied by pantomime. She expends no energy arguing the point historically, however (she doesn’t mention it until fairly late), but concentrates on the disposition of voice and body such performance would imply, one which “uncouples the figures who are (verbally) represented from the body of the actor performing them” (21). From that uncoupling derives an inclusive dramatic aesthetic that Slaney analyses into nine interrelated manifestations, which the ancient scripts only partly explore (metatheatricality, for instance, is only passingly evident in them); in an adroit distinction, the originals are “Senecan” in that they were written by Seneca, but the aesthetic “senecan” in a more open sense, extending beyond revivals and imitations and interacting over time with changing conventions of theatrical practice. The result is a strong narrative line whereby European theater explores, backs away from, and then—excitingly but unevenly—rediscovers the potential of senecan dramaturgy. Enlightened discussions of Kleist’s Penthesilea (actually recited with pantomime in one nineteenth-century performance) and Shelley’s The Cenci are good enough to make much of the point. But Slaney’s conceptualization of her topic also makes senecan dramaturgy relevant to the history of European theater even when it is not being practiced: a path European theater is deliberately not taking, a sinister double (occasionally vehemently denounced, as by Schlegel) to an evolving [End Page 286] notion of the pièce bien faite, but always there, ready to return in the theatrical experimentation of the twentieth century. Four chapters cover well-traveled territory (Tamburlaine, The Spanish Tragedy), though there also are striking novelties. The importance of Neo-Latin drama widely performed in the universities and some vernacular descendants of it (Robert Garnier) is widely recognized but has attracted little interest; for Slaney this strain is central and receives innovatively sympathetic attention. The originality of her general argument comes fully into the light when the fading of Seneca’s reputation is seen as part of a larger “repression” of senecan possibilities; a virtuoso chapter presents Racine’s Phèdre as shaped on several levels precisely by that repression. Chapters on later, more thorough “repression” focus on works that, though intended for the stage, had increasing difficulty making it there. The Cenci is eventually taken up by none other than Antonin Artaud for performance; he repeatedly cites Seneca as an important precedent for his Theatre of Cruelty. Slaney follows through on this advocacy more thoroughly than anyone else, with a careful look at what can be reconstructed about Artaud’s Cenci and at the line of descent through Artaud’s disciples. But she does not make it more of a triumphant return than it actually is. Of Artaud’s Cenci: “If there was any point at which Seneca was to have been revived as a major player in the development of twentieth-century tragedy, it would have been this” (241). But the production (Artaud’s last) was a failure, partly for contingent reasons, but also because of Artaud’s conception of the theater: “Artaud . . . mistrusted language altogether,” and in so doing “lost touch with the senecan aesthetic and its rhetorical deployment of the spoken word” (242). Later efforts make more use of the text, but in being more “Senecan” are actually less “senecan”; Caryl Churchill’s Thyestes “is deliberately flattened and compressed into a commonplace, informal register” (277). Slaney’s intelligent asperity continues in a tart conclusion, where she rejects the kind of gesture (“many of Seneca’s central themes seem particularly urgent and relevant in the current political and social climate”) with which discussions like this often end. The Senecan “hell on earth” is not to be so glibly invoked: “Some day, a relevant climate may indeed come...

Goodnight Moon; or, Why We Don’t Know Much about History

Goodnight Moon; or, Why We Don’t Know Much about History Anne Hyde (bio) James West Davidson. A Little History of the United States. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015. xiv + 325 pp. Illustrations, maps, and index. $25.00. Lawrence R. Samuel. Remembering America: How We Have Told Our Past. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015. 195 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $29.95. Susan Sleeper-Smith, Juliana Barr, Jean M. O’Brien, Nancy Shoemaker, and Scott Manning Stevens, eds. Why You Can’t Teach United States History without American Indians. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. xii + 335 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $29.95. Why is there so much drama around U.S. history textbooks? Honestly, with the exception of people reading a review like this, everyone hates them—students, teachers, and taxpayers. Their weight and impenetrable text guarantee that they will remain unread. Even so, we spend enormous cultural energy defending or attacking them. Teachers, parents, educational and cultural critics on all sides of the political spectrum desperately want students of all ages to know something about the national past and to care about it. What this something might be is, of course, really the source of the drama. What, how, and from whom students should learn history are deeply political questions, tied to the task of nation building. In order to avoid drama and politics, textbooks at all levels have moved in two different directions. Some, in order to be inclusive, have added all the groups, stories, and details left out of the “we the people” narrative, but that has made the texts encyclopedic, expensive, and even harder to read. Others take an opposite approach, creating “brief editions” so spare and so short that all the human actors are gone. Things just happen, but quickly and without suspense or detail. And the result has been that students report they hate history, while tests demonstrate, over and over again, that they don’t know much. Textbooks play a role in history education, but so do teachers, students, and communities, making the problem far more complicated. [End Page 1] Historians Roy Rosensweig and David Thelen covered much of this terrain nearly two decades ago. In The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life they conducted a large survey of U.S residents and concluded that citizens do care deeply about history. However, Americans view their own personal, family, and local histories as far more accurate and important than the national story, in whatever form it is taught. More worrisome, when the “official” U.S. story of progress and uplift collided with family histories and personal experiences of struggle and isolation, such disjunctures made people distrustful and even bitter toward history classrooms, teachers, and textbooks.1 This raises a bigger, maybe more important set of questions. What is history’s job—to tell a hopeful story of nationhood that makes some version of “us” feel good about the past or to tell a darker, more critical version to trouble another version of “us”? Can a narrative, tasked with bringing a modern nation together, even exist in a postmodern, more globally focused moment? The three books reviewed here set out the challenges and consider some answers. James West Davidson, in his A Little History of the United States, promises to tell a more inclusive history, but also to keep it short and to maintain a strong narrative line about the “us” that makes U.S. history. The book has a warm, inviting tone, although Davidson admits a few historical episodes are “sad” from the beginning—such as violence, epidemic disease, and the dispossession of indigenous people. There is inequality, there are poor people; but all citizens “dreamed of making the United States a freer and more perfect union” (p. 130). All is well because the ideology and heart of the nation are solid; toleration, religious freedom, and a desire for equality are girded by a government designed to uphold such ideals (p. 244). Written without footnotes or sources of any kind, which is supposed to make it more inviting to younger readers, the book operates like a long version of Goodnight Moon...

European anti-austerity and pro-democracy protests in the wake of the global financial crisis

European anti-austerity and pro-democracy movements form part of a global wave of protests following the global financial crisis. Despite continuity of actors and a double critique of global capitalism and democratic deficits from the previous Global Justice Movement, the centrality of the nation as target and focus of mobilization is a significant difference in this wave. The economic impact of the crisis and austerity policies is insufficient to explain variation in mobilization across countries hardest hit. In order to transform economic/material grievances into collective resistance, grievances need to be channelled against specific targets, and interpretive frameworks of meaning tied to a collective identity need to be mobilized. In Europe, anti-austerity protests were initiated by two sets of actors, Institutional Left and autonomous actors. Autonomous actors linked anti-austerity claims to interpretive system of meanings framed around the crisis of legitimacy of representative democracy; targeted primarily national political and economic oligarchies; and mobilized newcomers through an inclusive collective identity constructed around the ‘ordinary citizen’ as political subject. Democratic regeneration emerges as a significant demand, but is uneven in its resonance. It finds its clearest and most emblematic expression in the ‘movements of the squares’. To the extent that the ‘twin’ crises (financial/democratic) are framed synergistically, they can be seen as counter-hegemonic, as they seek to rupture the consensus of the ‘post-political’. The presence or absence of a strong pro-democracy narrative that connects actors across sectorial and organizational differences could help explain variation between cases. Transnational diffusion processes have been crucial but have not (yet) led to a transnational movement. Given the significant role of the Troika in the bail-outs, debt renegotiations and austerity policies of those countries hardest hit, the low visibility of ‘Europe’ in the mobilizations is surprising.

Pratiche riflessive e apprendimento nella ricerca organizzativa

The paper suggests some methodological considerations which, on the basis of a recent research on a medium enterprise in Italy, point out the reflexive potential of the ethnographic approach to organizational analysis. The experience of reflexivity is not a spontaneous phenomenon. It represents the intentional effect of the debate among the actors about the report produced by the researcher. Thus it’s possible to stimulate the reflexivity of actors also through more or less structured ways of debating a research in which they’re implied. From this point of view driven reflexivity is, de facto, a practice of (self) evaluation in so far as the expositive modalities of the results of research - which have to get strong narrative and descriptive features - are able to involve actors and foster their interest and commitment to reflect and learn starting from the discussion of the interpretations (proposed by the researcher) of their practices

"Mommy Blogs" and the Vaccination Exemption Narrative: Results From A Machine-Learning Approach for Story Aggregation on Parenting Social Media Sites.

BackgroundSocial media offer an unprecedented opportunity to explore how people talk about health care at a very large scale. Numerous studies have shown the importance of websites with user forums for people seeking information related to health. Parents turn to some of these sites, colloquially referred to as “mommy blogs,” to share concerns about children’s health care, including vaccination. Although substantial work has considered the role of social media, particularly Twitter, in discussions of vaccination and other health care–related issues, there has been little work on describing the underlying structure of these discussions and the role of persuasive storytelling, particularly on sites with no limits on post length. Understanding the role of persuasive storytelling at Internet scale provides useful insight into how people discuss vaccinations, including exemption-seeking behavior, which has been tied to a recent diminution of herd immunity in some communities.ObjectiveTo develop an automated and scalable machine-learning method for story aggregation on social media sites dedicated to discussions of parenting. We wanted to discover the aggregate narrative frameworks to which individuals, through their exchange of experiences and commentary, contribute over time in a particular topic domain. We also wanted to characterize temporal trends in these narrative frameworks on the sites over the study period.MethodsTo ensure that our data capture long-term discussions and not short-term reactions to recent events, we developed a dataset of 1.99 million posts contributed by 40,056 users and viewed 20.12 million times indexed from 2 parenting sites over a period of 105 months. Using probabilistic methods, we determined the topics of discussion on these parenting sites. We developed a generative statistical-mechanical narrative model to automatically extract the underlying stories and story fragments from millions of posts. We aggregated the stories into an overarching narrative framework graph. In our model, stories were represented as network graphs with actants as nodes and their various relationships as edges. We estimated the latent stories circulating on these sites by modeling the posts as a sampling of the hidden narrative framework graph. Temporal trends were examined based on monthly user-poststatistics.ResultsWe discovered that discussions of exemption from vaccination requirements are highly represented. We found a strong narrative framework related to exemption seeking and a culture of distrust of government and medical institutions. Various posts reinforced part of the narrative framework graph in which parents, medical professionals, and religious institutions emerged as key nodes, and exemption seeking emerged as an important edge. In the aggregate story, parents used religion or belief to acquire exemptions to protect their children from vaccines that are required by schools or government institutions, but (allegedly) cause adverse reactions such as autism, pain, compromised immunity, and even death. Although parents joined and left the discussion forums over time, discussions and stories about exemptions were persistent and robust to these membership changes.ConclusionsAnalyzing parent forums about health care using an automated analytic approach, such as the one presented here, allows the detection of widespread narrative frameworks that structure and inform discussions. In most vaccination stories from the sites we analyzed, it is taken for granted that vaccines and not vaccine preventable diseases (VPDs) pose a threat to children. Because vaccines are seen as a threat, parents focus on sharing successful strategies for avoiding them, with exemption being the foremost among these strategies. When new parents join such sites, they may be exposed to this endemic narrative framework in the threads they read and to which they contribute, which may influence their health care decision making.

Murder by the book: using crime fiction as a bibliotherapeutic resource

Crime is a popular genre of fiction, widely read but sometimes seen as ‘throwaway’. Disregarding this type of fiction because it is seen as low quality does not take into...

Storyboards of remembrance: Representations of the past in visitors’ photography at Auschwitz

A majority of today’s visitors to the Auschwitz memorial site take photos to document their stay. By calling attention to visitors’ photography on site, this article investigates the role of visual perception and visual techniques of memory for visits to memorial sites and empirically discusses the significance of historical imagination in linking the past with the present. Visitors’ photography at Auschwitz can be considered a mnemonic practice because seemingly lookalike, amateur pictures express modes of experience which are negotiated within an ethical and social framework. The strongest emotional impulse expressed in amateur photography on site is the feeling of the sublime, which supports the need to promote moral ideas like freedom or justice in the face of the past. Through participant-orientated research, this article contends that visual perception regulates sensual impressions during a visit and identifies six dominant photographic genres through which visitors focus their historical understanding of the site. Single images function within this as “storyboards” because of their strong narrative as well as mnemonic quality.

The problem of change in constructivist theory: Ontological security seeking and agent motivation

AbstractConstructivism has a problem in accounting for agent-led change and for what motivates agents to make up their minds about how to put their agency to use. I show that constructivism’s problem of change is related to tensions between constructivism’s own key assumptions about the mutually constitutive relationship between structure and agency, understanding of change and to an essentialist conception of identity. I argue that agency is constituted through processes of ‘identification’ involving identity and narrative constructions and performance through practice and action. I make the perhaps controversial move to regard ontological security as a precondition for agent-led change and to identify ontological security maximisation as functionally equivalent to rationalist theories’ agent assumption of utility maximisation. I identify two strategies for maximising ontological security: a ‘strategy of being’ to secure a stable and esteem-enhancing identity and a strong narrative; and a ‘strategy of doing’ to ensure cognitive consistency through routinised practice whilst also undertaking action contributing to a sense of integrity and pride. The article concludes that although humans are endowed with agency, their actual ability to utilise their agency is severely constrained by their need for maintaining ontological security, which may explain why change appears so difficult to achieve.

The past and future of evolutionary economics: some reflections based on new bibliometric evidence

The modern wave of ‘evolutionary economics’ was launched in 1982 with the classic study by Nelson and Winter. This paper reports a broad bibliometric analysis of ‘evolutionary’ research in the disciplines of management, business, economics, and sociology over 25 years from 1986 to 2010. It confirms that Nelson and Winter's book (An evolutionary theory of economic change, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1982) is an enduring nodal reference point for this broad field. The bibliometric evidence suggests that ‘evolutionary economics’ has benefitted from the rise of business schools and other interdisciplinary institutions, which have provided a home for evolutionary terminology, but it has failed to nurture a strong unifying core narrative or theory, which, in turn, could provide superior answers to important questions. This bibliometric evidence also shows that no strong cluster of general theoretical research immediately around Nelson and Winter's classic book has subsequently emerged. It identifies developmental problems in a partly successful but fragmented field. Future research in ‘evolutionary economics’ needs a more integrated research community with shared conceptual narratives and common research questions, to promote conversation and synergy between diverse clusters of research.

Exploring the post-genomic world: differing explanatory and manipulatory functions of post-genomic sciences

Richard Lewontin proposed that the ability of a scientific field to create a narrative for public understanding garners it social relevance. This article applies Lewontin's conceptual framework of the functions of science (manipulatory and explanatory) to compare and explain the current differences in perceived societal relevance of genetics/genomics and proteomics. We provide three examples to illustrate the social relevance and strong cultural narrative of genetics/genomics for which no counterpart exists for proteomics. We argue that the major difference between genetics/genomics and proteomics is that genomics has a strong explanatory function, due to the strong cultural narrative of heredity. Based on qualitative interviews and observations of proteomics conferences, we suggest that the nature of proteins, lack of public understanding, and theoretical complexity exacerbates this difference for proteomics. Lewontin's framework suggests that social scientists may find that omics sciences affect social relations in different ways than past analyses of genetics.

Children of Exile by Margaret Peterson Haddix

Reviewed by: Children of Exile by Margaret Peterson Haddix Alaine Martaus Haddix, Margaret Peterson Children of Exile. Simon, 2016 [304p] Trade ed. ISBN 978-1-4424-5003-5 $17.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-1-4424-5005-9 $10.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 5-7 Twelve-year old Rosi has grown up in peaceful Fredtown, where she, her younger brother Bobo, and dozens of other refugee children have been raised by loving foster Fred-parents who taught them the values of trust, honesty, and nonviolence. Now she and all the other children have returned to their real parents in a town [End Page 575] scarred by war and divided by lingering animosity. Rosi’s naïveté and righteousness soon place her and others in danger she doesn’t understand, and she’s also faced with harsh truths about the Freds themselves. This fast-paced, harrowing tale of innocence lost is a solid dystopia for beginners. The war between brown-eyed and green-eyed people sets a simple, straightforward stage for conflict, while naïve Rosi stands in for the naïve reader to whom everything is explained by adults. Savvy readers will likely catch on quickly to the fact that the Freds are aliens trying to save humanity from itself, but readers new to the genre will appreciate the story’s clarity. What the novels lacks in subtlety, it makes up for with a strong narrative that packs an emotional punch. Dark and heart-wrenching, this first volume in a planned series should excite readers who want thought-provoking stories and those who have outgrown the need for easy answers. Copyright © 2016 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Der er en særlig plads i Helvede for dovne børn

This article takes a closer look at the educational computer game Life Calculator (2010) and its attempts to inform young people about health risks and it argues that the game becomes a biopolitical and disciplinary tool. Drawing on the work of Foucault, the article claims that specific bodies are made (im)possible through the game’s strong narrative about Hell, death and health. The article will show how this narrative helps create ’healthy’ and ’liveable’ subject positions (for some) while understandings (of what health is or could be) that differ from the game’s view are stigmatized in the process. Inspired also by Sara Ahmed and her claim that emotions are cultural practices that hold affective power and organize our modes of life, this article is interested in the ways the ‘healthy’ body is understood as tied to life and therefore gets to count as life. The article concludes that health logics are organized and negotiated through a fearsome narrative about the ‘fat’ and ‘unhealthy’ body.

Enseñar o aprender periodismo. El modelo pedagógico de la Fundación García Márquez para el Nuevo Periodismo Iberoamericano (FNPI)

Journalism is traversing a bad period: precarity and lack of credibility appear nowadays as integral to the profession. The reasons for this situation are directly related to the economic crisis and managerial doubts regarding a business model faced with new technologies. But the causes can also be traced back to the abandonment or failure to comply with sacred norms such as rigor, ethics and quality. Can these defining and moral qualities be learned? Is it possible to teach them? Media and business owners do not trust formal education and accuse universities of creating unprepared journalists. The academic environment denounces the attempt to disparage university training as part of the search for cheap labour and compliant journalists. This article analyzes the case of the Foundation for a New IberoAmerican Journalism. The Foundation is an institution of worldwide reputation, designed and set up by Gabriel Garcia Marquez in 1995 with precisely the purpose of recovering essential elements of journalism. For 20 years it has been training young journalists on the basis of developing strong narrative skills, a commitment to rigorous investigation and ethical responsibility. A pedagogical model that puts forward a model for reclaiming journalism’s prestige, principles and public status. The example of the masters appears indispensable to all forms of learning.

Nommer les Choses: sur quelques inscriptions peintes dans la céramique attique archaïque

Résumé: Cet article étudie la façon dont les peintres de vases ont parfois associé aux objets représentés des inscriptions qui les nomment. Il ne s’agit pas, ce faisant, d’expliquer l’image mais d’attirer le regard sur des éléments de la représentation qui ont une importance narrative ou symbolique forte.

How Stories Argue: The Deep Roots of Storytelling in Political Rhetoric

It was said in the old days that every year Thor made a circle around Middle Earth, beating back the enemies of order. Thor got older every year, the circle occupied by gods men grew smaller. wisdom god, 'Woden,' went out to the king of the trolls, got him in an arm lock, demanded to know of him how order might triumph over chaos.Give me your left eye, said the king of the trolls, and I'll tell you.Without hesitation, Woden gave up his left eye. Now tell me.The troll said, The secret is, Watch with both eyes!1The author critic John Gardner used this mythic anecdote as an allegory of art criticism. artist critic beat back the forces of chaos, but those multiply while Thor's hammer gets heavier to wield every year. In On Moral Fiction, Gardner uses the hammer on postmodern writers such as William Gass for spending their talents on fiction that glories only in self-referential irony, undercutting characters themes that might strike an ethical chord in their audience-that might, in short, have a persuasive moral effect.There has been much speculation over the years about how stories function persuasively, that is, how they argue. That stories, or to use the more academic term narratives, have persuasive impact has long been understood.2 Yet the relationship of stories to rational argument structures has to date been rather muddled. There are a number of ways to approach this relationship, which I explore in this essay.There is also broad agreement that narrative is important in politics, though just exactly how may be somewhat uncertain. In its recent preliminary analysis of the 2014 election, the Democratic Party found that, while their policies find favor with the American people, the Republicans a better narrative, which makes them more attractive. Thus the analysis suggests the creation of a narrative project that will create a strong values-based national narrative that will engage, inspire, motivate voters to identify with support Democrats (Democratic National Committee). Narrative seems to be the balm in Gilead that will heal all political ills.Stories have long been used for persuasive intent, yet the relationship of narrative to argument in public moral debate has remained unsettled. How do stories argue? This essay addresses that question starting from Walter Fisher's influential essay Narration as a Human Communication Paradigm. Fisher, drawing from Kenneth Burke, posits two dimensions of judgment that audiences use in evaluating whether narratives offer good reasons for the action or motives depicted in the story. Fisher suggests that narrative is a different way of reasoning from rational argument: a paradigm of its own. In contrast, I argue that the persuasive use of stories goes back to early rhetorical training that stories have always been used along with rhetorical argument as part of persuasive discourse. Vladimir Propp's work on the morphology of folk- fairy tales demonstrates that stories use topics, or topoi, in a manner similar to those used to generate lines of argument in rhetoric. Extending Fisher's analysis, I offer four other aspects of narrative that affect the persuasive reception of stories: performance, adaptation, context, iconicity. These aspects of rhetorical storytelling, combined with the topoi of the story, give us a new analytical framework for evaluating the persuasive potential of political storytelling.Narrative, Community, PoliticsNarrative is broadly seen to be necessary to forming maintaining community. For Hannah Arendt, the connection between individual consciousness the public of the community is through shared narrative. It is the storyteller, as historian, who makes public the stories by which the members of a community understand themselves as a we, a body politic. For the ancient Greeks, the stories of a heroic past served as a model for the virtues of civic life. …

Ever Faithful: Race, Loyalty, and the Ends of Empire in Spanish Cuba by David Sartorius (review)

Reviewed by: Ever Faithful: Race, Loyalty, and the Ends of Empire in Spanish Cuba by David Sartorius William C. Van Norman Jr. David Sartorius. Ever Faithful: Race, Loyalty, and the Ends of Empire in Spanish Cuba. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013. 312 pp. David Sartorius has written an important book that challenges much of the standard narrative regarding people of color in Cuba during the nineteenth century. This rich analysis sustains a compelling and nuanced argument that will reshape what we know about race in Cuba during the nineteenth century. Sartorius convincingly contends that there were significant numbers of people of African descent who were loyal to Spain, participants in an ever-shifting relationship in which Spanish leaders unevenly sought their support and rewarded their loyalty. The author uses key events of Spanish imperial and Cuban colonial history to structure the six chapters. Each begins with an event that the author uses as a lens to explicate the context, actors, motivations, and implications of each moment. This facilitates the introduction of dozens of African-descended people, slave and free, loyal and rebel, and places them at the center of Cuban colonial history. While this book has a strong narrative structure, it is also theoretically informed, as the author draws on numerous sources to show how positions of loyalty or disloyalty to the Crown of Spain affected understandings of race and the status of people of color. In a brief introduction, the author establishes for the reader his argument and methodological concerns, and summarizes the chapters. Each part balances discussion of enslaved and free African-descended Cubans, revealing the complexity of race on the island. Sartorius also works to avoid the teleological position of only tracing events and participants that led to the ending of slavery and Cuban independence. His approach is both important and well executed, allowing the reader to fully grasp the ideas of people living in an empire and the possibilities and choices that existed for them, rather than only highlighting the road taken. In discussing the first half of the nineteenth century, Sartorius contrasts differing attitudes regarding the population of color between the leadership in Spain and elites in Cuba. There were ongoing debates on the peninsula about race and citizenship, while on the island the focus was on the question of slavery. This is highlighted by the role of Cuban deputy to the Cortes, Andrés de Jáuregui, who effectively killed the abolition debate by invoking the French debates on abolition that he claimed sparked the Haitian Revolution. Two factors contributed to attenuated freedoms for most people of color in the years leading up to the Ten Years’ War. Continued debates over slavery along with significant slave rebellions, such as those associated with the mass, state-led campaign of repression known as La Escalera in 1844, created a perceived need to limit opportunities of interaction and participation for all people of color, slave and free. [End Page 229] The first important challenge to the colonial government and imperial control in Cuba came from planters who understood that slavery was deeply tied to Spanish power. Using different strategies, both Spain and the rebels were able to attract significant numbers of African-descended Cubans to their struggle. Sartorius shows how ideas of citizenship and the loyalty of many people of color resulted in freedom for many slaves who assisted Spain. The rebels, relying on a similar rhetoric of citizenship, also freed slaves who came to their cause. The Pact of Zanjón in 1878 gave way to increased freedom of association and of the press for all. People of color seized such opportunities, establishing new branches of social and political clubs and several black newspapers. The importance of associations, cabildos, and cofradías grew, but there was a cost to these new opportunities. Members of these associations felt pressed to give up “primitive” practices, conform to Spanish colonial norms, and render apolitical any public expression of a shared identity or mutual interest. This resulted in limited opportunities for dissent. During the 1880s, both discourse and political actions reflected concerns over voting rights for men of color as well as over final emancipation. Loyalist actions were complex...

Dramaturgia de la cotidianidad en la obra de Laura Papo Bohoreta

Dramaturgia de la cotidianidad en la obra de Laura Papo Bohoreta

The Last Afrikaner Leaders: A Supreme Test of Power. By Hermann Giliomee (Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press, 2013; orig. pub. Cape Town, Tafelberg, 2012) 447 pp. $28.17

Apartheid originated as populist Afrikaner endeavor to regain hegemony for poorer and less favored whites in a South Africa dominated by wealthier English speakers and their moderate Afrikaans-speaking allies. In time, leaders such as Premier Hendrik F. Verwoerd created a rationalized ideology in an attempt to justify legislated segregation, the denial of human rights, the end of free speech, extreme separation of the “races,” and much more. President John B. Vorster and ruthless securocrats, such as General Hendrik van den Bergh, fashioned a security apparatus to maintain apartheid through repression. President Pieter W. Botha, later, tried to buttress the hegemony conveyed to Afrikaners and other whites through apartheid while simultaneously recognizing and coping with the realities of South Africa’s status as an international pariah, its fundamental economic decay, and its need to find a satisfactory way forward.Giliomee is a trusted guide through these convoluted waters, drawing effectively on his earlier acclaimed The Afrikaners: A Biography of a People (Cape Town, 2009; orig. pub. 2003). But he is even better in his analysis of apartheid’s end game. In the best manner of contemporary history, he shows why and how President Frederik W. De Klerk, Botha’s almost happenstance conservative successor, was able—much like Richard Nixon in his dealings with China—to accomplish the unthinkable. De Klerk, ahead of others, understood that since Nelson Mandela was not so much South Africa’s prisoner as South Africa was his, he had to release Mandela from his long imprisonment. De Klerk also knew that Mandela and the African National Congress (anc) were the rightful majority inheritors of power in a South Africa that could no longer play Canute against the powerful tides of time and humanity.Giliomee’s strong narrative and his intimate knowledge of how his fellow Afrikaners operated and what they believed, sought, and feared in the 1980s and 1990s is authoritative. He has no intent to be methodologically innovative or draw on cognate disciplines, but his solid research utilizes the written record in two languages and employs revealing interviews with many of the major figures of the era.Giliomee’s focus on the role of Afrikaner leaders in making and breaking apartheid is appropriate, if employed much more as an organizing than a theoretical rubric. In addition to the prime ministers and presidents that orchestrated apartheid, he also sketches in some detail the bright political rise of Frederik van zyl Slabbert from academic sociologist to leader of the Progressive Federal Party, South Africa’s liberal opposition. He credits Slabbert, crucially an Afrikaner with the character traits and athletic prowess beloved by Afrikaners, with undermining the very moral and theological credibility of apartheid that Verwoerd had labored to create and Vorster and Botha diligently to maintain. Giliomee also attempts to explain how Slabbert came to believe in the good intentions of the anc after visits to their bases elsewhere in Africa—how he was gulled and mesmerized by the bonhomie and artful promises of future president Thabo Mbeki and others. Giliomee portrays Slabbert as a tragic Icarus.Those JIH readers who know South Africa will find all kinds of interesting new nuggets of political information, and some speculation, in The Last Afrikaner Leaders. They will also discover that Giliomee is an unusually fluent guide to how Afrikaners, a people of whom he is proud, were misled by a set of domineering leaders, how the infernal edifice of apartheid proved a cruel and paralyzing detour in the maturation of South Africa, and how Slabbert—a potential savior of Afrikanerdom and South Africa—was himself out-maneuvered by Mbeki and the anc—to South Africa’s great loss.